The ONLY B2B Google Ads Strategy You Need in 2026

Running Google Ads for B2B is notoriously more complex than any other vertical. With longer sales cycles and higher stakes, the usual "best practices" and "ALWAYS do this" don't apply. In episode 110 of the Inside Google Ads podcast, Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales maps out the essential frameworks she's developed specifically for B2B advertisers to attract high-value business customers while repelling low-value consumer leads.

She starts with the non-negotiable foundation: full-funnel conversion tracking. Jyll explains why optimizing for simple form fills is a recipe for failure and why you must connect your CRM to feed Google data on marketing qualified leads (MQLs) instead. From there, we dive into the "Day in the Life" exercise to move beyond basic job-title targeting, the strategic use of Demand Gen campaigns to create a halo effect over your search efforts, and why high CPCs in the B2B world can actually be a sign of success. Finally, learn how to use intentional friction in your ad copy and landing pages to filter out the "hay" and find your "needles" in the haystack. This episode is a must watch/listen for anyone running Google Ads with a business-to-business objective.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Why your B2B strategy must move beyond tracking simple form fills.
• Connecting your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.) to optimize for MQLs and SQLs.
• The "Day in the Life" exercise for better audience targeting.
• Allocating budget to Demand Gen and Video for a 30% reduction in search CPL.
• The "Magnet, Needle and Haystack" analogy for using broad match and smart bidding.
• Using intentional friction in creative and landing pages to disqualify poor leads.
  
  

Plus, stay tuned until the end of the episode for a new Insider Challenge to solve!

You can get Inside Google Ads episode transcripts delivered to your inbox each week by signing up for free at https://free.jyll.ca/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode110
 
Google Ads Coaching
Need some expert help with your Google Ads strategy or optimizing your campaigns? Book a call with Jyll! Learn more at https://jyll.ca/pages/google-ads-coach?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode110

Inside Google Ads course
Join 400+ marketers like you who are mastering Google Ads with Jyll's Inside Google Ads membership course. You'll get exclusive access to JyllBot, and you can meet top industry experts at an exclusive live video call every single month. Learn more at https://learn.jyll.ca/iga?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode110

Read more about this topic on Jyll's Google Ads Blog

• Should B2B advertisers use broad match or exact match keywords? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/should-b2b-advertisers-use-broad-match-or-exact-match-keywords?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode110
• PMax vs. Demand Gen: Which is Right for Your B2B Google Ads Strategy? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/pmax-vs-demand-gen-which-is-right-for-your-b2b-google-ads-strategy?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode110
• Performance Max vs. Search: Which is Best for B2B Lead Generation? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/performance-max-vs-search-which-is-best-for-b2b-lead-generation?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode110

Follow Jyll on social media
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Transcript

I've often said that the most difficult kind of Google Ads to run are Google Ads on a small budget. But there's something even trickier: Google Ads for B2B.

In fact, developing and executing an effective B2B Google Ads strategy is so challenging that I have seen a lot of clients coming through my Google Ads coaching practice recently who need help, either with their own businesses or their clients', successfully attracting those high-value business customers while repelling the lower-value consumer leads.

Today, I'm mapping out the campaign types, the targeting, and the frameworks you need to be closing high-quality B2B deals for your business from Google Ads.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 110: B2B.

First, I'm going to start with the foundation, which of course is your conversion data. And I know you probably think you know what I'm going to say, but stick with me here for a minute or two, okay? 

Because if you don't have this step right, nothing else I tell you in the rest of the episode is going to work. You need to have full-funnel conversion tracking in place.

It's possible that you're in a B2B space that's more like B2B e-commerce. Someone buys something on your website, and if that's the case, this is going to be easier for you. But most B2B advertisers I meet work on these really long sales cycles. You get a lead, and then it becomes qualified, and then six months or two years later, it finally becomes a customer.

So the first thing I'll say is if you are optimizing your Google Ads towards a form fill, you're done.

You must connect your CRM to Google Ads so that at a bare minimum, you are optimizing towards a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). That is to say, a lead that has not only filled out your form or called you, but has been qualified in some way. They have the right kind of domain; they've said what kind of budget they have and it fits what you're doing; they're large enough to justify your sales team talking to them.

By only telling Google Ads about Marketing Qualified Leads via conversion tracking, and not just telling it about form fills, you're ensuring that you're telling Google the data it needs to optimize for the right kind of B2B buyers for you. 

