Ep 56: Google Ads Account Structures for B2B and SaaS

Are you a B2B company running Google Ads? If so, this episode is just for you.

Hey there everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to another episode of Marketing in 10, where we talk about each week a specific digital marketing tactic or strategy.

So this week, we're actually going to be talking about B2B and running Google Ads for B2B companies, so business to business companies. B2B and SaaS companies, SaaS is software as a service company, so software companies, have very different goals from their Google Ads campaigns than your typical B2C or consumer advertiser, so B2B campaigns are all about generating leads, trials, or something like that. And since these are very different goals, they're very different approaches to how you'll structure your Google Ads account to account for that.

So today I'm going to list the types of campaigns that you'll want to make sure that you have in your Google Ads account. Okay, starting off, the very first thing, everybody already knows that I'm a big fan of branded search campaigns and with B2B that's no exception. You'll probably want to go back and listen to Episode 17 of Marketing in 10 to hear why I think branded search campaign is very important for everybody. So definitely take a look at that, so the first thing you want to make sure is you have the branded campaign.

Next, you'll want to make sure that you have a regular search campaign that's going to be comprised of the keywords that you'll use to describe your service. So this is what most people think about when they think about Google Ads and keyword campaigns. That's all going to go together in this one singular search campaign. So you'll want to have a few different ad groups to organize those keywords into, and this is the campaign that will bring people who have never seen your brand before kind of into your fold or into your funnel.

I also recommend creating a campaign with dynamic ad groups. I call these dynamic search ads or DSA campaigns and I have a very specific use for these things. So I like to use these to fill in any gaps in your keyword strategy. Kind of the way that they work, at least the way that I implement them, is that you choose a page to target and I typically tell everybody to start with your homepage and then let the machine learning kind of take over. That machine learning is going to look through everything on that page and all the subpages and learn what products or services that you offer. Then it automatically generates ads and determines when to show those ads and to who to show them to. This DSA campaign is kind of like a fill in the gaps kind of thing. So it should be a smaller budget, but something that's a type of campaign that I'm seeing become increasingly useful as Google's machine learning continues to evolve and improve.

If you have some quality video assets, then you'll definitely want to create YouTube campaigns as well. YouTube campaigns are great for remarketing. So if you have someone hit your site, either through a search ad, organic search, social media, whatever, you can show them YouTube videos to keep your brand top of mind.

You can also use YouTube campaigns for cold targeting, if you can do a good job of finding channels and topics and interests for your ideal customer. This isn't always possible or reasonable, especially for business to business accounts, and it's a little bit tougher for newer advertisers. So I kind of recommend that as you get a little bit more experience.

So to recap, you're going to have a branded search campaign and a general search campaign. You'll have that dynamic search ads campaign that's going to be the fill in the gaps campaign and you have a YouTube campaign for remarketing. If for some reason you don't have any video assets, then you'll want to create some banner ads or responsive display ads and use those as your remarketing campaigns. You definitely want to be remarketing to any audiences in a B2B campaign because it's important to keep your brand top of mind. So that's it. It's a great basic campaign structure that works for any B2B or SaaS company.

If your company doesn't really fit into this structure, I'd love to hear about it. So DM me on social at jimlast, that's J-I-M-L-A-S-T.

'll have show notes and a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/56 and as always I would love it if you take a couple of minutes to rate and review the podcast. That helps me grow the audience and help more people.

As a thank you for listening, I've created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google Ads accounts in 30 minutes a week. This is the exact process that I teach all of my coaching students and includes everything you need to be able to run a profitable ad account for yourself. You can download this for free at jimlastinger.com/guide. That's jimlastinger.com/guide.

That's all for this week's episode. I'll be back soon with another episode of Marketing in 10. Until then, take care and have a great day.