Running Google Ads today isn’t the same as running Google Ads in 2015.
What years ago was a winning strategy no longer is, and will only lead to headaches, poor leads, and wasted spend.
Many marketers have already abandoned Google entirely, claiming that it doesn’t work anymore or it’s a waste of money — but this, in my experience, isn’t true.
Over the past few years, I’ve helped B2B SaaS companies such as Dreamdata, Airtame, and Templafy drive millions in revenue through Google Ads, and have developed a repeatable strategy to maximize performance.
I’ll be sharing my tips for success below 👇
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Many companies are simply tracking form submits, without paying attention to lead quality. This makes optimization challenging, both for the performance marketer managing the account and for the Google Ads algorithm.
To improve performance, make sure you send all the lifecycle stages from your CRM back into the Google Ads platform — this might look like MQLs, SALs, opportunities, etc. — and assign higher values to higher value conversions, so that Google’s algorithm understands what to optimize for.
If you’re using HubSpot as a CRM, this process will be very simple, as your Click IDs will automatically be captured without requiring a manual setup.
If you’re using a different CRM, you’ll need to manually push your click IDs into your CRM using hidden fields — this process might seem complicated, but you should be able to find a marketing operations specialist on Upwork that can help you with the initial setup.
In the past, when exact match was still exact, SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) made sense.
By including one keyword per ad group and using that keyword in the ad and landing page copy, you could improve your overall quality score.
Now that exact match is a lot less exact, this approach doesn’t make sense anymore.
These days, consolidation is the way to win — by grouping relevant keywords into the same ad group, we give the Google Ads algorithm more data points to make optimizations.
With exact match being less exact, exclusions are now more important than inclusions.
In other words, instead of trying to come up with hundreds of keywords to include in your campaigns, it’s better to spend your time excluding hundreds of irrelevant keywords.
For example, maybe you want to show up for the keyword customer journey tracking, but notice in your search terms report that you’re consistently showing up for the term customer journey mapping, which isn’t relevant to your core offering. By excluding different variations of customer journey mapping, you’ll be able to improve your overall targeting and get in front of more relevant prospects.
Pro tip: In the Google Ads reporting section, you can easily create a search terms report and schedule it to be emailed to you on a weekly basis. This will allow you to be more proactive about making exclusions in your account.
Landing pages are one of the most overlooked aspects of Google Ads performance.
If they aren’t loading quickly, Google will lower your quality score and it will be nearly impossible to get in front of your prospects. Before launching any campaign, double check that your landing pages are loading quickly on both mobile and desktop devices.
Next, make sure your landing page is as closely related as possible to the keywords in your ad group. For a product analytics ad group, you’d want your landing page to focus on product analytics. For a marketing analytics ad group, you’d want your landing page to focus on marketing analytics.
Take a look at the customized landing pages below:
This message match will improve your quality score and will also improve the relevance for your prospects, leading to better performance.
I know that creating new landing pages can be a heavy lift, especially if you have a small team. If this is the case, I recommend duplicating an existing landing page and simply modifying the hero section. Once you start seeing some initial traction from this simple landing page, you can put in the extra effort to create a fully customized experience.
Pro tip: To check the speed of your landing pages, you can use a free tool such as PageSpeed Insights.
Sometimes, smart bidding doesn’t make sense. For example, if you’re starting a new campaign and have zero conversions, it’s a better idea to start with manual CPC or maximize clicks with a bid cap.
However, once you have 10+ conversions per campaign, you’ll typically see better performance if you switch over to smart bidding and let Google optimize for you.
This wasn’t always the case — in the past, Google’s algorithm was much less sophisticated, and you were better off trying to control every single bid adjustment.
But these days, you’ll usually see more traffic and an increase in conversions by letting go of control, as long as you’re feeding Google high quality signals from your CRM.
As with everything in marketing, there are exceptions, and there are instances where you’ll switch to smart bidding and your CPCs will skyrocket 😨
If this happens, consider testing a portfolio bidding strategy with a target CPA and a bid cap — this will mimic max conversions bidding while giving you more control over the cost per click.
