B2B
Your bidding algorithm is not mis-aimed. It is starving.
Paid acquisition for considered purchases with long cycles, small keyword universes and offline conversions.
+2.4x
Improvement in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
The problem
Everything about B2B paid media follows from one fact: you do not generate enough conversions to teach a bidding algorithm anything. Automated bidding wants a steady flow of conversion events each month before it performs reliably. A specialist manufacturer or professional services firm might produce a fraction of that, and close a genuine order a handful of times a year.
The usual response makes it worse. Optimising to raw form submissions manufactures volume by finding the people most willing to submit forms — students, job applicants, competitors, overseas resellers, and people who wanted a datasheet. That does not merely distort your reporting. It trains the algorithm against you, and each week it gets better at finding more of them.
The second constraint is that your keyword universe is finite. You cannot scale by adding budget. You exhaust demand, sometimes within weeks, and growth has to come from adjacency, geography, channel or genuine demand creation.
Considerations
What we account for
Build a proxy conversion ladder
If closed-won is too rare and too slow to optimise on, and form fills are too noisy, the answer sits in between. We build a ladder of intermediate events — scored qualified call, quotation or tender request, sales-accepted lead, opportunity created — and assign each a conversion value reflecting its historical probability of becoming revenue. Bidding then targets the deepest event that still clears minimum volume. Choosing that point deliberately is most of the technical work in this vertical.
Count the telephone
In industrial and professional B2B, serious buyers ring. Form-only measurement systematically undercounts the best enquiries and biases bidding towards whichever campaigns happen to produce web forms. We implement dynamic number insertion and score calls against agreed qualification criteria, so a qualified call becomes a weighted conversion rather than an untracked event. Where you sell across borders, the choice of tracking provider is decided by local number availability and per-country coverage rather than by the feature list — a platform that cannot supply in-country numbers for your markets will quietly depress response, because buyers do not ring a foreign number to ask about a valve.
Treat the negative keyword list as the targeting
With broad match and automated bidding on a niche keyword universe, what you exclude defines your audience more than what you include. We run search-term review as a scheduled discipline rather than a periodic clear-out, maintaining exclusions for job seekers, students, academic research, competitors, out-of-territory traffic and adjacent-but-wrong applications.
Use published procurement pipelines as a demand signal
Where you sell to public sector or public-sector-adjacent buyers, almost every jurisdiction runs a public tender portal, and a growing number publish forward pipeline notices ahead of a procurement actually going live. That is a structured, forward-looking, free signal of who will be buying and roughly when — which is more than any intent-data subscription can honestly claim, and unlike intent data it is a matter of public record rather than an inference. The work is knowing which portals cover your markets, and reading them early enough for the notice to change campaign flighting and target account lists, rather than finding it once the tender is already open and the specification has been written around somebody else.
Services
What we run here
PPC Advertising
Paid search and shopping, managed against margin rather than platform-reported ROAS.
Performance Marketing
Cross-channel budget allocation decided by measured contribution, not platform self-reporting.
Customer Acquisition
Acquisition economics modelled to payback period, then media bought to fit.
Lead Generation
Optimised to pipeline and closed revenue, not to form submissions.
Campaign Management
ROI-focused campaign planning, pacing and review run as an operating rhythm.
Frequently asked
Our cost per lead is high compared to benchmarks we have seen. Is that bad?
Almost certainly the wrong question. If you receive a small number of quotation requests a month and one becomes a six-figure order, a high cost per enquiry is irrelevant and cost per lead is the wrong lens entirely. We would rather report cost per opportunity against typical order value, which is harder to benchmark against other companies and considerably more useful for deciding what to spend.
We only get a handful of enquiries a month. Is there enough data to do anything with?
Not enough to optimise to closed business directly, which is exactly why the proxy ladder exists. There is usually enough to optimise to a well-defined intermediate event. Where there genuinely is not, we say so and shift the emphasis to structural work — exclusions, landing pages, technical content, speed of response — rather than pretending an algorithm can learn from nothing.
Most of our enquiries come by phone or at exhibitions. Does that break this?
No, but ignoring it would. Call tracking brings the phone into the same measurement stack. Exhibition and trade press activity we integrate as a source in the CRM so pipeline gets attributed to it, rather than treating events as unmeasurable and letting digital take the credit for enquiries it did not originate.
Can we market to purchased B2B contact lists?
Cautiously, and never on the assumption that B2B is exempt. Most regimes are more relaxed about corporate subscribers than about individuals, but data protection law still applies to personal data whichever side of that line the contact sits on, sole traders and partnerships are frequently treated as individuals rather than as businesses, and penalties have risen substantially in most markets. The complication when you sell internationally is that these rules generally follow the recipient rather than the sender, so one purchased list can put you under several regimes at once and the most permissive of them is not the one that governs. We would want your data protection position confirmed by someone qualified before building a programme that depends on it.
Start with the audit.
It has a defined scope and a defined deliverable, and it is deliberately separable from anything that follows. If the audit says your current setup is fine, that is a legitimate outcome and we will say so.