Melissa Mackey, Search supervisor at Gyro and publisher of BeyondThePaid, a PPC-focused blog, recently answered an array of interesting questions on Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ session. A popular face in the PPC world, Melissa’s session was packed with questions ranging from ‘what made PPC the best option’ to ‘her experience with handling B2B accounts’.
You can view the entire session here. In this post, we bring some of the highlights of this session.
Learn more by following her on twitter at @mel66
1. CPCs are higher for LinkedIn Ads
Answering to a question on what her experience with LinkedIn Ads has been like, Melissa answered:
LinkedIn Ads definitely reach the B2B audience, but at a price: CPCs are much higher, and the interface is clunky to use. We do find for many clients that LinkedIn generates more leads than any other social channel. But if you’re going for engagement, Facebook or Twitter will likely be more affordable sources of content sharing.
2. Poor account structure and landing page, the low-hanging fruit in B2B
In response to a question on what were the fixable problem areas/ opportunities in B2B, Melissa said that she often witnessed accounts with poor campaign settings and landing page choices. She shares how often they have ended up auditing the account to identify issues and fix them right away.
We see one campaign with one ad group, poor landing page choices, testing 8 ads on an ad group with 10 clicks per month, terrible campaign settings – you name it. We usually start with an audit to identify these issues and fix them right away.
Landing page optimization takes more time. More than once we have scrapped them entirely and built new pages from scratch. Other times we use Optimizely to start testing. Either way, B2B landing pages tend to be a nightmare that is easily remedied with CRO best practices.
3. Love using time-based remarketing lists
To a question put across by Kirk Williams on what her favorite B2B remarketing lists were, Melissa responded:
I love using time-based remarketing. It’s a little challenging to set up initially, but it pays huge rewards in B2B where sales cycles are often 90-180 days long. We also use many of the typical remarketing lists you’ll find in B2C: targeting those who didn’t convert, and those who did with a complementary offer.
4. PPC helps make immediate impact
Answering the question on ‘ What would you define are the positives and negatives of PPC compared to other digital marketing channels?’, Melissa said that PPC allows you to control your actions such as keywords, placements, geographic targeting, audiences along with the benefit of putting everything to test. Answering the other part of the question on ‘How PPC in comparison to other digital platforms excels’ she responded:
All digital channels are important, but in PPC we can make changes to targeting on the fly – unlike digital media that’s bought a month in advance, for example; or SEO which takes time and the whim of the search engines to change.
5. Use long tail terms to eliminate consumer searches
In response to the question ‘What tactics do you use to discourage consumers to click on B2B ads that target ambiguous keywords?’, Melissa said:
We try to stay away from the very ambiguous keywords, since they’re expensive and rarely get a good cost per conversion or even a good quality score. With the high CPCs that B2B campaigns often see, low quality, too-broad terms are a waste of budget.
Further she said that action steps such as using long tail terms and using negative keywords are other important ways to control the clicks from consumer searches.
Wasn’t this session insightful? Reddit organizes such sessions on an ongoing basis, so keep yourself updated by subscribing there or visiting our blog for details about more of such sessions.
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