Google Ads for high-value B2B products: what actually matters

Google Ads was built for businesses that sell lots of small things to lots of people. Someone searches, clicks and buys, and the system learns from millions of those purchases. A business selling forty thousand dollar machines to a few hundred possible customers in Queensland is a very different animal, and some of the default settings work against it.

The good news is that what matters most here is fairly simple. Most of it comes down to who you're paying to reach and what you tell Google counts as success.

Read the search terms

Every Google Ads account has a report showing the actual searches that triggered your ads. For a B2B supplier it's the most useful page in the account, and I'd read it every week.

You'll find searches you'd never have guessed. Sell industrial floor scrubbers and you might be paying for "floor scrubber hire", "how to clean a floor scrubber", "floor scrubber jobs" and "cheap floor scrubber for home". Every one of those clicks costs money and none of them is a buyer. Adding them as negative keywords, so your ads stop showing for them, can be the quickest win in an account that's been left to run itself.

Keyword matching is looser than a lot of people assume, which is why this report is worth the weekly read.

Check who you're showing ads to

When you target a location, Google's default reaches people who are in that area or regularly there, plus people elsewhere who've shown interest in it. Google calls it "Presence or interest". If you only deliver in south-east Queensland, that second half can mean paying for clicks from other states or overseas.

The other option, "Presence", only shows ads to people who are actually in or regularly in your area. If you've got a defined service area, it's the first setting I'd check.

While you're there, look at whether your search campaigns are showing ads beyond Google's own results. Search campaigns can include Google's search partner sites and the Display Network, which puts ads on other websites. For a specialised B2B product they can behave very differently from Google search itself, so if they're switched on, look at their results separately and decide whether they've earned their spot.

Tell Google what a good result is

Google's automated bidding learns from whatever you tell it is a result. Many accounts count a form submission or a phone call. That's fine as a start, but Google then learns to find people who fill in forms, and in B2B those can include students, job seekers, suppliers trying to sell to you and people outside your area.

The better signal is what happened next. If your CRM records which enquiries became qualified, quoted or won, that can be fed back into Google Ads so it learns from the enquiries your sales team valued. Google's help pages say those imports have to land within 90 days of the click, so on a long sales cycle an earlier stage like "quoted" is usually the one to send.

Where they land

A high-value buyer who clicks an ad is checking whether you're worth a conversation, and they won't buy on the spot. Send them to your homepage and they have to hunt for the product they searched for. Send them to a page about that product, with the specs, the standards, where you service and an easy way to ask a question or get a price, and they've got what they came for.

Make the phone number tappable on mobile and keep the form short. It also helps to say what happens after they get in touch. Small stuff like that decides whether a paid click becomes a conversation.

Let the ad do some filtering

With a small market it's tempting to write ads that appeal to everyone. I'd rather be specific enough that the wrong people don't click. "Industrial floor scrubbers for warehouses and factories. Sales, service and fleet replacement across south-east Queensland" will get fewer clicks from people after something for home, and every click you avoid is money you keep.

Give it time

High-value B2B campaigns produce fewer, slower results than consumer ones, and judging them after three weeks leads to bad calls. Agree up front what you'll look at in the first month, like the search terms and the quality of the enquiries, and when you'd expect to see quotes and sales. Then give it the time a long sales cycle needs.

How we help with this: Paid search →