As technology advances, so do the strategies and tactics used by businesses to reach their target audiences. One such strategy is B2B pay-per-click advertising, which has become increasingly popular among B2B brands in recent years due to its ability to deliver targeted leads quickly and cost effectively.
Those unfamiliar with PPC, it is an online advertising model where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on their ad or takes a desired action such as signing up for an email list or making a purchase. This makes it ideal for B2B marketers looking to get the most out of their budget while still reaching potential customers in a highly targeted way.
Many B2B and eCommerce brands choose Google Ads as their major paid media channel. Google Ads PPC provides an immediate way to reach leads the moment they are searching for products or services like yours on Google.
One of the major benefits of using Google services is the ability to use advanced analytics tools and features. Analytics improve every year to help businesses reach a wider audience and get more hits. How will the analytic 4 era affect the future of marketing?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) combines data from all digital marketing channels with AI-powered insights and machine learning algorithms to analyze user behavior. With this new technology businesses will have more accurate targeting and better insights into customer intent.
This means that marketers can optimize their PPC campaigns for higher conversions and ROI even faster than before.
The advancements with GA4 provide a better customer experience, as it helps to understand customer needs and preferences. The goal of the new GA4 system is to help marketers make educated decisions on how to reach their target audiences more efficiently and cost effectively.
With this technology, businesses can build stronger relationships with customers and provide relevant content that engages them in the long-term.
To take full advantage of Google Analytics 4, businesses need to migrate from their existing analytics tool. It’s important to plan ahead and think strategically about the migration process, including budgeting for resources and managing data correctly throughout the tran
In this article, we will explore the latest trends and best practices related to PPC analysis and Google Ads campaigns specifically designed for B2B brands. We’ll discuss how you can leverage these powerful tools to generate more leads, increase conversions rates and maximize ROI from your efforts – all while staying ahead of your competition!
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
PPC Google ads are a type of paid search advertising. In PPC advertising, the company pays for each click or impression on an ad. There are many different PPC marketing channels, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, to meet different conversion goals. Using a PPC management service can help you identify the most efficient combination of PPC analysis tools to prevent you from wasting your budget and time.
PPC campaigns have the following benefits:
Google has 4.8 billion daily content interactions. Google Ads is a PPC platform that drives customers with high conversion intention to your site when they are searching for related products and services. It is a bottom-funnel marketing tool that improves PPC B2B lead generation.
The Google Ads service shares appropriately timed ads with your desired target audience. Businesses are featured through ads on the search engine results page (SERPs) the moment customers type in their search terms. Your audience sees your ads when they need your product most. With a good design PPC landing page, Google Ads is the first brick in the foundation of your demand generation marketing campaign.
GA4 is a free tool provided by Google to help website runners understand their website performance and audience persona. It can show which pages are doing well ad-wise, and which are not, the number of site visitors, ad revenue, goal conversion and more analytic metrics to help you make the right call for your marketing plan. You can even filter your optimisation changes and ads to show only in the most profitable regions to get a better understanding of your target audience and generate more revenue.
Your marketing team or PPC agency adjusts the PPC campaign and improves website traffic to achieve the best conversion results. GA4 helps you track your progress towards your marketing goals and gives you an awareness of the value of the campaign you are running. Overall, it is a very helpful digital marketing tool that all brands should take advantage of.
More advantages of using GA4 in your marketing campaign are as follows:
Analytics are necessary for businesses to improve their marketing, as well as other processes. Without data, it is impossible to understand what’s working and what isn’t. GA4 provides the information you need to make necessary changes to your marketing strategy.
GA4 allows businesses to see the interactions that users have with their website before, during and after conversion. This information is important because it can help businesses optimise their marketing campaigns and improve their overall marketing strategy. It can also help businesses understand what factors influenced a user to convert, which can be useful in future marketing efforts.
