The marketing movement. Why we find labs? Welcome to the marketing movement podcast by our Find Labs. I'm I was mad at one of the performance marketing managers at Refine.
And I also brought my friends Keegan and Denno here who happens to be performance marketing managers at Refine Labs as well. So today the topic we're going to be talking about is what is the most effective paid search strategy in B to B. But before we get into that, just quick introductions from Keegan and Denno here. So Keegan, why don't you start us off?
Hi there everybody. I'm Keegan Slattery, also performance marketing manager here at Refine Labs. I'm based out of Denver, Colorado. And currently my clients are mostly in the mid market.
So the SMB in the mid market space in enterprise tech. You have a fun fact about yourself. Oh fun fact is I'm based in Denver, but I'm currently in my wife's in lost house. So I'm sitting on a chair that was a man for a person about half my size with my knees up to my chest.
Because it's the best way to get out of the podcast. Always be a podcast. I'm sitting sitting where I'm at. Don't know how you're mad.
We're a fun fact and what size companies do work with. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm here located in the Minneapolis area, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yeah, work with small and also mid market companies here at Refine Labs and been here for about a month.
So really enjoying it here. And yeah, fun fact. Yeah, I have to say I've been renovating a house. So kind of getting to the end of that that's been going on now.
It's going to be at the end of it for months. So it's been a fun, very fun and looking forward to any soon here and moving into the house. So also the house currently on is not going to renovating. No, this is an apartment.
So we actually have an apartment and then we actually have a house that we bought in January. They were first and now we're renovating it and moving in at the end of April. So that's awesome. Yeah.
Okay. And I'm Miles Madden. As I already stated, I work primarily with SMB and mid market companies as well. Located in Orlando, Florida.
And my fun fact, I have a form of old such as a lot of diapers nowadays. And it's pretty much for my time as so. So play us out today's topic. What is the most effective paid search strategy in B2B?
We all have experience in SMB and mid market, but this strategy spans across SMB, but market enterprise, whatever size company you have. We want to touch on this because there's a lot of money spent in Google ads. So we want to show you guys what is most effective strategy to utilize and you're spending the best way possible. Once kick us off kind of on this philosophy and you guys want to lead this?
Yeah, I mean, I can start just a little high level with Google ads. I think one thing we've all learned pretty quickly is that generally Google ads loves to spend your money and it will do that in the broadest way it possibly can unless you, you put on the right constraints on your campaigns and your keyword strategy to stop it from sort of going out and finding all sorts of different places to spend on. So I think honing that in with using high intent keywords and specific themes of ad groups is really the best way to make sure you're capturing people who genuinely haven't and using high intent indicators of words that show us that people are actually a little bit further down the funnel, not just saying how to do something or learning more about it from a high level, but they actually want to know really specifics around how the product works. What the pricing is like, how to book a demo.
You know, one of the comparison alternatives are the reviews out there for it. Those are kind of high intent key or indicators that we like to utilize to make sure that we're capturing that audience when they're really further down the funnel in that process and they're using search to indicate that we're not. So that's kind of where we start from there and maybe I'll jump in if he wants to add anything else there. I think you answered it better than I could.
I'm not one. You did a fantastic job. I think especially with what we're seeing with Google ads is really, you know, people who talk about broad match. We've really seen that can really just eat a lot of your budget and really focus on keywords that have nothing to do with what you focused on.
So really, when I look at it from launch, you can't really do look at using more of those exact match or possibly phrase match keywords. And then later on, if you want to do an experiment, there might be a possibility later on for broad match once you have a really good negative key word list going. I think it's also really good to look at your search terms and really understanding those and doing search terms report just to make sure that you aren't seeing anything that's popping up in there that might be not as high intent or might not be what you're looking to get after. I've been seeing a lot recently of like really long sentences recently, which is interesting because if you actually do the search, you can find it's usually somebody asking a question for like college courses or something like that.
So it's been interesting to see some of those coming through as well. So really just making sure that you're you're having a really good real boss and a good keyword list as well. Yeah, I think there's a kind of a common misconception that you can set up your Google search and forget it and just let it sit. It's fine.
I put all keywords in there. It'll be great. But if you're not really actively going in there, especially the launch of a new campaign, when the algorithms are all turning and trying to figure out how everything works, you're not going in there and finding those checking those search term reports and starting to pull stuff out and realize where you're getting a lot of false flags. You know, this thing will turn on its own to become its own beast off spending your dollars away in an inefficient way.