Most people think that having more responsive search ads = more variations for Google = better performance.
But the opposite is actually true.
Let’s say you create 3 RSAs, and have 15 headlines per ad. This means that Google will have to test 45 different headlines until it finds a winning combination, which could take years 😅
If you only include 1 RSA per ad group (maximum two), your headlines will be tested much faster and Google will be able to find a winning combination more easily, minimizing wasted spend and improving overall results.
Pro tip: If you have a small budget, you might want to take things a step further, and test 6-9 headlines instead of 15. This way, Google will be able to test all the headlines in a matter of weeks (not years).
There’s still a lot of debate around pinning vs not pinning headlines.
Some people say that pinning is a bad idea, since it will negatively impact your ad strength, but ultimately, Google’s ad strength has no bearing on performance.
I’ve seen more success with pinning because it makes your headlines more legible — if your ads are clear and searchers have a better understanding of what your company does, you’ll see an improvement in performance.
If your headlines are redundant — as often happens with unpinned headlines, which leads to words like Google Ads agency and Google Ads consultant being next to each other — prospects are less likely to trust you, and much less likely to click.
Here’s the exact formula that I like to follow for my headlines:
Headline 1: Include your target keyword to maximize relevance
Headline 2: Include unique selling points or social proof
Headline 3: Include your company name or a relevant CTA
For each headline, I like to create 2-3 variations that Google can test.
Pro tip: Spend most of your time crafting headlines 1 and 2. Headline 3 is much less important these days, as Google rarely displays it in the SERP.
Oftentimes, certain devices will significantly outperform others.
For example, if you see that 20% of your spend and 90% of your conversions are happening on desktop, you might want to add a negative bid adjustment to mobile devices or tablets, in order to increase the budget allocated to desktop.
You could argue that mobile impressions are still valuable, and that decreasing spend on mobile could negatively impact performance if people are researching on their phones and then converting on desktop, but based on my experience, it’s best to work with the data that’s available to you — if a certain device is converting at a higher rate, I would recommend adding negative bid adjustments to the other devices.
Running brand campaigns vs not running them at all is a controversial topic.
Some people say that the impact of brand campaigns is minimal — prospects were already looking for you and may have converted organically — and that they simply exist to inflate performance marketing metrics.
However, in my experience, this isn’t the case, and it usually is a good idea to run brand campaigns to protect your brand, especially if competitors are bidding on your company name.
Back when I was working at Momondo, a B2C company, we were driving a ton of revenue from competitive campaigns, bidding on our competitor, Kayak, who wasn’t running brand campaigns to protect themselves.
Now, you might be thinking: sure, that’s B2C, but in B2B, especially enterprise B2B, you probably won’t change the course of a deal with a single ad.
But from what I’ve seen with my B2B clients, this isn’t true — my clients have driven a significant amount of revenue by bidding on competitor terms, which validates that bidding on your own terms to protect yourself is a good idea.
Check out the example from Mixpanel below. If they didn’t bid on their own brand name, competitors like Pendo and Heap might end up stealing some of their prospects.
If you’re undecided about whether you should run brand campaigns or not, you can run a holdout study.
Stop running brand campaigns in a specific region — maybe start with one of your less important regions — and see if the amount of demos or trials goes down. If it does, you can assume that you’re losing out on pipeline and revenue by not bidding on your own terms.
Brand and non-brand campaigns are completely different.
Brand campaigns are defensive. Someone already found out about your brand through other marketing efforts, and they’re looking for you specifically — you’re bidding on your own name in order to protect your brand from competitors trying to steal your traffic.
On the other hand, non-brand campaigns are offensive. You’re trying to show up for relevant solutions that your prospects might be looking for, and you’re trying to drive interest from a colder audience.
In other words, getting a conversion on a non-brand campaign is significantly more challenging than driving a conversion on a brand campaign; you need to separate these campaign types in your reporting to truly understand what’s working.
Most companies and ad agencies tend to look at performance by region, but completely ignore performance by country, which results in inefficient spending.
