In online advertising, especially in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, audiences represent one of the most vital signals for successful targeting. Beyond keywords, which in the B2B context can often be ambiguous, we need to identify specific audiences. These audiences provide us with an additional signal to direct our online advertising efforts towards the desired target audience in the B2B sector.

However, finding B2B-focused audiences is not always an easy task. Search engines often do not provide enough options for specific B2B audiences, and many B2B advertisers do not have sufficiently extensive first-party audience lists for effective targeting.

This is where the Google Display Network, YouTube, and Discovery campaigns become valuable tools. Although B2B advertisers sometimes hesitate to use top-of-the-funnel tactics like these, they are crucial for building audiences interested in a specific type of content, a fundamental stage in the B2B digital marketing sales funnel.

For example, if your company uses a video on YouTube to address common issues in your industry and show how your product or service solves them, you can create an audience based on those who watched a significant part of that video. This way, you identify those who show interest in your offering.

Moreover, promoting your content through the Google Display Network and Discovery campaigns not only helps build audiences but can also be effective in generating leads.

In B2B digital marketing, it’s crucial to monitor your campaign signals across all positions of the sales funnel. In this sector, it’s rare for a customer to make an online purchase, and advertisers focus on tracking prospects through online forms or other actions on their websites.

However, not all completed forms translate into real leads. A portion of them may contain false information, and another may represent low-quality prospects, such as individual consumers, students, or other users who don’t have a serious interest in making a purchase. Therefore, it’s vital to have a feedback system that informs search engines about the quality of the leads obtained through paid search campaigns. This system helps to distinguish between genuine prospects and those of lower quality.

The most effective way to assess the quality of these leads is by importing data from your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) into the search engines. Google, recognizing this need in B2B digital marketing, introduced the ability to import data from Salesforce in 2016 and, since then, has added thousands of data connectors that allow advertisers to incorporate information from their CRM systems into their online advertising strategies.

CRM systems are, in many cases, the main source of truthful information for B2B advertisers. By importing data from these sources, PPC campaign managers can access information on real business metrics, beyond simple form fill-outs, allowing them to better assess whether these turn into valuable prospects.

Moreover, with a sufficient volume of conversions coming from the CRM, this data can be used to optimize strategies like Smart Bidding in your paid search campaigns, thus improving the overall efficacy of your B2B digital marketing efforts.

In this example, an MQL is worth 1,000 times what a video view is worth.

By assigning a relative value, you’re indicating to the search engine which conversions are more important to you. The tROAS strategy will aim to maximize the value of conversions, not just the number of conversions, thereby improving the quality of the prospects it’s generating.