Google Ads has firmly cemented its place in the marketing mix for B2B SaaS businesses and for good reason. They offer businesses the opportunity to put their product in front of buyers at the exact moment they’re looking for a solution to a problem. This is the ideal situation that most marketers want to achieve.
But they can be a double-edged sword. While the opportunity they present is immense for driving traffic to your website, converting new leads and generating new revenue, they can also be a complete drain of time, money and resources if you aren’t running your campaigns effectively.
So how can you ensure that your B2B SaaS business is getting the most out of your Google Ads campaigns? Luckily we have years of experience setting up and managing Google Ads campaigns for SaaS businesses and we’ve documented our key principles from years of experience here.
Keyword Research
The first step to a successful Google Search Ads campaign is comprehensive keyword research. If you’ve already done keyword research for SEO, there should be a lot of overlap between your organic keywords and your paid keywords (here’s our guide to getting started with B2B SaaS SEO if you haven’t read it yet).
Similarly to SEO, we suggest starting without a keyword planning tool. Instead, start a document with the terms you think someone might look for when they want to find your product or solution. For example, if you own a SaaS accounting platform, you may include ‘B2B Accounting Software’ and other variations, like ‘B2B Accounting Platform’ or ‘B2B Accounting Tool’.
It makes most sense to start with these bottom-of-funnel keywords that are specific to your product or service – they’re the most likely to convert when they land on your website if they’re already looking for exactly what you offer. It’s also worth noting down your competitor’s brand names as keywords. Why? If someone is searching for one of your competitors they already clearly have a problem that your solution could solve, so take the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and drive someone actively looking for a solution to your site, while displacing a competitor. Win-win!
Once you have some successful campaigns up and running, you may wish to branch out into more middle or top-of-the-funnel keywords to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Now that you have a list of keywords you think you’d like to target, you can use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to evaluate those keywords and identify any related terms you missed the first time around.
For each of your keywords, you will want to consider:
- The monthly search volume – how many people are actively searching for this keyword? This can often indicate how many impressions your ad will receive and how many clicks you can expect off the back of this
- The competition – Google splits this out into low, medium and high. You can expect the best impression share and the lowest CPC (cost per click) for low-competition keywords and the lowest impression share and highest CPC for high-competition keywords
Depending on your budget and campaign objectives (more on this below), this information should be used to determine which keywords will be the most effective for your business to bid on. While most PPC agencies will focus on keywords with the most volume and lowest competition (it makes their vanity metrics look good when it comes time to review their contract), we suggest starting with the keywords with the highest buyer intent.
Clear Objectives
Like everything in marketing, the only way to know if Google Ads are working is to be clear on what you want them to achieve. Common goals include:
- Increasing website traffic
- Increasing demos
- Closing deals (for a self-serve tool)
For most B2B SaaS start-ups the obvious objective is generating demos to support sales, and ultimately, that is pretty much always the goal in the long term. But you need to be realistic about whether you can achieve significant lead-gen results through Google Ads with your budget, the competitor landscape you’re operating in, your conversion rate, your brand awareness and your product.
If you are a new solution with little brand awareness, a WIP website and minimal budget – sadly, chances are turning on Google Ads targeting product keywords isn’t going to result in a flood of demo requests
But that doesn’t mean they’re a waste of time.
You just need to be about your objectives and timeframes and make sure you optimise your marketing activities to deliver against these objectives.
If you set an objective to drive traffic to your website and target keywords related to your industry or product, there are two key benefits. Firstly, you’re getting individuals to visit your site, so there is a chance they convert then and there (more of a chance than if you relied solely on organic search and they never found your site at all). Secondly, you’re building an audience who have engaged with your brand, been to your site and seen what you’re about. You can then retarget them with different ads, so when they are ready to purchase or have done some more research into your offering, you’re front of mind.
You need to be clear on what you’re trying to achieve because it will determine what landing page you send them to and what messaging you put in front of them. If you know they aren’t likely to book a demo and probably haven’t heard of your product, you might direct them to a product overview page. If you know you’re trying to build a retargeting audience of individuals within a specific space, maybe you direct them to a piece of content that they can download.
Optimised Ad Copy
Your ad copy is critical. It is some of the shortest form copy that you will produce and it is all a prospect sees of your business before deciding whether to visit your website or not.
Good ad copy needs to do the following things:
- Address your prospects’ need
- Show how you solve the problem
- Include your target keyword
- Have a single clear call to action
Your Google Ads copy is not the place to start a rewrite of War and Peace. It should be short, sweet and to the point.
You’ll typically want to include a few variations of ad copy to A/B test what resonates well (you can use a template to help you get started with these) – Google can then cycle through these and optimise your ads for your objective. You might want to try different key benefits, different call to actions, or different approaches until you find the winning formula.
Dedicated Conversion Ready Landing Pages
One of the most common mistakes we see early-stage B2B SaaS businesses make with Google Ads is either throwing together a landing page at the last minute or not considering one at all.
As we’ve said, what page you send prospects to will depend on what your campaign objectives are, but by and large you’ll want a landing page that offers a short product overview and a conversion point – usually a form. Keep it simple. You don’t want anything on your landing page distracting visitors from the action you want them to take. That includes no other call-to-actions and no navigation bar.
