4 Tricks To Ensure You Get Quality Leads on AdWords

Only 1 out of 10 marketers can say their B2B lead generation efforts are highly efficient and effective, resulting in quality leads. Are you part of that 10%? If not, keep reading, and we’ll help you get your paid search efforts up to the latest Google AdWords benchmarks and start producing better results.  

Sculpt Your Campaigns by Using Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords that you tell Google AdWords to exclude from your search results. While you might target “b2b marketing,” excluding “jobs” from your campaigns means you won’t get searchers looking for “b2b marketing jobs” clicking through and wasting your spend. You can add negative keywords as broad, phrase, or exact matches. You can set the negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

Using negative keywords has proven to be one of the most important strategies you can employ to improve your campaign and lead quality. Monitor the search queries to see how search engine users are finding your ads. Add irrelevant queries as negative keywords. After all, paying for something you don’t want once is bad enough. Why do it again?

Adding negatives is particularly crucial if you’re bidding on broad match keywords. Broad match keywords have the tendency to display for a lot of search queries that are not very relevant to your target keywords.

Quality Score

Quality score, quality score, quality score. This is one of the most important KPIs for Google AdWords.

Google defines quality score as “an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.” It’s a metric that is too often overlooked. It takes a lot of extra work to perfect your ad copy and landing pages to achieve a high quality score, which is one of the reasons some marketers might ignore the metric.

The first step in having a good quality score is making sure your ad copy is relevant to your keywords and your landing page. It sounds simple, but often the keywords marketers target and the keywords in their ad copy and landing pages don’t match. It’s a Google Best Practice to try and include one of your target keywords in the headline and in the description.

It’s crucial that the ad is telling searchers exactly what they can expect when they click on the landing page. Google does not want searchers to be surprised when they click on an ad. This also helps qualify leads before they actually click.

If you have an enterprise product that is exclusively used by companies with 100+ employees, you’ll want to phrase your ad copy to reflect this to make sure you’re getting quality leads. This means unqualified leads are more likely to not click on your ad or convert, because they recognize your product is not for them.

Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA)

Companies are doing all they can to get high quality traffic to their site. An often overlooked strategy to achieve this is Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA). The main benefit of this strategy is that it gives you the ability to customize your search ads for people who have previously visited your website. To undertake this strategy, you must first have an active remarketing list on your site.

There are two ways to implement this strategy.

RLSA strategy No. 1

The first is to create separate (but identical) search campaigns. In the duplicated campaign, you can set it to exclusively target and bid on the remarketing list. Some marketers set it up this way so they can customize the customer’s journey by creating specific ads, landing pages, and deals they want these returning visitors to experience. The other method is adding and targeting the remarketing list directly to your current campaigns. We’ll discuss this method more in a bit, because not everyone has a large enough remarketing list size to make the first option a reasonable choice.   

First go to the Audiences tab and select the red “+Targeting” button. From there, select Interests & Remarketing. From the dropdown menu, select Remarketing Lists. Here you can view all of your remarketing lists. You can make your targeting as narrow as you want. However, we recommend targeting a list similar to “All Site Visitors”.

You want to use a list that has the highest number of previous site visitors to get the most out of this campaign. If you’re using the duplicate campaign method, you’ll want to make sure you select “Target and Bid.” If you’re just adding the remarketing list to your normal search campaign, pick “Bid Only”.

Using Remarketing List for Search Ads is a growing trend across Google AdWords. In the latest AdWords Benchmarks, we saw that RLSA now account for 23% of all search clicks. This number has been steadily growing since AdWords first introduced this ability. This just shows the importance of RLSA, and the huge opportunity that it offers to generate quality leads.

RLSA strategy No. 2

Another way to leverage a remarketing list to your advantage is to use it to create a similar audience. A similar audience list is a custom list that AdWords creates. They use your remarketing list and search for potential customers that have similar search behavior around the time that they first visited your site. Your remarketing list must have a minimum of 1,000 cookied users with enough similarity in user behavior to create a similar audience. Your similar audience will automatically be updated as a user’s search behavior evolves.

Setting up a similar audience only takes a few clicks. First go into the targeting page like you are setting up a remarketing list. On the drop down, select Similar to Remarketing Lists.

Once you click into the “Similar to remarketing list” section, you will see all of the similar lists that Google has created for your account. Depending on how many remarketing lists you have, you might have a lot of similar audience options. The more focused your remarketing list is, the more narrow your similar audience will be. A similar audience that is based off all site visitors will not be as focused as a similar audience based off all converters.

Conclusion

Isn’t it time you made your b2b lead generation efforts more effective and efficient? These strategies will help you generate more quality leads, but that’s not enough. The next step is making sure that you convert these leads into new business. Check out our B2B appointment setting tips to put you ahead of the curve and start turning your leads into new business.