Updated: Jan 30, 2019
B2B playbook for reducing costs and improving success from an online advertising cynic
Some Background
I have worked with online cost per click advertising for almost 18 years. I started using a company called RealNames then overture Adwords and finally Google Ads. There have been many iterations and improvements. One thing for sure is that it has gotten extremely complex and expensive by design.
Why bother? It kinda works.
By no means am I an online advertising advocate. Over the years we have seen ROI decline, costs have skyrocketed and the complexity grew 10 fold. I reluctantly use online advertising and limit its damage.
Learn With Caution
Google and others have developed thousands of hours of online learning assets. Just remind yourself as your learning that the instructor (Google) is teaching you out how to spend money with Google.
Some Good News "The B2B Card"
We in the printer and MPS services industry have an the advantage of working in a B2B market space and there are a number of filters we can turn on high to block our the noise and fraud.
The B2B Setup
Schedule your ads to run from 7am to 8pm EST. This reduces some of click fraud and small home office users.
Select Google search only- There are higher rates of fraud and motive for fraud within google partners.
Select your the cities and towns you operate in.
Set it weekdays only. This reduces some of click fraud and small home office users.
Focus on desktop platform only. Research supports desktop has a higher rate of B2B users then mobile. Data suggests there is more fraud in mobile so reduce mobile bid by at last half.
Click Fraud- the practice of clicking on an advertisement hosted on a website with the intention of generating revenue for the host site or draining revenue from the advertiser.
Click fraud is due to advertisers being charged for every click on their ad, hence the model’s name. In 2017 alone, about 1 in 5 clicks on adverts were fraudulent, with the number slowly increasing every month.
Other Helpful Resources
Paper Jam Solutions For Laserjet Printers
Printer Service And Parts Glossary
Developing a Critical HP Printer Parts Stocking Strategy
Click fraud is very real in CPC advertising world. There are cell phone farms across the world which have rooms full of smart phones along walls controlled by one PC. They are programmed to do what ever task they are assigned. Sometimes its clicking on ads day and night. Google "tries" it best ;) to prevent it but much gets thru.
Blocking Click Fraud
Set up IP Exclusions in Google Ads If you’ve done your due diligence and identified the IP address associated with fraudulent clicks, you can block your ad from being served to that IP in the future. To set up an exclusion, all you need to do is head to the Settings tab and scroll down to the IP Exclusions setting. You can also outsource this to a company like ClickCease. They prevent competitors and bots from depleting your PPC advertising budget.
Select Your Keywords
Tools- Keyword planner is a great tool to find keywords searched by business prospects. It allows you to find the right keywords to target for display ads, search ads, video ads, and app ads. You may find terms that you didnt think of. Its free click below
https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Broad Terms vs Targeted Terms