GA4 focuses on user engagement and user-centric features rather than only on traffic. This is important because it allows businesses to see how users interact with their website and what they do after they leave the site. It can also help businesses understand what factors influence a user to stay on a website or leave it. By focusing on user-centric features, companies can improve their analytics, which leads to more customers and subsequently more profit.
Google has added new prediction features to show your products and services to the people that will find them most useful or helpful. The user-centric features mentioned above assist with this because you cannot attract the right people if you do not know what they need. Knowing the revenue that a company could get from a group of people helps them decide who to focus on.
With the help of Google Tag Manager, you can customise different types of events to track different actions audiences made while visiting your website. For instance, you can create events to track different scroll depths to have a better picture of how audiences interact with your content, rather than just a simple number. The better you understand your users, the more you can design goals that actually matter to them, which improves your chances of closing a deal.
GA4 provides better graphs and other visual aids to help marketing professionals piece together and show off their data more efficiently. Popular existing graphs are improved. There are also templates for all sorts of visual aids to help companies report their data in a format that anyone can grasp.
Data parameters allow marketing professionals to filter the data from their work to see precisely what they want to track from their customer base. GA4 has more parameters than most analytics software. Every event from a user can be explored in depth with up to 25 different parameters. With this many specifics, it is easy to plan a precise marketing strategy.
These are some of the benefits of using GA4. The size of Google’s user base and its continually optimising system prove that Google's service is the strongest option on the market, and GA4 is no exception.
Google is known for the consistent updates it makes to its suite of products. A series of updates are introduced to make data analysis more accurate, customised and approachable. Here are some of the key features of GA4 that change how you optimise your campaigns.
The most significant advantage GA4 offers is its ability to track and pool data from different devices. With the help of User ID, metrics show a comprehensive view of your customers as they move from one device to another.
This feature is significant because most people do not use only one device to access the internet. In fact, studies show that people use multiple devices every day, creating much more complicated network touchpoints.
This change in user habits also affects online-offline integration. Potential clients might visit their local store, find the product they want and search for cheaper options or online comments about the product on their phone and vice versa. Thus, making sure you can track every movement of your clients across devices becomes more and more important.
As well as pooling data from different devices, GA4 also collects data from different mediums, including websites, apps and ads. Roll-up reporting helps you collect, organise and analyse from multiple digital sources at the same time. This is necessary because it helps companies better understand their total performance. The accuracy of roll-up reporting is improved as well.
With GA4, companies can better track users across all devices which allows them to discover how they can improve the user experience, address cross-device purchase issues (starting on the phone, continuing on a laptop, etc.) and understand how they can make their marketing campaigns better.
The new “Debug View” feature in GA4 allows companies to set up data collection, troubleshoot issues as they arise and understand users' behaviour as they explore your website or app. With the correct settings, you can see real-time data about the website activities down to seconds.
The “User Explorer” report on GA4 allows website owners to see data for individual users and delete a user's data if necessary. With Universal Analytics, you could only erase data within a certain time frame; this upgrade offers users more privacy options.
BigQuery is a cloud data warehouse that enables you to run quick queries of large datasets. You can export all your raw events from GA4 properties to BigQuery and then use SQL-like syntax to query that data. Also in BigQuery, you have the option to export your data to external storage or import external data for modification with your analytics data. This makes it easier to integrate data from GA4 with data from external sources.
By utilising GA4's machine-learning algorithms on your given dataset, you can predict and observe future user behaviour on your website. With predictive metrics like these, you can identify which users are more likely to take an action that results in a purchase or conversion and make your PPC campaign more cost-effective.
The types of predictive analysis currently supported by GA4 are:
The addition of these key features demonstrates Google’s commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. There would be no need to release new versions of software if the new ones did not improve on the foundations that were built before them.
It’s no surprise that Google Analytics has come quite a way since the introduction of Universal Analytics. This section will explore the most notable differences between GA4 and Universal Analytics.
