B2B
Your bidding algorithm is not pointed the wrong way. It is simply underfed.
Paid acquisition for high-consideration purchases with long sales cycles, narrow keyword pools and offline conversions.
+2.4x
Uplift in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
The challenge
Everything in B2B paid media stems from one reality: you rarely generate enough conversions to train a bidding algorithm. Automated bidding needs a consistent volume of conversion events every month before it performs dependably. A specialist manufacturer or professional services business may produce only a fraction of that, and win a real order just a few times a year.
The common fix makes things worse. Optimising for every form submission creates volume by targeting the people most likely to fill in forms — students, job seekers, competitors, overseas resellers and anyone after a free datasheet. That does more than skew your reports. It teaches the algorithm to work against you, and it becomes better at finding those people every week.
The second limitation is that your pool of keywords is finite. Extra budget alone will not scale results. Demand runs out, sometimes within weeks, so growth has to come from adjacent markets, new regions, new channels or genuinely creating demand.
Key factors
What we plan for
Create a proxy conversion ladder
When closed deals are too infrequent and too slow to optimise towards, and form fills are too unreliable, the solution lies between them. We define a sequence of intermediate milestones — a qualified call, a quote or tender request, a sales-accepted lead, a created opportunity — and give each a value based on how often it has historically turned into revenue. Bidding then aims at the deepest milestone that still has enough volume. Picking that point carefully is the core technical task in this sector.
Track phone enquiries
In industrial and professional B2B, serious buyers pick up the phone. Measuring forms alone consistently undercounts your strongest enquiries and pushes bidding towards whichever campaigns generate web forms. We set up dynamic number insertion and grade calls against agreed qualification rules, so a qualified call counts as a weighted conversion instead of going untracked. If you sell internationally, the call tracking provider is chosen on local number availability and country coverage, not on features — a platform that cannot offer local numbers in your markets will silently reduce response, because buyers will not call an overseas number to ask about a valve.
Make negative keywords your targeting strategy
When broad match and automated bidding operate on a narrow keyword pool, what you exclude shapes your audience more than what you include. We treat search-term reviews as a regular routine rather than an occasional clean-up, keeping exclusions current for job seekers, students, academic researchers, competitors, out-of-region traffic and related-but-irrelevant uses.
Turn public procurement data into a demand signal
If you sell to public sector or related buyers, nearly every country operates a public tender portal, and more of them now publish advance pipeline notices before a procurement opens. That gives you a structured, forward-looking and free indication of who is buying and roughly when — more than any intent-data provider can honestly offer, and it is public record rather than guesswork. The skill lies in knowing which portals cover your markets and reading them early enough to adjust campaign timing and target account lists, instead of discovering a tender after it has opened and the specification has been shaped around a competitor.
Services
Services we deliver here
PPC Advertising
Paid search and shopping managed for margin, not platform-reported ROAS.
Performance Marketing
Budget allocated across channels by measured contribution, not by what each platform claims.
Customer Acquisition
Acquisition economics modelled to a payback period, with media purchased to match.
Lead Generation
Optimised for pipeline and closed revenue, not form submissions.
Campaign Management
Profit-focused campaign planning, pacing and reviews run as a steady routine.
Common questions
Our cost per lead looks high against benchmarks we have seen. Is that a concern?
It is very likely the wrong question to ask. If you receive a handful of quote requests each month and one turns into a six-figure order, a high cost per enquiry does not matter and cost per lead is the wrong measure. We prefer to report cost per opportunity against average order value — harder to compare with other companies, but far more useful for deciding how much to invest.
We only receive a few enquiries each month. Is that enough data to work with?
Not enough to optimise directly for closed deals, which is precisely why the proxy ladder exists. There is usually enough to optimise for a clearly defined intermediate milestone. When there truly is not, we say so and focus on structural improvements — exclusions, landing pages, technical content and response speed — instead of pretending an algorithm can learn from nothing.
Most of our enquiries arrive by phone or at trade shows. Does that undermine this approach?
No — but ignoring those channels would. Call tracking brings phone enquiries into the same measurement framework. Trade shows and trade press are recorded as sources in your CRM so pipeline is credited to them, instead of writing events off as unmeasurable and letting digital claim enquiries it never generated.
Can we run campaigns to purchased B2B contact lists?
With care, and never assuming B2B is automatically exempt. Most regulations treat corporate contacts more leniently than individuals, but data protection law still covers personal data on either side of that line, sole traders and partnerships are often treated as individuals, and fines have risen sharply in most markets. Selling internationally adds complexity because these rules usually follow the recipient, not the sender, so a single purchased list may place you under several regimes at once — and the most lenient one is not the one that applies. We would want a qualified adviser to confirm your data protection position before building a programme that relies on it.
Begin with an audit.
The audit has a clear scope and a clear output, and it stands on its own — no obligation to continue. If it shows your current setup is working well, that is a perfectly valid result and we will tell you so.