For example, if you’re targeting France, Italy, Spain, DACH, Nordics, and the UK in the same campaign, if you drill down and analyze performance by country, you might realize that all your spend is going to the southern European countries, which typically have more affordable CPCs.
And if you look further down the funnel, you might see that Spain, DACH, and Nordics are generating a lot of form submissions, but that all your pipeline is actually coming from the UK.
Ultimately, you want to ask yourself:
1. Are any countries cannibalizing my spend and do they need to be separated into different campaigns?
2. Are there countries that aren’t generating any form submissions that we might want to pause?
3. Are there countries that are generating submissions but never convert into pipeline that we might want to invest less money in?
If you ask yourself these questions consistently, you’ll be in a much better position than 99% of companies.
Hope you found this article helpful!
If you’re looking to learn more about Google Ads, check out these free Google Ads courses, that will teach you how to launch, optimize, and scale Google Ads campaigns effectively.
And if you have any questions about Google Ads or paid media in general, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
If you’re a marketer with some paid media experience, you’ve likely heard the same LinkedIn Ads advice many times: disable audience expansion, turn off the LinkedIn audience network, use manual bidding, etc.
This is all great advice, but following it doesn’t guarantee success – as the LinkedIn Ads market becomes increasingly saturated, it takes a more advanced approach to be successful.
Below, I’ll be sharing some less common strategies that my LinkedIn Ads agency has used to generate millions in revenue, and that you can implement to take your LinkedIn Ads performance to the next level.
This might sound silly, but I think it’s important to say it: Make sure you’re leveraging the LinkedIn Insight Tag to its full potential.
I’ve audited so many accounts where the insight tag isn’t installed and all the spend is going to cold audiences, and I’ve also seen accounts where the tag is installed, but the right audiences haven’t been set up.
As soon as you create your account, set up your 30, 90, and 180-day website visits remarketing audiences – these audiences are extremely high value and aren’t retroactive.
In other words, if you set them up 6 months after creating your account, you’ll miss out on 6 months of website traffic that you could retarget 😢
If you haven’t installed the insight tag already, check out this tutorial.
And for a full breakdown of the remarketing audiences you can create in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, take a look at this comprehensive guide.
One of the best ways to improve your LinkedIn Ads results is to implement a solid paid search strategy – this could be Google Ads, Bing, or another paid listing.
Although LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are incredible, you’re typically reaching a colder audience that isn’t actively searching for your solution, and have to take them from unaware to aware before driving conversions, which means longer sales cycles.
Meanwhile, with paid search, you can target people who are looking for your exact solution or researching the pain points you solve and shopping for vendors/solutions.
By running search ads and then retargeting with LinkedIn Ads, you can stay in front of in-market, warm audiences that are already problem and brand-aware, and significantly shorten your sales cycle. You can even qualify this in-market search traffic by layering in LinkedIn’s demographic and firmographic targeting filters on top of your warm website traffic to only retarget high-fit prospects.
Pro tip: If you’re investing a lot of money in paid search (30K+/month), you might be able to create a custom LinkedIn Ads remarketing audience with the UTM source “paid_search”, or “cpc”, or “google”. This way, you’ll only retarget high-intent prospects who have already clicked on your search campaigns.
There’s no point in running search campaigns if you’re not getting in front of your ICP.
If you’re a performance marketer working at an agency, make sure you communicate with in-house marketers to confirm you’re showing up for the right search terms – their feedback is essential, because they know their business and ICP better than you do.
To make things simple, send the team a search terms report bi-weekly or monthly, and ask for feedback on what to exclude.
By doing this, you’ll improve the quality of your Google Ads traffic, and also significantly improve the quality of your LinkedIn Ads remarketing audiences.
Video is one of the most impactful formats on LinkedIn, as it allows you to build trust, communicate your value, and showcase your personality more effectively than images.
If you work at a service-based company, you can steal the exact strategy I use at my agency:
1. Target your cold audience with videos that clearly describe what you do and what problems you solve – these videos don’t have to be super exciting, but they do have to be relevant to the right audience and weed out people who aren’t in your ICP.