For example, some companies I meet with find that for every 10 form fills, just one of them is a Marketing Qualified Lead. From there, it still has to go to sales and through the process, et cetera. So if you were telling Google about nine leads that don't even pass the first gate, it's going to find more people who look like those nine rather than more people who look like the one. It's better to not even tell Google that those nine were a conversion because they weren't; it's just a form fill. And instead, only tell Google about that one Marketing Qualified Lead. Yes, you will have far less data, but it's better to have less high-quality data than a ton of low-quality data.

If your deal flow is large enough, ideally you can get at least 10 Marketing Qualified Leads a month per campaign. But even without that, I will still say do not optimize for the form fill or you are setting Google Ads, and therefore yourself, up for failure. Optimize for at least a Marketing Qualified Lead, if not a Sales Qualified Lead, or if possible, a closed-won deal if it tends to occur within two to three months of the ad click.

If you use a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, these have direct Google Ads integrations you can use. And even if you use a different CRM, you can use an automation tool like Zapier to ensure you're sending that information back and forth.

Along with that, I will say that features like Enhanced Conversions and Consent Mode are not optional for you. The reason for that is you want to make sure you are passing back to Google every possible piece of useful conversion information. If you don't use Enhanced Conversions, there goes some of your data. If you don't use Consent Mode properly implemented, there goes some of your conversion data there. And all this stacks up to a point where perhaps you're only sending 50% to 60% of the conversion data Google Ads could use instead of something like 90% or more. So all of these things that for small businesses or for e-commerce I sort of say, "Yeah, you have to do it, but if not, it's kind of okay" - for B2B, it is not kind of okay. All of your measurement suite must be top-tier in order for anything else we're about to discuss to work well for you in Google Ads. Get your foundation in order before trying to build your house.

All right, let's move into some more of the fun stuff. The next thing I often see with B2B clients is they're super duper focused on Search. And while Search is great - and we're going to get to that later in this episode - it is not sufficient now to truly support, maintain, and convert your leads.

Remember, a B2B buyer is just a human being. For example, I am a B2B buyer and I'm also just a human being: a mom, Canadian, a city dweller. So what I encourage you to do when you're starting to think about how to reach people beyond Search is do my "Day in the Life" exercise. 

Don't just target a job title or an industry. For example, "I want to reach people who work in manufacturing." I've had a lot of coaching clients these days saying that. What does it mean to work in manufacturing? In the United States alone, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people who work in manufacturing. And I'm willing to bet at least 90% of them are not your target customers.

So go more specific. Who is that real person you're trying to reach? What are they responsible for? What's going to get them promoted this year, or what would get them fired this year? What do they do when they wake up? What kind of news sources do they consume? How do they spend their day? Who are they meeting with? By treating your B2B buyer as a real person, you'll build so much more information you can use to put together an effective targeting strategy.

And I recommend reserving about 10% of your Google Ads budget for more of this demand generation while still leaving 90% for your intent-driven Search. Over time, that may increase, but start with 10%, especially if you're not doing any demand generation now. When I say demand generation, you can do that via a Demand Gen campaign, a Video campaign, or a Display campaign.

If you're just getting started with going beyond Search for B2B, I recommend Demand Gen because traffic quality tends to be higher. These are signed-in users and Demand Gen operates on either click- or conversion-focused bid strategies. So the objective of a Demand Gen campaign, whether with image or video creative, is to get the person to leave what they're doing now and come to your website. This is in contrast with a Video campaign, which does share a lot of similarities with Demand Gen, but Video campaigns only operate on a reach or views objective. So your purpose of a Video campaign is to get someone to engage with your video; it is not to get them to leave YouTube and come to your website. So feel free to add this in a bit later. But when you're just getting started with demand generation, the Demand Gen campaign is aptly named.

Generally, I am not a fan of Display, either on its own or as a box to untick in your Search, Demand Gen, or Video campaigns, due to high bot traffic and low lead quality. In fact, if you have Display turned on in your campaigns, but you're using the full-funnel conversion tracking I discussed, you will notice that your campaign barely spends on Display because those quality conversions aren't going to come from there.

When we're measuring the success of these Beyond Search campaigns, don't hold them to the same metrics as your Search campaigns. What you will likely find is that your cost-per-view or cost-per-click is going to be much cheaper than Search, but of course it's going to convert at a much lower rate. The purpose of your Demand Gen or Video campaign is not to directly drive a qualified lead, though of course that can happen over time. It's to support your Search efforts so that when someone sees your search ad alongside three other companies, they don't just scroll on by; they go, "Hmm, I've heard of that before." Or maybe they see your video ads a bunch of times and then they go to Search and search for you. And you think your branded search campaign is doing amazingly well, which it is, but of course that has been supported by an assist from demand generation.

