Effective PPC Bid Strategies to Maximise Your Advertising Budget

Sam Searle - Head of Delivery Operations

PPC bidding significantly impacts the success of B2B advertising campaigns. Ensuring you use all the metrics, bid types and analytics available across the various PPC platforms keeps costs low while still reaching high-quality leads that are likely to convert.

In this article, we’ll look at the key elements of PPC bidding and how to refine your approach for better ROI.

Understanding the Basics of PPC Bidding for B2B Success

Your PPC bidding strategy is important in driving the right traffic to your site and maximising ROAS. That means targeting the correct audience, in the right places.

The most common platforms for B2B PPC advertising include:

  • Google Ads: As the leading search engine with 81.95% of the market share, Google offers high reach and visibility. Its extensive targeting lets you keyword match types, demographics and audience interests with the ability to drill down into niche long-tail keyword searches – ideal for B2B marketing.
  • Bing Ads: Due to it being a smaller audience, Bing Ads typically offer lower competition rates than Google Ads; with its owner, Microsoft providing stats showing that it’s likely to be used by higher-income professionals or in other words… those in the B2B space.
  • LinkedIn: Ideal for targeting by job type, title, industry or company size, on a platform where professionals are actively looking for new solutions and ideas.

Whichever platform you choose, there are three main components of a PPC bid strategy:

  • Manual Bidding: This allows you to have complete control over your bids, setting a specific amount you’re willing to pay per click. This is ideal for businesses looking to prioritise high-value keywords and keep a close eye on their ad spend.
  • Automated Bidding: With automated bidding, platforms like Google Ads use machine learning to adjust bids in real-time, aiming to maximise the results within your set budget. This option is usually the most preferable as it can allow for large-scale campaign implementation and instant adjustment, without having to wait for human input.
  • Budget Allocation: Choosing how to distribute your budget across various campaigns and ad groups is also key. This includes prioritising high-value keywords and your highest-converting target audiences to reduce wasted spend.

Don’t forget to align your PPC budget and strategy with what you’re looking to achieve from your campaign. It’s important to strike a balance between getting clicks and conversions. Ultimately clicks are a short-term success unit, whereas conversions are what ultimately keep your revenue ticking over.

In B2B where sales cycles are long and require nurturing due to the often-large investments companies make, you need to focus on quality over quantity and prioritise getting high-quality leads.

Manual vs. Automated Bidding: Which Works Best for B2B?

There’s no right answer to whether you should manually adjust your B2B PPC campaigns, or let the automated system do the work. It depends on which bidding type best benefits your specific business goals.

Manual Bidding

Manual PPC bidding offers a granular level of flexibility and control, letting businesses set specific bids for high-value keywords.

This is useful if there are specific terms you’re targeting and want to focus on. It also allows you to manually remove the budget from inefficient keywords or keywords where the leads don’t typically convert.

However, manual bidding also requires a much larger time investment, with constant oversight and optimisation, and relies more heavily on human expertise.

When to Use Manual Bidding

Manual bidding is best used for granular campaign adjustments where you want a deeper level of control over spend.

This is useful when targeting leads at the bottom of the funnel who are ready to convert.

Automated Bidding

Automated bidding is usually a PPC specialist’s preferred choice. With the benefit of machine learning, your bids adjust in real time based on user behaviour and campaign objectives.

With the option to have automated bidding based on CPA (cost-per-acquisition), ROAS (return on ad spend) or to maximise conversions, you can allow the system to make data-driven decisions and continually refine its approach.

This is particularly useful for large-scale campaigns and in keeping up with multiple keywords at once.

However, automated bidding can lead to errors, such as unintentionally funnelling more budget than intended to a particular keyword.

When to Use Automated Bidding

Automated bidding works best for brand awareness or lead-generation campaigns targeting a broad audience. It helps maintain a consistent cost-per-lead by making real-time data adjustments.

The best approach of all, however, is simply to test both and find a balance by monitoring the PPC performance metrics. Try different approaches over different campaigns or ad groups to see what’s most effective for your B2B PPC ads.

How to Make Bid Adjustments to Maximise PPC Campaign Performance

Bid adjustments allow businesses to fine-tune PPC campaigns further based on factors like devices, locations, time of day and audience demographics.

This provides a way to effectively prioritise high-value buyer personas like business decision-makers or high ROI potential industries.

By increasing bids for these groups, you allocate more budget to those most likely to convert, thus achieving a higher ROI.

Part of this involves leveraging performance data for further ad refinement. If you can see that conversions and engagement are stronger at certain times of the day or in specific locations, you can adjust your PPC campaign accordingly to capitalise on this.