2. In remarketing, use clips of yourself speaking on well-known podcasts – this will help you build more credibility with your ICP and make them more likely to reach out.
If you‘re selling a product instead of a service, run video ads showcasing how leaders in your industry use your product to solve their problems – this third-party validation is extremely powerful and has helped my SaaS clients generate millions in revenue over the past few years.
There’s no point in having great CPCs, CTRs, and CPLs if the sales team has no interest in working with your leads.
At minimum, I’d recommend meeting with your sales team once a month to go over your lead quality – these conversations will help you refine your targeting and exclusions, and minimize the amount of ad dollars being wasted.
In addition to this monthly check-in, you can go one step further and set up automated lead alerts in Slack (using Zapier). When these alerts come in, your sales team can react – thumbs up for a good lead and thumbs down for a bad one – and you can use these reactions to get real-time feedback and make quick pivots in targeting.
This might seem a bit boring, but it’s important to have a monthly and quarterly maintenance plan for your account – the same way you have a maintenance plan for your car or for your health.
For example, if you launched new video campaigns, did you create video view audiences and add them to your remarketing campaigns? Is your insight tag still active and picking up website traffic? Is your ad budget staying on LinkedIn and not being wasted on the LinkedIn audience network? Are your conversion events still functional, or do you have to update them due to changes in your website URLs?
Without these consistent checks, things can easily go awry and you can waste thousands or even millions of dollars.
Here’s the exact maintenance checklist that we use with our clients – feel free to make a copy and use it for your own accounts.
If a piece of content performs well organically, it will most likely also perform well as an ad.
Use organic social media as a testing ground – test different pain points, messages, formats, and styles, on both personal accounts and your company page, and make note of what’s attracting meaningful DMs and high-quality leads.
Once your posts have received a solid amount of engagement, you can boost them to your ICP and turn them into evergreen assets that will continue to generate inbound leads with minimal effort.
By maximizing distribution via paid, you’ll improve your organic performance, and by testing new concepts via organic social, you’ll improve the ROI on your paid media efforts.
Posts from thought leaders will consistently outperform ads from company pages. This is partially due to a mindset shift – when we post from our personal pages our reputation is on the line, so we try to be less promotional and more helpful.
That being said, even if you promote the same exact post from a company page vs a thought leader’s page, the thought leader ad will typically perform better – this confirms that the saying is true: people want to buy from people, not companies.
By running thought leader ads, you can expect to see:
1. Increased engagements, which will allow you to build your remarketing audiences more quickly
2. An increase in LinkedIn DMs from qualified prospects
3. A spike in organic search traffic
4. An incremental lift in conversions (my agency saw a 15-20% increase)
Pro tip: Experiment with different types of thought leader ads (videos, images, text, custom graphics) and double down on whatever works best.
LinkedIn Ads start running on UTC time (8 p.m. EST), which means that a lot of companies are spending their money at nighttime and run out of budget by 5 or 6 a.m. – this leads to poor performance, as prospects are typically not as receptive to ads at these hours.
With ad scheduling, you can ensure that your ads are showing up at the right times.
For my agency, I like to run ads from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. EST, pause in the afternoons, and restart in the evenings. For you, this schedule might look a bit different, based on when your ICP is most active.
In addition to scheduling, it can also be interesting to experiment with ad rotation, especially if you’re a smaller company with limited budget.
For example, you could run 3 campaigns on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and 3 different campaigns on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Typically, to run 6 campaigns you’d need a budget of at least $60/day (due to LinkedIn’s $10/day per campaign minimum), but with ad rotation, you’d only need $30/day – in other words, your budget would go a longer way and you’d be able to reach more audiences.
Ad scheduling and rotation may not be necessary if you have a massive budget and are targeting a broad audience, but it can make a huge difference if you’re spending under $30K/month and want to make the most of your budget.
To get started with ad scheduling and ad rotation, you can use DemandSense, a tool that we developed at my agency.
