How to Optimize B2B Pay Per Click campaigns

Oct 19, 2018 - Marcel Odena

To optimize B2B pay-per-click campaigns, we must take into account the main metrics that have to do with generating business, such as the number of sales, the amount of sales and the number of qualified leads thanks to which it was possible to close those sales. That is, it is necessary to analyze the sales that have been closed in a period and determine the campaigns that have participated, either at the time of obtaining the leads (phase of leads capture) as well as in the phase of escorting the lead in its path to make it progress in our sales funnel.
And do this in the B2B world can be more complicated than for example in the ecommerce’s world since the sales cycles tend to be longer and the traceability of the sale with the origin of the click that generated the lead usually involves a technical development not available to everyone.

Next, I indicate the key metrics from my point of view when optimizing our PPC campaigns:

Number of sales and amount of said sales . The campaigns that help generate sales should have priority and be the most maintained, should have a budget allocation sufficient to capture all possible traffic, generous bids, regularly review of the ads, etc.
Number of sales opportunities . A campaign that helps generate many sales opportunities is good, the more opportunities the more likely there is to close a sale.
Metrics according to each business prior to sale : depending on each business there are some key metrics before sending a commercial proposal. In some companies SaaS type (Software As A Service) usually work with metrics type number of meetings and/or number of agreed demos. That is, if a potential customer is interested in our product and accepts a meeting or demo session of the product, it means that it is closer to the sale. Most likely, a commercial proposal will be sent to them and a percentage will end up buying.
Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): this is a lead accepted by the sales department. In other words, it is a qualified lead so that the sales department can initiate the sales process. If the sales do not accept our leads, it does not help that we generate many leads from marketing, therefore, we must prioritize those campaigns that are contributing to generate SALs.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): It is a lead accepted by the very own marketing department. We must bear in mind that of all the leads that we generate there is always a percentage that we can consider “failed”. For example, our buyer persona can be the financial director of a large company and it is likely that certain leads will enter that don’t comply with this profile, and therefore we have to discard them.
Here it will depend on the rules we set to consider an MQL. It is also usual to define a mínimum score (lead scoring) under which the lead becomes MQL, and this qualification can contemplate both demographic attributes (charge of the person, number of employees, etc.) and the behavior that it has had (number of downloads, pages that you have seen, etc.).
Leads: that is, all the contacts we get with the campaigns. Those campaigns that generate more leads and at a lower cost per lead will be the most appreciated and those that we should take care of the most. Still, more important than the leads are the previous metrics, so that could be the case of a campaign with a cost per lead much higher than another but that generates more Sales Accepted Leads, or more sales than the other campaign and therefore we should prioritize it and take care of it more.

For me, these 6 metrics are crucial to take into account when optimizing pay per click campaigns to generate sales pipeline . If they are not taken into account from my point of view we will be optimizing a little backwards to the business. It could be possible to optimize to improve the click ratios (CTR), optimize to get an increasingly low cost per conversion, to get more and more conversions, etc. but without the previous metrics it could happen that we get more conversions and at a lower cost of a certain campaign that nevertheless has very little or no repercussion at the time of generating business (sales) for our company.

Marcel Odena

CEO at Magnetica Advertising | LinkedIn Ads Expert

Since 2013 I've been working in the Pay Per Click Advertising Industry. I manage Google and LinkedIn Ads accounts for several B2B companies. I work to deliver results to my clients as well to contribute to do better B2B marketing. I like to learn and share my knowledge at the same time.