The best Google Ads strategies are the ones that have dedicated landing pages by campaign. This allows you to put the most relevant content in front of people and significantly boosts your chance of generating a lead. For example, if you’re running a competitor campaign, why not create a landing page called ‘[Your Product] vs [Competitor Name]’, highlight the pros and cons of each (your product is better, obviously) and offer a free demo to prove your product is the superior option.
When creating your landing pages, you need to consider:
- Is this a helpful and logical place for my prospect to end up based on what they’re looking for?
- Am I giving them the information they need?
- Is there a clear next step for them?
Much like The X-Factor (we’re showing our age here, we know…) you’ll need three yes’ to those questions to move to the next stage.
Effective Monitoring and Management
Unfortunately, successful B2B Google Ads isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. You’ll need to be continuously monitoring, managing and optimising your campaigns to achieve the best results.
Not only is it time-consuming, but for those who don’t have experience in the platform, it isn’t the most intuitive in our experience, even if you’ve dabbled in Google Ads in the past (the interface is often changing). On top of that, there’s a lot of jargon to get your head around and quite a few ‘gotchas’ disguised as assistance that you’ll want to avoid. That’s why a lot of businesses opt to bring in external help with ads. We agree this is the best approach unless you have an ads whizz in-house or someone with enough time to spare to voluntarily become one. There are a few options available to businesses – check out our guide to freelancers, agencies and fractional marketing teams to see which might be the best and most economical fit for you.
A word of warning from us – Google is a business at the end of the day, and the more you spend on ads, the more money they make. It’s important to bear this in mind when working with their advisors. The same goes for PPC agencies. In a lot of cases, their business model works by them taking a percentage cut of your ad spend as their fee. More ad spend, more money in their pocket.
It’s worth saying, since we’re giving you Google Ads advice, at Codi, we completely disagree with this way of thinking. We never have, and never will, charge in this way – we advise you to do the best thing for your business, not the best thing for our pockets.
Time to make Google Ads work for you
By now you should feel ready to grab the reins of your Google Ads campaigns.. Ultimately, achieving success with Google Ads comes down to good old-fashioned marketing principles (the right people, with the right message, in the right place at the right time) mixed with some technical know-how and experience.
If you’re looking for support to level up your ads strategy, or you’re keen to get started and see what is possible, why not reach out to the team at Codi? We have years of experience ensuring that B2B SaaS businesses get the most bang for their buck from their Google Ads strategy and we’d love to help you to do the same.
FAQs
What budget do I need to get started?
The annoying answer here is ‘it depends’ – and to an extent, it does. Largely it depends on how competitive the keywords you’re going after are. When you work with Codi, we can forecast your expected monthly spend before your campaigns go live, so you won’t be shocked.
But if we were pushed to give a number, we’d say the minimum budget you should be working with to see some results is around £2,000 per month.
What B2B SaaS metrics for PPC should I be looking at?
At Codi, we’re all about marketing that drives revenue, so the ultimate metric for your ads campaigns should be how much revenue they generate. But as we say, you likely won’t start seeing this immediately, so here are the KPIs we think you should measure your campaign against:
- Impressions – how many people see your ads
- Clicks – how many people are clicking on your ads
- CTR (Click-through-rate) – what percentage of people who see your ad are subsequently click on it
- CPC (Cost-per-click) – how much are you paying for each click on an ad
- Demos/Free Trials – how many people arriving on your site via PPC are requesting a demo or free trial.
- Conversion rate – what percentage of people convert from a demo, to an opportunity and ultimately to a customer.
- CPL (Cost-per-lead) – how much are you paying per conversion on your website
You’ll want to consider these KPIs in the context of your performance across other marketing channels as well.
How does the cookies update impact Google Ads?
For PPC search ads, the impact is pretty minimal, the biggest change is that you won’t be able to track journeys across third-party sites, but by and large your process will remain the same. The biggest difference will be for remarketing ads – particularly those that rely on third-party data. The best solution to this is to start shifting towards first-party remarketing lists now, but bare in mind that this change may impact your retargeting results in the short to medium term.
What about display ads for B2B SaaS?
Do you want the brutal truth? Put them in the bin. For Series A and B SaaS start-ups, display ads are an expensive gimmick that almost never drive any results. They’re spammy, you can’t communicate effectively and quite frankly you probably don’t want to position your B2B SaaS product alongside the likes of Candy Crush.
Should I run ads on my brand keywords?
As a general rule, no. It’s pointless if you’re already ranking organically for your brand name. But there are a couple of exceptions to this rule.
Firstly, it can be worthwhile if you don’t rank for your brand name organically. This usually happens when a brand is named quite literally e.g. if a window fitter’s brand was called ‘Cheap Windows’ they’d probably struggle to rank.
The second instance where you might want to bid on your brand name is if a pesky competitor has started bidding on it as well, so their site is showing up to people searching for your business. It’s worth knowing that if they have directly named your company, you can complain to Google and the competitor will have to remove the ad. However, some companies are sneaky and they can strongly allude to your brand, without actually naming it – if this happens, you may have to bid on your own name to re-grain that estate on the search engine.
