Last Updated on 2020-12-28 by ppcguybklyn
B2B customers, for PPC managers who mostly have B2C e-commerce clients, may be quite difficult. When the effectiveness of our advertising cannot be measured by the value of product purchases, what conversions should we pursue and track them? When the client's advertising goal is not the average individual consumer, how should we optimize the paid search advertising? In this article, I will briefly introduce the common conversion types of B2B customers, the way to track conversions, and the corresponding optimization strategies for PPC advertising.
Common types of conversion pursued by B2B customers
Orders
The most basic type of B2B conversion is an order. B2B products are not like ordinary e-commerce products that can be placed in a shopping cart and ready to ship after checkout. Most of the time, customers put forward their needs for product style and quantity of the product in the form of orders, which can only be delivered to the customer after communication. Even if it is a B2C e-commerce company, if there are inventory or other considerations (such as limited products), they may use the form of orders to contact customers.
Inquiry
B2B services will have different quotations and processing times according to the number of products requested by the customer, the requirements for the products and even the delivery location. For B2B websites, how many customers send messages to inquire about products or services is very important information.
Cooperation opportunity
Not every B2B business model has to sell products or services. Some may seek cooperation and investment opportunities before profiting from them. The motivation for establishing the website and the above message will focus on promoting your company and looking for opportunities for cooperation. The conversion required for the website will also be how many possible partners will express their willingness to cooperate through the website.
Potential customer email, contact information and other information
Regardless of the B2C or B2B business model, the email and contact information of potential customers can provide useful information or be applied to other analyses. So no matter whether the other party is about to buy our services and products, as long as they are interested in the content of the website, they may become our potential customers. At this time, we can encourage them to contact us or subscribe to the newsletter. In this process, we can obtain their contact information and information for future marketing or analysis.
Recommended conversion tracking methods
Thank you page after conversion
The simplest and most direct way to record conversions is to use platform provided functions or design so that the website can generate a Thank you page after the customer completes the conversion, and then usethe actual link goal function of Google Analyticsto treat the traffic to the Thank you page as a conversion. My own experience is that when we want to track this type of conversion, using Google Analytics is much easier than using Google Ads. Google Ads supports the import of Google Analytics goals as conversions, so in this case we can record conversions even if we don’t install the conversion code for Google Ads.
Phone conversion tracking
In addition to the number of inquiry orders sent, we can also record how many customers call us through the website to inquire about prices or inquire about cooperation opportunities. Both Google Ads and Tag Manager provide the function of recording call conversions.This article by Google Supporthas very detailed teaching. Of course, we can also choose some paid third-party platforms to help record call conversions to save the trouble of setting these. These platforms will set another set of phone numbers to transfer to our existing numbers, so that the conversion will happen when customers call in. The data will be recorded in their platform.
Advertising optimization strategy
When helping to establish paid search advertising campaigns for B2B websites, there are some things to pay attention to that are different from B2C e-commerce: our purpose is to arouse the interest of targeting audiences, and then use the website to obtain more information or cooperation opportunities, not just selling products. The following are the optimization strategies I think can be performed when advertising B2B businesses:
Streamline the fields of conversion forms
B2B conversion orders are different from B2C e-commerce, which only requires to fill in the address and the payment method during checkout. The number of fields in a conversion order is entirely up to the B2B clients to determine how much information the customers should fill in. Therefore, when taking over a B2B account, we often find that the website conversion rate is low. The reason is mostly because there are too many fields to fill in. If the targeting audience is interested in products or services after entering the website through Google Ads, but seeing more than 10 mandatory fields, they are likely to bounce.
Confirm with clients the fields that can be deleted, so that conversion forms use the fewest fields to achieve their desired effect. This way the advertising audiences with low interaction time are more willing to fill in and send conversions.
Keywords containing search terms related to inquiry
When our advertising goal is to pursue orders, inquiry or cooperation opportunities, we should consider using more detailed keywords. If the keywords are too broad, it is likely to attract self-employed individuals who are looking for B2C websites. If my website is a supplier of machinery and components, I will try to avoid reaching customers who only want to buy a set of machines, unless it is a very high unit price product. Therefore, our keywords should try to include the search terms that B2B potential customers may enter when looking for an inquiry object, such as "supplier", "purchasing", "wholesale", "cooperation opportunity" and so on.
Exclude B2C keywords and optimize ad copies
Same as the previous point, in order to further confirm that we can avoid B2C search terms from consuming our advertising budget, we can set relevant B2C search terms as negative keywords. The exact negative keywords can be determined based on the search terms of the campaign.
After confirming that there is no problem with the keywords, we must also make sure that the information conveyed by the ad copies can clearly express that this is a B2B website, not for ordinary individual customers. B2B paid search ad campaigns can easily have very low CTR when the target is not clear, so we have to keep improving our keywords, adding negative keywords, and finding the best ad copy combination to ensure our traffic quality.
Design an independent landing page
If the purpose of our advertising is only to obtain inquiry or contact information, then we can consider designing a landing page independent of the website. This page contains the basic introduction of the company’s products and services, contact information and conversion forms. When our targeting audiences click on this landing page, they do not need to interact with other pages to get enough information to decide whether to contact this company. This will not only increase the conversion rate, but we can also change the content of the landing page at any time to ensure that the ad can maintain a very high quality score.
Conclusion
The range of B2B customers is very wide, and every industry is different, and the details of the actual operation are also different. But if we can grasp some of the principles of advertising optimization, we can find the problem in a short time when we are in contact with customers, and use basic optimization methods to quickly improve advertising effectiveness.