So you have to go learn that the hard way or like we're about to sit again forgetting and be like, it'll be fine. And then when you set it and forget it to it becomes this beast like you said and then it seems impossible to manage. You've got hundreds of collects and hundreds of search terms and now it's now you have to export into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with that situation. And you get touched on two things, match types and high intent keywords.
I'm going to touch on the tokens how we define high intent keywords to find it. But there are a few, well, and there's a lot of there that I want to pull out. Software, those are tokens that we use to be high intent. So, HR software software being the token platform company pricing.
And so that's how we those are the tokens that we use to define the high intent keyword. And like you said, then, using those exact matching phrase matches that makes sure we're only getting that high intent keyword. We're not getting the wild west which are as long as search queries that are transactional questions. And so those those we call middle intent or if it's obviously super public email, long time, but the middle intent is when we strip away those tokens.
But that's only if we obviously we don't touch middle intent too much. But if we saturate high intent, we have 100% search impression share and we want to test middle intent. That is an opportunity to grow. But I see a lot of the grads, managers being afraid of what they may lose out on in the middle intent.
And that fear makes you open up wide right off the bat and raise a lot of money. Do you guys have any comments or opinions on that observation? Yeah, I mean, I definitely see it. I saw just with a campaign launch recently to our client was very focused on like their gardener.
They purchased a gardener report and worked with gardeners on getting something together. And you know, if you've been very favorably, however, that's if you look at the actual search terms that came through none of those are really indicative of someone who's in a buying process. They were more just looking at the report. I don't even know why, but there's also like five other people listed in those reports were very different things.
So really wasn't that relevant if someone was finding them through the gardener report. So we started with that as much more of a mid to a low intent. And since we can bucket them, you know, the high campaign level that way, we can make sure we're not, you know, because people search for gardener all the time for all sorts of stuff. And so we can really limit the amount of budget and limit the amount that we're allowing people to know where that we spend money on those particular terms since we find that they're low intent.
They're not always, you know, very indicative. They don't drive the best quality traffic, those sorts of things. So I think that structuring is really nice of having high median low and being able to to pace out where those things can go, especially if the client is invested in something like gardener, you want to make sure you honor that and spend there as well. That's a great example.
And to kind of further, I guess, get more tactical with this. So to summarize what we just said at the high level, the philosophy of our paid search strategy for B2B is we have a brand campaign which want to capture demand of people looking for a brand. And then on the non brand side, we begin by only bidding on high intent keywords with tokens like software platform pricing things like that. So to summarize what you guys have been talking about our philosophy or paid search strategy, we have brand campaigns capture demand of people who want or know about our brand.
And then we have non brand segments solely focused on high intent keywords with those high intent tokens like pricing, software company platform. I'd imagine when we remove those long term middle attempt terms that convert but don't convert to customers that are cost per lead is going to increase. So my question for you guys, how do you guys set expectations with partners and what does that conversation look like and what should we expect from CPL level. Sure.
Yeah. Yeah. So because we are, you know, driving less leads but we're also improving more efficiency, especially within the pipeline. And we're going after more of those high intent keywords, which for the most part, when you look at that, they're also going to be a higher cost per click just because they are better for suited for that.
So what we're going to see is the cost per lead is going to go up, but you're also going to be able to see more coming in the pipeline higher conversion rates or higher opportunities coming from there as well. So having the conversation that yes, as of right now you're going to be seeing lower leads, but we're also focusing on increasing and really making your getting getting a much better pipeline. So just coming down to that idea because I think that's the biggest thing that we've seen here is just getting the mindset of switching from all those leads that are coming in where many of them might not be coming from a science and search keywords in the beginning and they're really not high quality and switching it over to a higher quality and really you get what you're paying for as well. Yeah, totally.
I think for us in terms of setting expectations to I think one of the important ones is overall budget amount to because a lot of times you're planning so much on search and that just gobbles up a ton of budget, but suddenly we're being really, really strategic about it and we're really taking away and carving away a lot of that waste that comes from broad match keywords. And with that you spend a lot less, which is I think also interesting one that you need to sort of set the stage for with clients ahead of time is that we're not going to dump as much money into Google as we did past just simply because there's fewer of those keywords but we're really taking away a lot of the wasted searches that you're bidding on and spending money on. And then we also, I think during pre conversations that we're talking about strategy and working up to there, we constantly try to reiterate up front how that difference that was talking about that. You're going to have a lot fewer leads, but most of those leads were inefficient basins anyway and your cost is going to go up a little higher.