Universal Analytics uses a session-based data model while GA4 uses a more flexible event-based data model. Sessions are groups of user data that occur within the same given time period. User data such as page views are tracked within each session.
On the other hand, in the event-based model with GA4, user data is stored individually as events. Anything from a page click to purchase is considered an event, Events are specific and add context to actions like the price of a purchase or a user’s location.
All data is now recorded as events, which makes it easier for users to measure and understand. Simpler data means that analysts need less time to interpret it. Within GA4, there are "Automatically Collected Events", "Enhanced Measurement Events", "Recommended Events" and "Custom Events".
Universal Analytics was designed to be a comprehensive or well-built collection of standard reports, while GA4 is optimised for custom and exported data. Both versions of this software also differ in how they handle acquisition reporting. Acquisition reporting tracks how various forms of customer traffic are doing on the website, for example, comparing how email and organic searching through a search engine fare when it comes to driving purchases and other types of conversions. Acquisition reporting gives companies the tools they need to make budgeting decisions, GA4 provides an acquisition overview, user acquisition and traffic acquisition.
If other data formats are necessary, the existing data can be exported to another application. Universal Analytics provides acquisition data in overview, all traffic, treemaps, source/medium and referrals. Again, the newer instalment is much more simplified.
In GA4, there are 3 standard types of data metrics:
None of these metrics can be accessed in Universal Analytics. The closest version of data in Universal Analytics is the bounce rate. Session duration and the number of pages per session are tried and true metrics. The reason why there are different metrics is that each of these software runs on a different data model.
Segments make it possible for you to look at small parts of the data collected to better understand the consumer base. They function the same way in both versions and have the same 3 categories: Event Segments, Session Segments and User Segments. In GA4, however, they are located under the "Explorations tab".
Universal Analytics has a hit limit of 10 million per month. On the other hand, GA4 has a limit of 500 events per month that can be captured since the model is event-based.
Although Universal Analytics and GA4 are both made by Google to help users analyse data, there are some significant differences between the two. The software updates to improve it and make it more user-friendly.
With so many features that help users get the most out of data, GA4 is the future of digital marketing and the keystone for Google Ads PPC. GA4 tracks cross-device activity, which makes it simple to follow the user journey. There are also new funnel reports, pathing reports, real-time reports and standard reports to help advertisers better examine the data.
GA4 is user actions-focused, which is different from the website activity-focused Universal Analytics. The ability to track a user across all of their devices is revolutionary. GA4 improves debugging, audience tracking, automatic measurements of metrics and predictive analytics that step into another level of data processing/analysing.
The GA4 release is still recent, so some features from Universal Analytics haven’t been added yet. However, users can expect these features to be developed in the near future. The software is still being improved as we speak and new features are on the way to make digital marketing even easier for advertisers.
GA4 is designed to help you run the best PPC campaigns. These are some of the features that can make your job easier and run successful campaigns.
Constantly updating the negative keywords on Google Ads is crucial for running successful PPC campaigns. The list helps you focus and concentrate your marketing efforts on your target audience, making sure to convert the customers at the bottom of the sales funnel. GA4 shows what search queries have not generated any revenue and helps you eliminate irrelevant keywords.
PPC landing pages greatly determine your conversion rate. As the first page that your potential clients see after clicking on the ads, it plays an important role in delivering the message, creating credibility and guiding customers further down the sales funnel. In GA4, you can examine what PPC landing pages are doing poorly with each search query and readjust your campaign strategies or design.
GA4 provides advanced reporting that includes all of the features of Universal Analytics and more for better PPC reports. The reporting is designed to give users a complete picture of what’s going on with their website. This allows for deep analysis so you can improve your marketing strategies and ad campaigns. The new features of GA4 to assist you include engine filters, custom reports, natural keywords and site searches.
Using these features, you can optimise your campaigns to feature the most profitable resources which help them be more successful.