Or, another effective tactic is integrating remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). This PPC strategy allows you to upload lists of current customers or site visitors to target those individuals or lookalike audiences, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Using PPC Bid Strategies for Maximum ROI Across Platforms

Each PPC platform has different advantages, beyond the different targeting options we’ve already discussed. Tailoring your strategy to suit each platform’s mechanics is key to PPC success:

  • Google Ads: Google Ads allows you to target high-intent keywords which have a much stronger likelihood of conversion. Its effective campaign types include Target CPA and ‘maximise conversions’ which ensure you’re only paying for clicks that align with conversion goals.
  • Bing Ads: With its typically lower rates, using Bing Ads B2B marketers can achieve a lower cost-per-click and, as of 2024, utilise the “Enhanced CPC” campaign type, which uses search queries, bid modifiers, location, device, ad copy and more to achieve the best results.
  • LinkedIn Ads: With LinkedIn ads, you can focus on brand awareness with metrics like CPM (cost per thousand impressions) to drive awareness and increase the reach of your PPC campaigns. This is effective in targeting a lot of high-level B2B professionals, quickly.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Up PPC Bid Strategies

Due to its many nuances, B2B marketers can easily make some common PPC mistakes that negatively impact how well their campaign performs.

Overbidding or Underbidding

Overbidding quickly drains a PPC budget without offering meaningful returns. This most commonly happens in attempts to dominate ad placements or eke out a competitor’s ad.

But while this increases visibility, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee high-quality traffic that converts. Instead, it can lead to ineffective spending and lower ROI, leaving less budget for high-potential lead targeting.

Underbidding, on the other hand, can lead to missed opportunities. Ads could fail to show on search results or show inconsistently, at ineffective times where leads are less likely to convert. This limits your business exposure and results in fewer clickthroughs.

It’s all about striking the perfect bidding balance through monitoring and refinement of your PPC campaigns.

Ignoring Bid Adjustments

Bid adjustments allow for granular, refined targeting. By neglecting options like location, time of day and device, B2B marketers run the risk of missing out on the high-converting points in time within their industry.

Setting Bids Too Broadly

Broad bids targeting generic keywords like “SaaS software” have more chance of attracting poor-quality leads due to their wider audience focus. They’re also more likely to be seen by those without the ability to make purchasing decisions, or those outside your target audience.

Not Testing and Refining PPC Bidding

Continual monitoring, testing and refinement are key to PPC bidding success. Whether manual, automated, or both, keeping your campaigns optimised over time requires close attention and regular evaluation.

How to Monitor and Optimise Your Bidding Strategy Over Time

Continually monitoring the PPC platform’s performance metrics and using its reporting tools is the best way to stay informed on your campaign’s success rates and areas of ineffectiveness.

Most PPC platforms provide information like bidding insights and auction reports that provide real-time information on bid performance. This allows you to spot trends, potential opportunities and inefficient keyword targeting.

If a keyword is consistently generating high-quality leads, for example, you might want to funnel more budget toward it. On the other hand, if a keyword is underperforming, either lowering its spending or removing its budget entirely can reduce wasted spend and redirect focus to those where you have a better chance of conversions.

Tools like Google Ads Smart Bidding provide automated suggestions to help with this.

Set a Regular Monitoring Schedule

Establish a regular schedule (at least once per month) to review and adjust PPC bids, based on performance metrics and factors like time of year, competitor activity and industry trends.

As part of this, don’t just equate clicks with success. Look deeper into the metrics with the quality of lead generated and later purchase conversion rates. This provides better actionable insights on where to place bid adjustments.

Case Study: Improving ROI With a Tailored B2B PPC Bid Strategy

As businesses grow, their campaign strategy expands, often becoming confused and jumbled, with various ad groups requiring streamlining and refinement.

This was the case for the B2B content management solution company, Alfresco. It needed a complete Google Ads account review and a better-tailored PPC bid strategy to improve its cost-per-conversion, and therefore, its ROI.

Unfortunately, due to too many stakeholders contributing in the past, the Google Ad account had many conflicting campaigns and Google Ads groups set up, that were not performing optimally. New techniques were needed to streamline the platform and achieve higher traffic and conversion rates for the money spent.

The Results of Effective PPC Campaign Management

That’s where Common Ground came in.

Taking over Alfresco’s PPC management, we adjusted the ad group campaigns and budgets for better clickthrough rates with new ad copy and improved targeting. We focussed on improving performance on already successful campaigns and optimising high-potential ones.

In doing this, we achieved a reduction in cost-per-conversion by a huge 64%, a 105% increase in click-throughs and a reduced cost-per-
click of 58%.

But most staggeringly, we succeeded in providing Alfresco with a staggering 162% increase in paid traffic conversions. And they’re not the only ones we’ve helped. You can see other B2B PPC case studies here.

How Common Ground Can Help You Optimise Your PPC Bid Strategy

Just like Alfresco, Common Ground can help your business maximise its advertising budget with highly effective PPC bid strategies.

We offer personalised advice and in-depth, highly informational free PPC audits and consultations to get your PPC campaigns producing high-quality leads and conversions.

With over 10 years of PPC experience, we understand how to use the right ad types and targeting across every stage of the sales funnel.

We believe in monitoring and adjusting at every level of a PPC campaign, from quick wins to new ad types, campaigns and landing pages.
At every step, we will provide clear, transparent information and deliver measurable results.

Book a call with us now for tighter PPC bid alignment and strategies that produce higher conversion and clickthrough rates.

Sam Searle - Head of Delivery Operations

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