If you work in B2B lead generation, you know the struggle: for every one "perfect" Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), you have to sift through dozens of B2C searchers and low-budget "tire kickers" who just aren't a fit.
That’s exactly where Ariana was when we hopped on our monthly Google Ads coaching call to review performance, and discuss strategy and optimizations.
Ariana manages a large, complex B2B account. Like you, her biggest challenge has always been lead quality. Before our call, she was looking into 30-day performance of one of her ad groups, and saw only one conversion.
Panic set in.
To fix it, she added dozens and dozens of negative keywords, before switching from Broad Match to Exact Match to stop the "waste," as she called it.
She was trying to take control, but in my opinion? She was actually suffocating the system and making things worse.
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I've been working with Ariana for more than a year, and the account has seen extrordinary growth by leaning into Broad Match and Target CPA bidding - with offline conversion tracking, of course. So it seemed strange to me that this one specific ad group would suddenly start flailing under a strategy that had been working so well.
When Ariana told me about the issues, and the adjustments she had just made, I asked her to do one simple thing:
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Change the date range from 30 days to 120 days.
The data transformed. Instead of one lonely, expensive conversion, we saw 11 conversions at a stable CPA - perfectly in line with her goals, and the campaign's target CPA.
There are two very important lessons here for all Google Ads managers. First, when you feed Google's Smart Bidding data about which leads are high quality (MQLs or SQLs), you don't need to micromanage your search terms with negatives. Google's AI can see millions of auction-time signals you can't, like a searcher’s online behaviour and search history, to determine if an "irrelevant" search term is actually coming from a high-value B2B buyer. As we saw with Chloe's story last month, getting high quality B2B leads on Google is like trying to find needles in a haystack. By trying to manually "clean up" her account with negatives and Exact Match, Ariana was throwing away the needles with the hay, the baby with the bathwater, pick your analogy! I advised her to remove all those negatives, and switch back to Broad Match, so we could keep buying the haystack - and the needles within it.
Second, when you have conversion lag and/or low conversion volume, you cannot optimize your account in 7-day or 30-day increments. Conversion lag means that it takes a few weeks or months between when the user clicks on an ad, and when they finally convert. Low conversion volume means less than 15 conversions in a 30-day period. Ariana's ad group has both of these challenges. As we saw with Ramzi's story a few months ago, you can often do more harm than good when you over-optimize your Google Ads campaigns. By zooming out, we could see the forest through the trees, which revealed the truth: this ad group was performing well.
If you're worried about lead quality dipping or lead volume stalling, like Ariana, here's what you can do:
- Check your lag: By going to Goals > Measurement > Attribution > Path Metrics, you can see the average number of days between last ad interaction & conversion, and the distribution of any potential lag between ad interaction & conversion. If you see that it takes up to 10 days to see 90% of your conversions, for example, then you should not analyze the last 10 days of performance. Ever.
- Review your conversion tracking: Are you only tracking form fills? Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)? Sales qualified leads (SQLs)? Opportunities? Closed won deals? Smart Bidding (and optimized targeting) is only as good as the data you give it. If your conversion tracking foundation isn't in place, then yes, you need to "lock down" your search campaigns with Exact Match and negatives. But if your conversion tracking foundation is in place, you're ready to start embracing automation.
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Stop the whack-a-mole: If you find yourself adding more than 10 negatives a week, ask yourself: is this search term truly harmful? Or am I just trying to micro-manage a job that Smart Bidding is already handling for me?
Leaning into automation feels uncomfortable. But it may be the only way for you to continue growing your business. Book a call with me and we'll determine the right lead generation strategy for you.
