Ways B2B PPC Advertisers Deal with Ad Blindness on Google AdWords

There are many of us that have the unique position of having to write hundreds or thousands of lines of creative for the B2B audience (or god forbid, other marketers).   For this exercise let’s assume that all ads are created equally and they all are exactly as compelling to the average B2B buyer.  In that case, we must take important strides to do what we can to make sure our ads stand out in a sea of similar advertisements.

We can do this by maximizing geography and ensuring visibility.

Maximize Real Estate

There is limited space on the results page for paid advertisements, so you would naturally want to use all the tools at your disposal to make sure that your ads are using as much room as possible.  This serves a few purposes – not only does it draw more attention to your particular advertisement, but it pushes competitors to lower ad positions and possibly even below the page break.

• AdWords Sitelinks
  
  For those advertisers with large enough spend to maintain multiple ad positions in the top 2 or 3 sitelinks are crucial for maximizing space and they provide the added benefit of allowing you to provide related relevant links and other core competencies of your business.
• Communication Extension
  
  The Communications Extension allows advertisers to display an email capture field directly underneath their advertisement.  This gives advertisers the flexibility to utilize creative that focuses on either collecting users email addresses for future nurturing through email communication as a secondary conversion action.  This can be exceptionally powerful in the B2B space where a great piece of content can be the first.
• Image / Product Ads
  
  Image and Product Ads are great for B2B marketers that offer direct sales on their sites.  Your products will be listed on Google Shopping as well as through selected search queries.  This is obviously powerful as people can get information on your products that aren’t typically displayed in paid ads including price, visual qualities, related products, and more.
• The Google+ Extension
  
  It’s plain to see that it’s imperative that marketers pay more attention to Google Plus, especially if they want to get the most out of their creative.As Google Plus adoption becomes more and more prominent, advertisers can benefit by adding location and profile elements appear in the Search results page.  Notice the example below – the listing with Google Plus locations enabled is more than twice the size of a traditional paid ad.  It also links directly with reviews listed on the profile page, and provides an the phone number as another (free) point of contact.  This is important to note because unlike the call extension feature – adding the phone number through the Google Plus location extension has no added cost.

Ensure Visibility

So we’ve discussed several ways to make sure our ads are using different available strategies and extensions to take up as much space on the page as possible, as well as provide many different key pieces of information.  Next we will look at a couple strategies to make sure that your customer will always be able to find your ad when making their search.

• Build keyword lists to the long tail
  The long tail continues to be important for converting paid traffic in the B2B space. Best of all, AdWords advertisers still have access to the performance of this type of keyword traffic.
• Craft your advertisements for the proper device.
  It’s important that advertisers craft ads and align campaign settings to proper devices.  Desktop and Tablet campaigns can utilize sitelinks, communication extensions, and generally be more verbose than their mobile counterparts.  On a mobile device usually only the top 1 or 2 ads show, call to action and conversions should center around a call or a really quick and easy to accomplish action, and a myriad of other intricacies that deserve their own post.  For our purposes here just remember that using your desktop campaign settings and ad text will probably not yield good results for mobile devices, and will probably not result in many ad views either.
• Use Enhanced Campaigns (+1 your Ads)
  Businesses that use enhanced campaigns  will automatically show social endorsements and give users the ability to +1 their ads on Google Plus.  Typically you need a relatively large group of followers for a page before they will begin to show (1oo or more for most businesses) but once they do it gives multiple benefits.  It uses up more space on the results page, differentiates your ad with the G+ button next to it, and serves as a symbol of trust, showing the size and scope of your following  and activity on Google Plus.
  

Conclusion

Each advertising platform has its own unique characteristics, and we can clearly see that  Google+ is becoming more directly integrated and integral to AdWords success, therefore delving into it and really understanding how it works is crucial for marketers in the paid space.  

B2B customers and searchers are literally bombarded with advertisements every day through all different types of media, so it’s important that advertisers take every and any step they can to differentiate themselves from the competition.  

Well written, catchy, and engaging ad creative is usually not enough.  As advertisers we need to learn and understand all the technical aspects that allow us to distance ourselves from the competition and make a lasting impact on our audience.