This isn't just theory, by the way. Melissa Mackey, who's the head of paid search at Compound Growth Marketing, was recently a guest at my PPC Zone event and podcast. And she shared a case study from one of her clients about how YouTube is a powerful influence on B2B lead generation. Melissa said that by running this educational video as an ad, they were able to decrease their cost-per-lead in Search by 30% or more. In fact, for one of her clients, when they stopped running the video, their branded search cost-per-lead spiked by 47%.

This is the way that you're going to make either YouTube or Demand Gen campaigns work for you: by seeing how they assist and create a halo effect over your search efforts, rather than trying to measure them to justify themselves in a vacuum.

Melissa used custom segments based on search terms for her campaigns. That is an excellent way to start. There may also be some in-market audiences or detailed demographics that are relevant for you. For example, the detailed demographics by industry or the in-market segments that fall under business services or business and industrial products.

And although as of when I'm recording, this isn't fully rolled out yet, there's a feature called Attributed Branded Searches that is coming soon that will help you see the impact of your video by measuring branded searches that happen after someone has engaged with your video. I'll put a link for more information about Attributed Branded Searches in the episode description, as I'm continuously updating that article as this feature rolls out.

To sum up: reserve at least 10% of your budget for beyond search tactics and measure them by how they support your search efforts rather than analyzing them in a vacuum. This is what the most successful B2B advertisers are doing today. So if you're not doing this yet, you should start right now.

And then of course, it's time to talk about Search, the bread and butter for many advertisers and especially for B2B advertisers.

High CPCs in B2B Search are natural and even desired because, remember, high CPCs are not the enemy; low-quality traffic is. If these high CPC users convert for you, you're set to make tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of dollars. So you should be willing to pay a lot for those clicks. If your CPCs are really low, that's the strongest sign that you are just getting consumers and not business buyers, which means you're wasting money on those low CPC clicks. Anyway, you get what you pay for.

Another common mistake I see with B2B advertisers is having some exact match keywords and a million negative keywords and trying to be super duper narrow-focused. And while I do recommend starting there, at least with the exact match keyword part, having a super-focused, narrowed-down strategy is not going to get you the lead volume that you need to drive your business forward. 

I like to use the analogy of a needle in a haystack, because that's what it really can feel like. Your ideal customers are these few needles stuck in a huge haystack. So how are you going to find them?

Using exact match keywords with thousands of negatives is like sitting down in front of that stack, picking up one piece of hay at a time and saying, "Is this a needle? Nope. Is this a needle? Nope. Is this a needle? Nope." And hoping to eventually find your needle. You will eventually find your needle, hopefully, but you're also going to waste a ton of time.

Wouldn't it be more effective to, say, bring an industrial-sized magnet to the barn? Walk over to that haystack, place it down and start picking up armfuls of hay to feed to your magnet, right? And then the hay is all going to fall to the side, but those needles will stick to the magnet. They'll be there. Importantly though, you can't just reach right in and pick up a needle. You need to grab all the hay with it because you know that in that big armful, needles will be inside. And that's what working with broad match keywords is like in B2B.

Yes, you are going to advertise on searches you don't want. You are, but you have to cast the net wide enough so that among all the searches you don't want, you also pick up the searchers you do want - those all-important needles. And using AI-powered Smart Bidding is like having this giant magnet that's going to attract them for you.

Let's put the analogy aside and make this tactical. If you're just getting started or you have a more modest budget, then yes, start with exact match keywords for your Search campaign. You don't need to have a million keywords. It's better to start small and focused and expand from there. 

But don't go crazy with the negatives, okay? If you operate in a B2B space, here is how you should approach your Search Terms Report in Google Ads. Sort descending by impressions and start looking through the searches you match to. 

If you see a search term that is not relevant, I want you to pause before adding it as a negative. First, answer: Is it not relevant because I don't sell this? For example, they're searching for a certain product that you just don't sell. If that's the case, do you sell a similar product? Do you sell a service that could fulfill a similar need? If so, don't hit negative just yet because now you're going to answer question number two: even though the search isn't relevant, is this the right searcher? Is the person who would search for this the ideal customer for me?

For example, let's say that I was advertising on the broad match keyword "Google Ads," okay? All kinds of stuff would come in there. If I see the search term "Google Ads Management," I don't offer that as a service and a person looking for Google Ads management is probably not the right customer for me. So I would want to add that as a negative.