However, when you look at your funnel further down everything that's coming through here is going to be much higher quality, much more engaging, ultimately, much more likely to convert to a paying customer further down the line because we trimmed away all that waste. So cost will go up volume will go down, but quality goes up in the end. That's what really matters, right? If we can spend less money but get more quality super right.
I think that's ultimately the goal there so it's definitely a lot of setting expectations early and explaining the strategy and reiterating as much as possible that like hey this is a different mindset we got change where you know what our expectations are here and what we've done in the past because this is a new, a new path forward that's a lot more efficient. And that's, you know, I've done this where I was so focused on the in platform metric that I completely neglected the down funnel progression and ultimately advertising cost per customer. So exactly what you're saying, but in platform metric which how we're talking about it is almost a vanity metric at this point. And then the down funnel progression is the really important part that advertising tag making sure we're profitable with their capture demand channel.
So I hope that doesn't get caught. Of course, cost really is not a vanity metric but I'll be referring to it as a little bit. I'm actually curious from your perspective. This is not to thinking about is also seeing what we start working on this that the difference between the growth in organic search as well, because we're having a really good paid social strategy at striving intent.
We're also going to see over time, paid search grow but also organic search. I'm curious when you guys are looking at organic search volume and reporting. How do you sort of balance that out? Like you guys like to lump together paid and organic to say like our general search volume is going up or you know, how do you sort of present that because those two really do work hand in hand since they're visually so close together on the page, you know, it's almost a decision about the user of which one they end up clicking.
But in the end, the fact that they're both there is really important. Yeah, I thought that's a really good question. I haven't thought too much into this. Only the backup a little bit.
You talked about a lot of companies spend a lot money on Google. We shifted this high in time. That reduces the budget. Now we have a lot more budget that we can locate somewhere else.
I'm going to round about to what you're saying. And for us, we take the extra budget, focus it into paid social channels and other initiatives to create demand and so to your point, organic search that increase paid search that increase where we're building more for brand and the knowledge around the category and the need for the product. So those both from organic and page and increase, but yeah, never thought about combining them. I'd be interested if I don't have that.
Some people that. Yeah, in the past one thing that I did was go into your Google search council for the client and also being in the pool, they're branded organic search terms because that would be the closest that you can really get to it. That's one thing that we did. We were doing a lot of brand awareness in the past for a B2B client and in the Manjai tea services space.
And so we did like it was like five brand a month that we did on like Facebook and YouTube and everything like that and brand awareness. And then we had our core metrics looking at that and the traffic to the website. But then we also looked at an interesting one was just really looking at our organic search of how much branded search was coming through. If it was increasing over time and then really like pointing it into like taking off careers and all those other different things are really focusing on that.
So that was one way that we did. And we did see, you know, there was with all the brand where it's our paying for and as well as pay search over paying for we did see an increase in their overall brand lift over time through search organic search. That was interesting. So that was one thing that we've done past that I've done.
Very interesting. Yeah, I'm doing on for a while. So I'll have to come back to that one in a few months or now and see where we're at. Yeah, that's really good point.
And there's even like the correlation between like with your paid and then if your paid is really really well and organic search and how are there one might be pulling one away from the other. So there's also that as well. And I've seen, you know, this is another time for another time but there's like power BI people have been able to pull both of those and look at them. So it's interesting.
Super interesting. Cool. So we have our philosophy or strategy high level. Now we know to set expectations and what those expectations are being that cost per week it's going to increase but the quality of those leads are going to increase and are advertising a cap cost per acquisition.
That's going to decrease, which is ultimately the goal. So that's we monitor that impact by reporting on those metrics correct. Okay, cool. I was going to say, I mean, also looking at keywords to kind of going back to some of the indicators.
I'm curious if you guys have ever had any very unique indicators like unique tokens that you found that are kind of special just your product because there's easy things that are like doing the, you know, software product and reviews and alternatives and things like that. Is there anything else that's kind of unique one to certain of your clients that you found that actually ended up being a really good indicator that wasn't the first thing you would think of or is it part of the standard tokens that you would use. Nothing comes to mind, but with you closing that question, I'm curious. Have you experienced something where you have unique tokens for a specific industry or company or anything like that.
I think a lot of them had to do with unique competitors and their competitor offerings. So we do, you know, as we're doing the regular times, we also do the competitors and using some of those same tokens to bid on those as well. That's a great place to be. But some of the other competitors would have very unique product offerings to that were a little different or had like a certain feature or a title.
