Let’s start with the obvious: if you’ve got thousands of unique products and product variants, and a stack of different B2B customers you want to target, known as buyer personas, running PPC campaigns isn’t just about “setting and forgetting.” It’s more like trying to organise a warehouse full of unruly children with different budgets, buying cycles, and preferred landing page experiences.
PPC campaigns for traditional B2B companies can be complex, but the fact remains that they can drive revenue growth and help businesses to achieve their financial targets more quickly than if they rely solely on the organic performance of their ecommerce website.
Structuring PPC campaigns for complex B2B product catalogues, containing thousands of unique product identifier numbers (SKUs) is completely doable with a blend of automation, logic, and specialist experience of the B2B market. At Fluid Commerce we have several B2B clients operating in the manufacturing and distribution sectors that we manage successful PPC campaigns for. As the head of Fluid Commerce’s PPC team, I have pulled together a list below of my key priorities when planning campaigns for these types of companies.
1. Segmentation is key
The biggest mistake we see when taking over an existing PPC campaign is when all the company’s products are thrown into one mega-campaign like it’s a Black Friday fire sale. That works for B2C impulse buys, not B2B buyers with six-person procurement committees.
Instead, we spend time ensuring products are segmented into their appropriate categories. This doesn’t just mean the product category or solution type ie: industrial adhesives vs. commercial sealants, but also includes their price, industry vertical that they are utilised in and also their profit margin. Profit margin is important as this will play a role in the bidding strategy to ensure the campaigns remain profitable.
Getting this planning stage right is crucial to the campaigns’ success and ensuring everything is set up correctly will pay dividends later.
2. Intent-led campaign structure: not all clicks are equal
B2B buyers don’t wake up and click “buy now.” They read. They compare. They request a demo, then something that feels more urgent wil come up in their business and they pause their purchase for three weeks.
So your PPC campaigns need to reflect those stages: Each stage deserves its own campaign or ad group, with tailored copy, bids, and landing pages. This is how you will convert your B2B customers over time by tapping into the natural cycle of their buying journey.
3. Dynamic search ads and feed Management
Now to the elephant in the warehouse: thousands of SKUs. Manual ad writing? Not happening.
Enter dynamic search ads (DSAs), a campaign type that automatically generates ad headlines and landing pages based on your website’s content. DSAs are an essential tool for many traditional B2B campaigns and one that we have great experience of at Fluid Commerce.
Pair this campaign type with a clean, optimised and well-structured product feed, and it’s like giving Google a neatly labelled blueprint of your product catalogue and saying, “Go fetch.”
However, your feed is going to need some expert attention and this can be quite a technical and complex area that requires a great deal of expertise.
4. Leverage first-party data like a pro
One of the best-kept secrets in B2B PPC? Your CRM.
Your CRM holds valuable data on your existing customers and their purchasing behaviours that can provide a significant boost to your PPC campaigns. The data held on your CRM allows for highly targeted campaigns to be run that are often very successful, often more so than blanket bidding approaches, and also more cost effective.
5. Don’t forget the humans behind the keywords
B2B PPC might be full of acronyms, but at the end of the day, you’re selling to people. People who are tired, overworked, and just want their project to actually get done.
That’s why ad copy still needs to be creative, but also very accessible. Ad copy needs to quickly communicate the clear benefits of your products in layman’s terms, include trust signals and accreditations, and also good quality imagery.
At Fluid Commerce we know that speaking to the humans behind the business is vital or custom will be lost. We’ve got communicating with B2B customers down to a fine art, but all too often we see non-client PPC campaigns that are full of jargon and technical language that we know customers will just scroll past.
6. Measure what matters, when it matters
B2B journeys are longer than a queue for free biscuits at a trade show, and your KPIs need to match. Don’t just look at direct sales, measure
- Form submissions
- Quote requests
- Phone calls
- Offline conversions
Google’s new conversion tracking tools and CRM integrations are your friend here.
Not only that, but we are seeing B2B conversions take an average of 17 days to fully report on the platform. So if your ROAS looks low, don’t despair. It’s likely it will look much healthier if you look at the reported revenue again a few weeks later.
Final thought
Yes, structuring PPC campaigns across thousands of SKUs and buyer intents is a beast. But it’s not about doing everything at once. It’s about doing the right things in the right order, with the right level of automation and a specialist B2B PPC agency will be able to handle this for you.
Fluid Commerce is a Google, Bing and Meta-certified agency focused on B2B Performance Marketing. We are experts at turning around failing B2B PPC campaigns and fine tuning them so that they deliver the results companies are looking for.
If you’d like to discuss our PPC services in more detail, get in touch with our team!