If you’re experimenting with LinkedIn organic, paid, and thought leader ads, it’s a great idea to connect with your LinkedIn profile visitors to maximize the impact of your efforts.
Here’s exactly how you can do this:1. Set up a filter in LinkedIn Sales Navigator for people who have visited your profile, aren’t connected with you (2nd or 3rd degree connections), and fit your ICP criteria (right company size + seniority level)
2. Send connection requests to these people on a weekly basis – in my experience, it’s best to send blank connection requests to avoid coming across as a salesperson
3. Once your connection request has been accepted, send a simple intro message such as: Hey X, saw you checked out my profile and thought it would be good to connect. If you ever have any questions about LinkedIn Ads or want to talk about B2B marketing, let me know. Here's the link to some resources that people commonly ask me for: [insert valuable link]
With this approach, I typically see about a 60% acceptance rate, and I always get a lot of follow up questions, such as: Do you work for X company? Have you experienced X problem?
Plus, a lot of prospects end up visiting my company website, which means that I can stay in front of them for a longer period of time, since they get pulled into my LinkedIn remarketing audience.
Pro tip: You can start by doing this process manually with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but you can also automate and simplify the process by using a tool like PhantomBuster.
Even if you’re doing everything right on LinkedIn – communicating with sales, using video, experimenting with organic social, amplifying your thought leadership, etc. – don’t expect to see tons of demos and opportunities right away.
Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and email are very transactional channels, but LinkedIn Ads are more similar to SEO – it takes time to see results but your efforts will pay dividends down the road.
Feel free to reach out with any questions about LinkedIn Ads or paid media.
Most B2B SaaS companies have a two-dimensional approach to paid media: prospecting campaigns to generate awareness, remarketing campaigns to capture demand.
This isn't necessarily wrong, but there are so many more possibilities, such as moving existing open deals faster to close – this is called pipeline acceleration.
As a Demand Marketing Manager at Unmuted, I've helped my B2B SaaS clients drive revenue through pipeline acceleration.
Here are my 10 tips on how to make this playbook work for you 👇
Before running any pipeline acceleration campaigns, make sure your executive team understands that the goal is NOT to drive new opportunities, but to increase the rate (and speed) at which open opportunities turn into revenue.
This might seem basic, but without this alignment, your campaigns may be considered a failure and paused prematurely, even if they’re extremely successful.
Once you have buy-in from internal stakeholders, I recommend getting started with LinkedIn Ads.
For your targeting, you can create a dynamic list of open opportunities in HubSpot and connect it to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. And if you’re using another CRM, such as Salesforce, you can send your open opportunities to LinkedIn Campaign Manager via Zapier.
On top of this company list of open opportunities, you’ll want to layer on job titles within your DMU (decision-making unit) – these are all the people that may be involved in sales conversations.
For example, if you’re selling an attribution tool, you might want to reach RevOps, Marketing, Sales, and Business Development job titles at your target accounts.
Marketing job titles (VP of Marketing, Head of Demand Gen, Chief Marketing Officer) will likely push the deal forward, but other departments will need to sign off in order for a purchase to be made. By building trust within all these key departments, you’ll increase the likelihood of a deal moving over the finish line.
Pro tip: If you don’t have a massive list of open opportunities, you may not be able to layer on job titles, as your audience size will be too small. If you run into this issue, try using job function targeting instead.
If you have a large enough audience size to do so, consider creating different campaigns for each persona within your DMU (decision-making unit). For example:
Campaign 1: Open opportunity companies + Marketing job titles
Campaign 2: Open opportunity companies + Finance job titles
Campaign 3: Open opportunity companies + Sales job titles
By separating these different personas into different campaigns, you can create messaging that’s more relevant to each department – marketing ads could focus on measurement, finance ads could focus on revenue, sales ads could focus on closing more deals, etc.
With more tailored messaging, your ads are more likely to resonate and leave an impression on different departments.
Once your campaigns are live, you need a way to measure (and prove) that they’re working.
