CASE STUDYHow to Boost B2B

Leads From PPC and Landing Pages by 9x

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CONTENTS

04 IDENTIFYING THE ISSUES

THE RESULTS

IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION09

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INTRODUCTION

Do you ever dream about increasing your conversion rate? How about

increasing it by 290 percent and boosting your lead generation by 9x?

Well, that’s exactly what we did for our client, Revecent, a company

specializing in sales consulting and recruiting.

Today, I’m going to show you exactly how we did it, and how you can

achieve the same results by following key PPC and landing page best

practices. Ready to start making more money than you ever thought

possible from your B2B PPC campaigns? Let’s dig in!

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IDENTIFYING THE ISSUES

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Most B2B PPC campaigns have poor conversion rates and ROI. This

usually happens because the campaign is not set up using best

practices, is not managed using a disciplined process, and does not

use optimized landing pages. In fact 52 percent of B2B PPC ads still

point to home pages.

Indeed, when we first looked at our client’s old Google AdWords

campaign for recruiting services, we saw each one of these issues in

play.

Their overall conversion rate of 2.83 percent, while above average for a

B2B campaign, was still nothing to write home about. And the high cost

per conversion didn’t produce many quality leads thus preventing the

client from scaling up their campaign.

While there were many issues, we focused on four key areas for our

plan of attack:

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1. Poor Account Structure

One of the biggest issues in the campaign was that they had only three ad

groups with 40 to 50 keywords each. This resulted in poor quality scores

and poor message match between ads and keywords. Here is an example

of one such ad and the variety of different keywords triggering that ad:

Your ads (and landing pages) can never be relevant for so many different

keywords. So, you should only have a handful of keywords in an ad

group, and ideally, just one keyword per ad group.

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2. No Special Landing Pages

Rather than develop specific landing pages for the campaign, the client

chose to use one of their service pages as a landing page. As you can

see below, it had a number of issues including conflicting Calls-to-

Action, multiple navigation links, and some pretty blasé content and

design:

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3. Wasted Ad Spend

Even considering their modest budget, the campaign was very

inefficient — only 10 percent of the keywords had conversions and 90

percent of conversions came from 30 percent of their total ad spend.

4. Inadequate Keyword Management

With all their ad groups combined, the entire campaign had only 130

keywords. Plus, they weren’t regularly identifying and adding new

keywords. While the client did implement a few negative keywords,

there was room for a lot more in order to improve the quality of their

traffic.

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IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION

IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION

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We came up with a three-step plan to optimize the PPC campaign:

Use best practices to structure the account, create conversion

optimized landing pages, and use a disciplined process to manage

the campaign and realize ongoing improvements.

1. PPC Best Practices to Set up the Campaign

First, we spent time understanding the client’s business in detail—

going through their services, industries they serve, ideal customers,

and competitors. Based on this, we conducted extensive research

to brainstorm some quality keywords for their campaign.

Using the Google Keywords Tool, we identified the best keyword

opportunities including niche keywords around specific industries

like Software, SaaS, and Technology as well as keywords

containing metro areas like Chicago, NYC, and San Francisco. We

poured through the Search Terms Report from the client’s old

campaigns and extracted some excellent keywords from there as

well as a host of negative keywords. We also used the SpyFu tool to

look at which keywords competitors were using and then extracted

some of those as well.

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Next, we set up an account structure that would give us a solid

platform for the campaign. We created a structure of single-

keyword ad groups for keywords accounting for around 90 percent

of the expected traffic to the campaign. This resulted in about 80 ad

groups. Our approach would give us the most control over the

campaign, ensuring precise message match between keywords

and ads, high quality scores and click-through rates, while keeping

keyword cost-per click at a reasonable level—even for the top three

ad slots.

Below are three examples of the ad groups we created.

Ad Group Sales Recruiters Dallas:

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Ad Group Software Sales Recruiters:

Ad Group Sales Recruiting Agencies:

We rewrote all the ad copy to properly convey the client’s main benefits with

lines such as “Build an All Star B2B Sales Team” and “Targeted & Vetted

Candidates Only.” We also added sitelinks, callouts, and call ad extensions.