Now, what if someone searches for "PMax versus AI Max"? I might say, "Well, that's really generic." They're not specifically looking for coaching or an audit or courses, but the person searching for that could absolutely be the right kind of customer for me. Because if they even know what AI Max or PMax is - or rather, they have heard those terms and want to know what they are - then that suggests a level of sophistication with Google Ads that puts them right into the target market for my services. And if they're trying to figure out the difference between these two, that means this is someone who's looking for education, looking for guidance. 

So yeah, it might make sense for me to show them an ad for Google Ads coaching, even though that search was not specifically "Google Ads coach," because there are things there about the searcher that suggest that's a person I would want to reach. So I would not add it as a negative.

I know this is not how we are used to thinking about search terms and negatives and keywords, but this is how you need to think today. Because remember, your smart bidding algorithm, which you absolutely must be using in B2B, is focusing not just on that one specific search and that one specific moment, but all the other signals and information about the user. 

These are needles in a haystack we're looking for, right? 

So this is your needle poking up a little bit closer to the surface, maybe not with the perfect search right now, but a close-enough search. It's not like they're looking for a laundry service or yoga pants. They're looking for something Google Ads related. It's the exact right kind of person. Let's show them the ad. They may not click on it right away. It may not have the perfect ad copy for them, but this is the kind of person we absolutely want to reach. 

And over time, as you let the algorithm pick up all these different pieces of hay and see what sticks, it's going to figure out, maybe 95% of the people searching PMax versus AI Max are people we don't want to show an ad to, but if they display XYZ behavior in their profile, then for those 5%, let's show them an ad and that could be valuable for us. And that is key. Not all searchers are created equal, which means not all search terms are created equal. If you're playing constant whack-a-mole with negatives, you are fighting the system that is only trying to help you. Don't obsess over a mistake here, a wasted click there. You are looking for six and seven and eight-figure deals. You can't afford to be so myopic.

All right, off my soapbox, a few more practical tips I have for you. 

Search audiences can absolutely be your friend, whether on observation, on targeting, or exclusion. For example, maybe you want to apply an in-market segment for business services or detailed demographics around company size as a targeting layer on top of your search keywords so that if the user doesn't match that audience requirement, we don't show them an ad. As you might imagine, I talk a lot more about that in my bestselling book, Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting, available on Amazon, Kobo, and Google Play.

All right, last but not least, a really key, important part of your B2B strategy is your quality control and messaging. We've talked about laying the data foundation, campaign types and budgeting, keyword and negative keyword strategies, and now we have your ad and landing page - the actual messaging you're putting in front of these potentially B2B buyers or potentially not B2B buyers.

Use this to your advantage by intentionally creating friction. I know what you're thinking. “I thought we want as many people as possible to click on our ads.” “I thought we wanted to get as many conversions as possible.” No. By strategically introducing a little bit of friction, you can help your ad campaigns get much better, more efficient results. 

Here's what I mean. Let's start with your ad copy. You want your ad to attract the right kind of people, those needles in the haystack, and just as importantly, to repel the wrong kind of people, the people who are not going to be your target customer. This means you may want to strategically use jargon or acronyms or language that only your ideal customer would understand. You may want to use certain words like "enterprise" to stop people who are not your ideal customers from clicking on your ads.

You want to appeal to your target audience and, just as importantly, not appeal to your not-target audience. This applies to Search, but this is also really important for something like Demand Gen or Video campaigns, because you're going to be targeting an audience that's going to contain a lot of hay with your needles. And so it is that ad creative itself - the text, image, or video you're using - that's going to act like a magnet to suck up the needles you want and to push away the hay you don't want.

And this mentality does not just stop with your ad creative. Your landing page should have a little bit of friction as well. I know we've been taught we want to get our conversion rate up, conversion rate up, conversion rate up. And yes, on the whole, assuming we're bringing the right people to the website, we want as many as possible to convert. But if someone's not going to be the right fit for you, you want them to drop out gracefully at this point rather than going in and wasting your sales team's time. 

So a few things you can do are add a few potential qualifiers to your lead form. For example, a dropdown for company size or a dropdown for starting budget. Let's say, for example, that you offer website development services, but you're not looking for Joe Schmo who just started their business yesterday. You want large websites. So you could have one question that's "estimated budget," dropdown menu, and it starts at $50,000, $50,000 to $100,000, $100,000 to $200,000, et cetera. So Joe Schmo, the small business owner, starts to fill out your form but then sees that your starting price is more than 10 times what they can afford; they won't fill out the form. And good! We don't want them to, because now Google is going to get the signal, "Hmm, that click didn't work out, not the right kind of user you thought it was."