We could play around with that featured feature name that they might have in place like working with box.com. You know, if you just type box.com is a competitor, like it's a pretty broad one, right? So getting in much more tight on storage solutions enterprise solutions, things like that to make it a little, a little more strategic with that because the search volume on that alone can be massive. Yeah, that's really interesting.
I've never never had that conversation. So I brought that up. Then you have anything or. I thought that was fantastic.
I thought that was great to see how this segmenting out the different tokens there. I think that'd be a fantastic option for a lot of people to look at for your competitor conquest campaigns. Awesome. So one thing.
Thanks again. I think is might be a little obvious for me. It's just obvious to us, but I think it needs to be said is the actual conversion action. And so we're focusing on high-income keywords.
Now, going through the journey, we want to make sure we're sending them to appropriate landing page and also driving them to an appropriate conversion action. I recently saw an algorithm account. They were building a high-income keywords, but then they were sending people to a page around an ebook. And so capturing an ebook, which is, in my opinion, completely disrespectful to the user experience.
And now they have this ebook that close that will rate kind of the analogy I like to use is, you know, what if I asked you, I needed new hockey skates and then you gave me a book. How to I skate either you completely didn't listen to me, or you don't care which could be one of the same. So I'm interested in not interested. I just want to talk to you guys about this.
Are we only focusing on high-income conversion actions and are making sure we're driving them through a product page that you can navigate to the rest of the website? Are we sending them through a main page where they have to basically follow the demo on the form on that main page? What's your guys experience with that flow? Yeah.
Yeah. Looking at the conversion action part first, I really want to just optimize for what you would consider to be your primary conversion action. So what do you think would be the most important, which is going to be, you know, for many of us can be demos. So making sure that.
And then for your secondary, you know, putting in what we just talked about ebooks and different things like that, that are great to see in reports that way you can actually look at it in all conversions on your columns. So that's also a good thing to look at. But definitely your primary. If you're looking at demo requests, you're going to want to make sure that's your primary across your account for the most part.
And then going from there, yeah, just sending them, particularly to, you know, the most optimized landing page that you possibly can for that specific product offering would definitely be the best option. And then I think from there, you know, there's, there's some really cool tools that you can use as well to make sure that the traffic is going to a page that has a really great experience. And I think that's going to be the biggest part is now, you know, these new free tools like Microsoft clarity, Google optimize. That way you can really start to optimize those landing pages as best as you can.
Because I think that's, that's another thing that that is often can be overlooked at times is, you know, we're sending traffic where we're looking at keywords, we're looking at our ad copy, we're looking at all these different things, devices, audience type, and we're sending all this traffic to our website. And if the page is not as you say, it does not have a good user experience. We don't really understand what the user is looking for. And we're just kind of sending them all around and as a bad experience.
Well, that's going to need to be something that we really like that because that's going to be also increasing our overall password conversion or really just pulling off and not giving as many demo requests as we should. So that's a long winded way. I know I answered that, but yeah, yeah, I think that's that's kind of the way I do it. There is a tactical element to, you know, we keep saying primary conversion, usually demo or free trial.
That's a high time conversion. But if you go into the goal setting within Google Ads, there is a drop down where you select primary action or secondary action and as with the campaign, that's how it optimizes. So you want to set your demo conversion event and what you're using for trial or contact us, whatever it may be. So that's a primary action.
And then if you have secondary actions, like, I don't want to say contact us does not have a lot of demand that flows through it. So that's the secondary because you want to drive people through the demo that has the highest conversion rate to customer. So that's a, I don't want to lose the tactic because that is super important with how these campaigns optimize. Yeah, there's an interesting bit here too, when you start thinking about having those different pages and you do need to consider sort of where the clients at.
A lot of times it's wonderful when you have a client who's super bought in, but there's also a history that comes with how they structure their website, how they've done things in the past and where their content lives. You know, we've found the clients, they have a giant statute of gated ebooks and so ungating that is super important and they're on board with that. But I think the culture of ungating things and no longer having that stream of leads is a big sort of higher level piece. You have to help work through and gather that trust like this is going to be okay we can ungate this content and start learning how to sort of restructure our pages to make sure that we're offering that content because that's what's on the wants when they're searching for things right that's what they're trying to find is something really useful to learn more to get review or understand the product.