Finally, we added a number of negative keywords in each ad group to make sure

that any keyword searched on Google would only match one ad group. For

example, in our “Sales Recruiters” ad group, we added “Dallas”, “Software”,

“Agencies” and a host of other terms as negative keywords.

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2. Conversion Optimized Landing Page Design

Using Unbounce, we created a new landing page, employing best

practices for landing page design. Instead of creating multiple

pages with content customized to associated ad groups, we opted

to use dynamic text replacement to change the content of a few key

areas of the landing page.

The key elements of our landing page were as follows:

• Tagline below logo emphasizing focus on Sales Recruiting

• Phone number integrating with Google call tracking so we could

track phone calls being made from this page

• Customer testimonial

• Prominently placed form

• Clear Call-to-action and moving arrow to attract attention

• Customer logos to build trust

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• Tracking of UTM parameters so we could record the campaign,

keyword, device, and keyword match type

In addition to the above, we created a headline and subheading

that effectively described what the client does and what the main

benefits of the service are. Using dynamic text replacement, we

were able to change the entire headline based on which ad the

user clicked on. We also used dynamic text parameters for a

portion of the subheading and section headings.

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For example, the “Software Sales Recruiters” ad had the following

content. The bolded, italicized portion represents the dynamic

portion of the content.

• Headline: Hire Top Notch Software Sales Professionals Today

• Subheading: We recruit the best software sales professionals in

your industry. Candidates are assessed based on 21 sales

specific skills common among top 20% performers to ensure

success.

• Section heading: Outsource Your Sales Hiring to Expert Software

Sales Recruiters

Once we had our account set up the way we wanted and the main

landing page ready to go, we launched the campaign.

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3. Ongoing Optimization and A/B Testing

Even if you use best practices to set up a campaign, things may not

always go as planned. Real-world performance can throw a few

curve balls. In our case, while we did find that our campaign was

performing a lot better than the old campaign, there were a few

things that needed to be adjusted.

4. Negative Keywords

Our campaign was getting lot of traffic from irrelevant keywords.

These keywords were either not related to the client’s business or

they were top of the funnel/informational searches which were not

a priority for us in this campaign. So, we went into the Search Terms

Report in AdWords and added these as negative keywords. You can

see examples of some of these on the next page.

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5. New Keywords

On the other hand, we found dozens of new keywords that people

were searching for that we hadn’t used in the campaign. We added

these keywords into new ad groups in the campaign to maximize

their effectiveness:

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6. A/B Testing

We started out with two ads in the ad groups receiving the most

traffic and continued to A/B test until we found a winner. Then, we

created a new variant and tested that against this winner and

continued this process to improve click-through rates. We also

created a variant of the landing page with a different CTA and a

different headline that included a number (as these tend to perform

better).

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7. Bid Optimization

We employed a manual CPC based bid strategy throughout, which

gave us the most control over the bidding process. We also

monitored and optimized bids regularly to maintain a top three

average position with most ads.

8. Lead Quality

Our client wanted to make sure that we minimized leads from job

candidates. They also were not interested in getting leads from

companies looking for part-time help or commission-only sales

reps. Most leads specified what they were looking for in the

description box on the form. We used this in conjunction with the

search term used by the lead to identify keywords that were

responsible for such leads. Based on this, we would either pause

those keywords or modify the ad copy.

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THE RESULTSTHE RESULTS

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As you can see in the table below, our new campaign performed

exceptionally well compared to the old campaign. We were able to

realize immediate performance gains and, because of the low cost

per lead, the client asked us to scale up the campaign quickly.

In all, the new campaign was able to:

• Reduce Cost Per Conversion by 78 percent - From $183.13 in the

old campaign down to an outstanding $39.85

• Improve Conversion Rate by 290 percent - From 2.83 percent to

11.04 percent, which is outstanding for a bottom-of-the-funnel,

B2B offer

• Boost conversions from 33 to 308 in the same time frame

• Improve the Lead to Opportunity conversion rate from 10 percent

to 25 percent

We achieved our results by following best practices for

campaign setup and landing page design, and by employing

a disciplined process for ongoing optimization after the initial

launch. Although it took a considerable amount of time to set

up the original campaign structure, this approach allowed us

to get the perfect search term + ad copy + landing page

message match. In the end, we were able to create a solid,

highly scalable platform for sustained growth.

CONCLUSIONCONCLUSION