You may think that your keywords and audience targeting are the filter. While they're a good starting point, the ultimate filters are actually your ad creative and landing page paired with your conversion tracking. The ones who don't convert are the ones who are going to tell Google who not to show ads to again, while the ones who do convert are going to tell Google the ones to show ads to again, working alongside the audiences or keywords you've chosen.

To wrap up, here's how the most successful B2B Google Ads advertisers are working today. 

1. They have offline conversion tracking implemented so that they are at least tracking a Marketing Qualified Lead, if not a Sales Qualified Lead or a closed-won. 

2. They are using all the measurement tools available to them, like Enhanced Conversions and Consent Mode, to ensure that data foundation is secure. 

3. Then they are not putting all of their eggs into the search basket. 

They're dedicating 10% to 20% of their budget to demand generation and conversion-supporting avenues like Demand Gen or Video campaigns with tight audience targeting, measuring their success on how they support your Search and overall efforts rather than how they are performing solely on their own.

4. And then with Search, while you may want to start small, you will at some point need to embrace a broader strategy. 

Picking up the armloads of hay to get the few needles in between rather than trying to sort through manually one by one hoping to luck upon a needle. Smart bidding paired with your offline conversion tracking, targeted keywords, and when you review your search terms, focusing on the right searcher, even if it's not the right search. Lay off the negatives unless absolutely necessary for things like "free," "jobs," et cetera.

5. And then last but not least, do not leave your creative to an afterthought. 

Your text, image, or video advertising should attract your target customer just as much as it repels your not-target customer. And similarly, your landing page should make it really easy for your ideal customer to convert, but a little bit difficult for your not-ideal customer to convert, because that will then feed the data back into the beginning to get this whole funnel working wonderfully.

6. And then patience. 

B2B sales cycles take months, if not years. Do not judge your campaign based on its first two weeks. You may not be able to judge it even based on its first two months. You can look at your leading indicators like MQLs and opportunity values to start to understand how things are going. And then in your CRM, when these deals close months or years later, you can at least look back and see what has been working well, what you might want to test next, and what you may want to cut from your strategy.

Of course, if you're feeling stuck, you can book a call with me via my website at jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, so we can work on your specific B2B Google Ads strategy together.

Today's Insider Challenge is this: Let's say you start working with a large B2B advertiser and you're trying to decide whether to use Exact Match, Phrase Match, Broad Match, or AI Max in their Search campaigns. They're looking to spend $100,000 a month on Google Ads and historically their CPCs have been $5 to $10. What questions would you ask and what research would you do to decide which match type to use?

The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving.

The last episode with an Insider Challenge was Episode 107, and it was this: You're auditing an account and you see an ad group with Quality Scores ranging from 2 to 4. When you look at the explainer columns, you see ad relevance is generally above average, landing page experience is generally average, and expected CTR is generally below average. What do you look into first and why?

For me, the combination of above-average ad relevance and below-average expected CTR tells me we probably have an "ads are not sexy enough" problem. Solid ad relevance means we're meeting best practices, including the keywords in our ads, but in spite of serving highly relevant ads, users don't want to click on them. So in this scenario, I would first head to the asset performance report and filter it for headlines to just see how the headlines are doing. Since they are more important than descriptions in getting or not getting the click, I’m going to run them through a mental test, looking at each headline and saying, "Could my competitor say this exact same thing? Could they use this exact headline and it would make sense?"

Of course, for some headlines, the answer's going to be yes. But if your answer is yes for most of your headlines, you have an overly generic problem. I would then look at Auction Insights to see my competitors, look them up in the Google Ads Transparency Center, see what their ads actually say, and figure out how I can stand out. What this might reveal, though, is that your offer itself is just not distinguished enough. And that's possible. If you are a plumber or a hairstylist or a running shoe store, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish yourself from all the other people who are ostensibly offering the same thing.

So if that's the real challenge - not just an ad copy issue, but a "do I differentiate my business" issue - I would start by using Gemini to look at my landing page, my Google Business Profile, compare it to competitors, and then see what are the pros and cons of what I'm offering versus them. Hopefully, there are things that are special about my business that I just haven't highlighted, perhaps on my landing page or in the ad copy. But if my offer is just that generic and indistinguishable, well then I've got a core business problem to solve exposed by my quality score issue. And I'm going to have to solve that first before I can solve the advertising problem. 

What about you? What would you look into first?

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.