Here’s how I recommend doing it:
1. When a deal closes, go to the Companies tab in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and see how many impressions (and engagements) the Closed Won company received. If you see a lot of impressions and engagements, it’s safe to assume that your ads played a role in the eventual conversion.
2. To take things up a level, consider using a tool like Fibbler, which sends ad impressions on a company level back into HubSpot – this will allow both your marketing and sales team to see how many ads companies saw before making a purchase.
3. If you have a larger budget, consider investing in a tool like Dreamdata or HockeyStack, which will provide more details on the incremental lift driven by your pipeline acceleration campaigns.
4. For a true A/B test, manually split your open opportunities into two different groups, and expose only one of them to the pipeline acceleration ads. Are the exposed companies closing faster and at a higher rate?
5. To further understand the impact of your campaigns, ask the POC of your new customers if they happened to see your ads, and if those ads influenced their decision in any capacity.
This is simple, but extremely important: Don’t forget to exclude new customers from your pipeline acceleration campaigns.
If your customers continue seeing ads from your company during their onboarding phase, you may end up annoying them, in addition to throwing money down the drain.
Making these exclusions is straightforward: when a company transitions from opportunity to closed won in HubSpot, they should be added to a new dynamic list of customers, which can be connected to LinkedIn Campaign Manager and added as an exclusion list in your pipeline acceleration campaigns.
If you’re using a different CRM, the process is similar, you’ll just have to make the connection through Zapier instead.
Once this playbook is working well for pipeline acceleration, you can apply it (with a few modifications) to upsells and cross-sells.
For example, if you launch a new product, you could target a list of all your existing customers highlighting its capabilities, and outlining how it will enhance their existing workflows. Check out an example from ZoomInfo below:
The possibilities are endless once you understand the fundamentals of LinkedIn’s targeting – any lifecycle stage can be targeted with relevant content and offers.
Once LinkedIn Ads are working well for you, consider adding other channels and strategies into the mix to create a sense of omnipresence.
For example, maybe you could test Meta or Reddit retargeting ads (depending on where your audience spends the most time).
It’s also a great idea to leverage LinkedIn organic, to expand your reach beyond paid ads.
Your Head of Sales, Chief Commercial Officer, members of your marketing team, and other employees who are consistently posting on LinkedIn can connect with people within the DMU (Decision-making unit) at your open opportunity companies – this way, they’ll be seeing content from your organization constantly, and you’ll be top of mind throughout the entire sales process.
To maximize the impact of your ads, you ideally want your team to be posting relevant content on LinkedIn, and you can take things to the next level by running thought leader ads, boosting the top performing posts from your team members to your list of open opportunities.
For example, if your Head of Sales makes a post related to the capabilities of your product and it goes viral, you can put some ad spend behind this post, targeting all your open opps – this will serve as great social proof, reassuring members of the DMU that working with your company is the right decision.
The added benefit of thought leader ads is that they don’t look like ads at all, and typically drive more interest and engagement than standard company ads.
Here’s a good example from Sendoso:
To understand how deals are progressing, take a look at the signals that are available to you.
Is a specific company seeing your ads a lot? Are they engaging frequently? Are they going a step further and visiting your website? (you can easily see this using a tool like Warmly, LeadInfo, or Leadfeeder)
If you’re in the US and have access to person-level identification tools, you can even see some of the people that are visiting your site. For example, if the CFO, CMO, and CTO are all visiting your website, you can infer that the deal is progressing rapidly and chances of a purchase are high.
Keep a close eye on closed lost deals and look for recurring patterns.
Are you consistently losing on pricing, timing, or to a specific competitor?
This is great intel for messaging in future pipeline acceleration campaigns – if you can get ahead of potential objections, the likelihood of an opportunity closing is significantly greater.
For example, let’s say you’re reviewing a year of data and notice that you lost most of your deals to a specific competitor.
In your future pipeline acceleration campaigns, you might want to run competitive ads, highlighting the benefits of choosing your product. This might help prospects who are thinking of working with your competitor choose to work with your company instead.
Here’s a great example from Cognism:
Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions about pipeline acceleration, paid media strategy, or B2B marketing.
