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5 common mistakes made by B2B paid search novices

Looking to incorporate paid search into your B2B marketing mix? Columnist Pauline Jakober provides some advice for starting off on the right foot.

Pauline Jakober on July 11, 2017 at 3:31 pm

Here’s a common scenario in the B2B marketing space:

You’re a member of your B2B company’s marketing team. As part of that team, you’ve become accomplished in a variety of marketing channels, including email marketing, content marketing, organic search, trade shows and so forth.

But your team hasn’t yet taken the company into the paid search marketing channel. And as the most “digital-savvy” member of the group, you’ve been tapped to head the initiative. You’re excited to take on this responsibility, but you’re also nervous.

Before you start, you should know that when it comes to PPC, B2B marketers tend to trip up in certain specific areas. To give you a leg up, I’m going to describe five common mistakes that B2B paid search novices tend to make and how you can avoid them. Good luck!

Mistake #1: Rushing to launch

Rushing to launch is a common mistake — and an understandable one. When your company has a big promotion or event on the horizon, you want to have your PPC campaigns in place to support it.

This is something I’ve seen many times with our clients. They will set a deadline for launch and insist on sticking to it, even if all campaign elements aren’t in place.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for having deadlines. But sometimes a premature launch can do more harm than good.

Most often, when campaigns are launched prematurely, the missing elements are:

Landing pages
Conversion tracking
Integration with other marketing channels

Without custom landing pages in place, your conversion rates are likely to be lower. Sometimes much lower. And this can lead to questions about the viability of your PPC program.

Without conversion tracking, it’s impossible to know exactly how well (or poorly) your campaigns are performing. And it’s hard to justify any marketing program when you don’t have numbers to back it up.

Failure to integrate with other marketing channels can lead to lost opportunities. And even worse, you might end up pillaging your efforts in other channels.

Even if you work with a PPC agency, your marketing and web development teams will still need to take some responsibility for these elements. Yes, we can set up your accounts. We can even select your keywords, write your ad messaging and run them by you for approval.

But some elements — especially post-click elements — require your involvement.

If the delay in implementing these elements is just a couple of days, then that’s usually not a big deal. But anything longer is worrying.

Mistake #2: Making decisions before the data is in

One of the great things about PPC is the ability to make tweaks and changes on the fly with little effort. Few other marketing channels offer this much flexibility.

But this flexibility is also a curse. Sometimes, it’s hard to be patient and wait for more data to accumulate before deciding to change campaign settings and elements.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Pauline Jakober

Pauline Jakober is CEO of Group Twenty Seven, a boutique online advertising agency specializing in the Google AdWords and Bing Ads networks. As a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Jakober and her team practice cutting edge paid search strategy and management for clients across many industries.