Your B2B PPC Strategy Isn’t Working - Let’s Fix It

Presented at PPC.London in September 2025

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Most B2B PPC strategies don’t fail because of the market or the platforms themselves, they fail because they’re built on outdated audience personas and ‘best practices’ which are quietly sabotaging their success.

This session is about stepping back, fixing the fundamentals and solidifying the role of PPC in the modern B2B marketing strategy.

By moving away from ineffective strategies and metrics better suited to B2C, Sophie’s talk gives you a clearer understanding of how to approach B2B audiences properly, along with practical changes you can implement to improve performance and reporting.

Key takeaways:

- Rethinking how to approach the B2B audience.
- Taking your optimisation and growth strategy beyond Impressions and Clicks.
- Technical tweaks to improve performance and reporting.

Transcript

1. Your B2B PPC Strategy Isn’t Working – Let’s Fix It Sophie Logan
2. A short story.
3. PPC for B2B is hard.
4. The end.
5. Tactical.
6. Tactical. Efficient.
7. Tactical. Efficient. Practical.
8. A powerful driver of demand, pipeline, and measurable business results.
9. Where strategies go wrong…
10. Focusing on quantity rather than quality.
11. Why I’m okay with a 0.87% Conversion Rate.
12. 5.8% Conversion Rate. $10.12 CPA. Clients looking at their dashboards
13. 0.5% of leads became Opportunities. -$21,812 ROI after 6 months. Clients after reading my findings
14. What can we do?
15. CRM integration.
16. CRM integration.
17. Actions beyond form submissions.
18. Beyond form submissions. Create Conversion actions for all CRM lifecycle stages, so you can see the quality of your leads. Just be sure to make them Secondary.
19. Beyond form submissions. Add this into your monthly reporting. And educate your stakeholders on what it all means.
20. Enhanced Conversions.
21. Enhanced Conversions. Matches your first-party data to recover unaccounted for Conversions and feed more data to platform.
22. Remember: A form submissions does not equal PPC success.
23. Where strategies go wrong…
24. Only using PPC at the bottom of the funnel.
25. PPC for B2B isn’t just for capturing demand.
26. What can we do?
27. Brand awareness.
28. Brand awareness. • Subtle • Educational and insightful • ‘Giving’
29. Brand awareness. • Free & ungated • No strings • Build lists Example - Kiuwan
30. Brand awareness. Demand generation.
31. Demand generation. • Intro the product/service • Address pain points and offer their solution
32. Demand gen. • Lookalike • Solution based • Trust Example – Demandbase
33. Brand awareness. Demand generation. Demand capture.
34. Demand capture. • Why us? • Stronger CTAs • Now
35. Demand capture. • Copy is crucial • Use assets • OPTIMISE! Example - Beauhurst
36. But wait. There’s more!
37. Sales support.
38. Sales support. • Target active leads • Build trust • Persuasives
39. Sales support. Customer retention.
40. Customer retention. • Encourage usage/involvement • User guides, feature announcements, webinars…
41. Remember: PPC can play a pivotal role in all stages of the marketing journey.
42. Where strategies go wrong…
43. Expecting PPC platforms to automatically be B2B friendly.
44. With a few tweaks they can be better.
45. Common B2B PPC challenges.
46. Low Conversion volumes.
47. Long sales cycles.
48. High CPCs.
49. Niche product / service
50. What can we do?
51. Micro Conversions. An action which takes place in the lead up to an actual (Macro) Conversion.
54. Segment – Conversions – Conversion Actions
55. Let go of last-click. Embrace data-driven attribution.
57. Check your Conversion window. 30 days is not a realistic Conversion window for many B2B accounts.
58. For example...
59. If it takes 43 days to convert, and you're using a 30 day window for a 'new customer' Conversion, your campaign gets nothing.
61. 90+ day Conversion lag?
62. External tools. Tools such a Dreamdata can offer longer historical lookback windows and thorough multi-channel attribution.
63. Remember: Make sure you're not under selling your work due to ineffective settings.
64. Summary.
65. Conversion quality is queen. Report on the quality of Conv. Radical honesty is hard but it’s important for all involved.
66. Full strategy involvement. Be there throughout the journey. Make PPC an integral part of all marketing efforts.
67. B2B friendly settings. Platforms aren’t made for B2B. But small tweaks can make a big impact on results.
68. Sophie Logan Community & Editorial Manager at Rough Agenda. B2B PPC Specialist. Dexters Mum
69. Thank you PPC.London!