You know, if they keep getting hit with that wall that's not a great experience. I think everyone gets that but a lot of times you have to overcome some of the history of how the website and client has been set up in the past to be able to work through that so there is. You know sometimes some friction there to get on board with the implementation of all strategy to that's definitely takes a lot of education up front to understand like where everything's living and how we're going to get to that new ideal state where it's a nice easy flow for someone to come in from search. That's great.
I love that and that kind of brings me to my next point. We talked about setting expectations of monitoring impacts but it's been very clear. This is the change we're going to when I'm talking about when communicating with leadership and this is what I'm reporting on now. And so I think that's really valuable to have that communication line open with leadership make sure everyone's on the same page because at the end of the day that's really helped us.
This will work really well. So that's all I've got guys. I don't know if you have any less common service page search strategy or anything else you want to riff on. I just think it's kind of fun because it's ever changing and it's ever evolving.
And I think we're going to see big changes to coming up with Google Analytics 4 and that might even change more about how we haven't dealt in Google Analytics 4 yet. That's a black box to me as of now. But I think things like that and you get more insights from different tools that are coming up and new strategies for search. It's going to be interesting over time to see how things evolve even more.
Yeah, so exciting changes. You got anything else? Yeah, I just have to say, you know, one of the big things that has helped me with paid search is really just looking at it from all the different angles and looking at it from, you know, as we discussed, keywords, search terms, native keywords and also looking at it from like devices that we're bidding on. Also looking at audiences, putting audiences in observation mode, making sure their audiences that fit what you're actually targeting.
And then even from there like day parting, different things like that. So just really looking at all the different angles that you can use to optimize your search campaigns as much as possible is always a really good step in the right direction. That's good. Next, we think a question of there are so many levers you can pull and you can focus on day parting over here and doing these different bits.
Is there a point where you can start seeing that you're almost over optimized and you become too narrowed in? And what do you guys see as those indicators that you're like, all right, I might put too many constraints on here now, because I can't spend budget or I'm not getting any impressions like what are some of those indicators that you might be doing almost too much layering in of a thousand different letters that you're trying to tweak. Well, that I think you're the king here. You've got a good answer for that.
Right. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, that's a great question, because there is sometimes where you can't over optimize things 100%. And then, you know, you could look at something where the impressions are falling or or maybe that add an adverse reaction that you caused within that campaign and now it's it's not performing as good as it was in the past. So that's an option.
You know, if you want to look at one thing that I'm, I like doing a lot with like experiments. I think they're really great for that. You know, people, they like to shy away from experiments because they feel like now you're experimenting with everything that you could have already done. But I think for options like that where you really want to do, you know, big changes with like day party where you just want to go in and do some big changes with that.
That might be a good option. But for like devices and things like that, I think that's a good one where you can really just look at it. Devices are an interesting one because some, you know, desktop and then, and then mobile device users, you can kind of see the same thing but then tablet. That's the one that we usually see is like in an odd space where it really can't it doesn't perform as well.
But I think for that instance, you know, going back to your question, I think you can over optimize what I think a lot of the things if you can see like clear data points for like last three months, you can see clear performance changes that can be made. I would say definitely go with it. But if you think that it might be over optimizing or it might be a step that could be potentially taking performance away, then I would say do an experiment with it and then launch that because then you'll definitely be able to get more statistical significance on it. And we have talked about what you guys are saying, of course, being too aggressive sometimes in our bit adjustments and starting and especially with our strategy been in first and high intent keywords that reduces the volume substantially.
And so if we are too aggressive with bit adjustments, we could completely eliminate half the volume we're eligible to show up for. So it's good to have those adjustments to improve the efficiency or improve the performance, but to your point, we don't want to like negative 100% models if it's not performing as well as desktop because that could easily remove a good portion of our high intent traffic. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's definitely a good option to look at too.
Because that's something that I've always seen. It's it really does come by a campaign by campaign basis to some things you might see some products might see do really well on certain devices or not as well. So it's kind of something that you have to do as well by a campaign by campaign basis at times. That's great guys.
This was a blast. I know I've learned a lot since I've been here with you guys. You guys are fantastic Google ads and so much more so keep in town. Appreciate you guys coming on.
Everyone has some good takeaways from this paid search strategy. Like we said, if you want you guys to be successful, we want your Google ads campaigns to be profitable. So we hope there's some good takeaways here. And would love for me personally my doors open on LinkedIn.
So you can reach out send our questions on Pigantano, you guys have any parting messages. We're working with Mindy. Thanks so much for having us. It was fun to get shit chatting on this stuff and talking shop.
I was appreciate that. Yeah, we should do this again. This was a lot fun. Thank you.