Although the release of GA4 is months away, there are some things you can do now to prepare yourself for the new era. For example, install the beta version to start gathering data, so that you have something to work with next year and are ready for the advanced PPC analysis and PPC reports.
Once GA4 launches, the goals you created in Universal Analytics will be gone, so make sure you save them and convert them into events in the new events-based system. Also, keep Universal Analytics in case you need to access data later. Note that the interface will change and that it may take longer to find your favourite features at first.
Powerful mobile phones and the personalised customer experience are changing modern marketing. As a PPC-focused agency, these are 5 of the biggest changes we’re observing in the digital marketing world.
With the release of GA4, we’re seeing a large shift in how marketing will be done through automation by machines. By using machine learning, GA4 is constantly collecting data and making predictions to help you better understand your target market and how to reach them. This will free up a lot of time for PPC advertising so marketers can focus on bigger projects and analyses.
One example is the new campaign type released by Google Ads, Performance Max. This new campaign is powered by machine learning and is designed to automatically find the best-performing ad elements and deliver them to your target market.
Another feature of Performance Max is automated bidding and targeting. It helps you find the best audience for your products and generate revenue efficiently. There are more and more Performance Max examples that show its potential for paid ad campaigns. If you are a brand looking for a new market and revenue boost, talk to your PPC management agency to understand your options.
From the new features introduced by GA4, we can see that the future of data analysis is more people-based and user journey-focused. GA4's cross-device functionality assists by following users from the first click to the final purchase. Marketers need to bring in a linear mindset that considers the whole customer journey while planning their marketing campaign.
Smartphones are everywhere and used for various purposes. The average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone every day. This number has been increasing over the years as our dependency on mobile devices grows. To reach your target market, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and provides a good user experience.
Your website needs to be designed in a way that is easy to navigate on a small screen. The user should be able to find the information they are looking for without any difficulty. If your website is not optimised for mobile, you will lose potential customers and revenue.
Cookies help marketers by tracking user data they can use for analytics. In the future, cookies will not be able to be used if IOS users enable mail privacy protection and hide their email, which prevents users from being tracked thanks to automatic burner emails and more. This will lead to more bounces for marketers.
Companies can prepare for the change by making sure to optimise their emails to make it past privacy settings. They also need to focus on building first-party data and leveraging platforms like GA4 to avoid being too reliant on cookies.
Search intent is the key to every customer's actions. It is also a major index for the search engine to rank a relevant website while people search for relevant keywords. As a marketer, if you understand the needs and wants of your target customers, you can create a marketing strategy that best suits them. In the future of digital marketing, we can confidently say that how to build a marketing campaign based on customers' search intent will be the main focus.
The four types of search intent are informational, navigational, transactional and commercial intent.
Informational: The user is looking for information on a topic
Navigational: The user is looking for a specific website
Transactional: The user wants to buy something
Commercial investigation: The user is comparison shopping or looking for deals
For paid search campaigns, the two that matter the most are transactional intent and commercial intent because customers who search with these two intents are located at the bottom of the sales funnel and are more likely to convert.
To find the best PPC agency for you, you need to consider your needs and goals, whether you want to use a local or international firm, whether the agency is doing its own PPC marketing, and many other aspects. To better help you understand the major criteria, we conclude the process in 12 steps:
Step #1: Identify your needs, goals and desired outcomes
Step #2: Choose a local or international firm
Step #3: Confirm the agency is doing PPC for themselves
Step #4: Verify social proof and industry know-how
Step #5: Critique the agency's website design, ad copy and user experience
Step #6: Choose between a specialised PPC agency or a full-service digital marketing agency
Step #7: Verify case studies, industry experience and expertise
Step #8: Confirm the agency's qualifications
Step #9: Digital strategy, onboarding and long-term vision
Step #10: Find out if the agency's culture is a good fit
Step #11: Communication, pricing and transparency
Step #12: Conversion tracking, reporting and analytics
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
