Improving PPC Lead Quality for B2B Campaigns

Improving the quality of PPC leads is a critical challenge for B2B campaigns. Success hinges on qualifying leads effectively, optimising paid media channels, and leveraging data integration. These strategies not only enhance campaign performance but also foster alignment with sales teams.

Lead generation comes with three undeniable truths: driving leads is easy, driving quality leads is hard, and delivering poor leads leads to unhappy sales teams. Many brands that turn to agencies for help face similar struggles, making this an ongoing challenge despite two decades of digital marketing evolution.

In a recent presentation at SMX Next, I focused on how to tackle this persistent issue. The goal is to refine the process of generating PPC leads that are not just plentiful but also valuable. Achieving this requires a deliberate and structured approach.

The foundation lies in building a basic lead qualification infrastructure. This involves creating clear parameters for what constitutes a high-quality lead, ensuring that your campaigns are set up to attract the right audience from the start.

Next is fluency with media levers. Understanding how to optimise your paid media strategy—whether through platforms, targeting options, or budget allocation—is essential to driving better results.

Strategic creative also plays a significant role. Compelling ad copy and visuals aligned with your audience’s needs and preferences can significantly improve engagement and lead quality.

Finally, advanced data management and integration complete the picture. Using sophisticated tools to track, analyse, and integrate data ensures that your campaigns remain informed and adaptable to changing conditions.

By focusing on these core principles, businesses can move closer to solving the challenge of generating higher-quality PPC leads, ultimately driving better outcomes for both marketing and sales teams.

Lead qualification infrastructure

Improving the quality of PPC leads starts with establishing a robust lead qualification system, even if it is manual at first. Ensure your CRM is configured to capture essential data like UTMs and click IDs. This setup provides a foundational understanding of where your leads are originating, offering valuable insights for campaign optimisation.

To take this further, consider integrating a lead scoring tool to help identify Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). This system can guide users through the key stages of their purchase journey within your CRM, such as:

SALs (Sales-Accepted Leads),
Opportunities,
Customers, and
Any other stage specific to your business’s nomenclature.

Many businesses depend on platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce for managing leads effectively. These tools streamline the process of sorting and nurturing leads, though the main challenge often lies in achieving sufficient data density. Without this, it can be difficult to differentiate between strong and weak leads, reducing the effectiveness of lead management efforts.

For companies struggling with manual lead scoring, third-party automation tools can be a game-changer. However, if automation isn’t feasible, tools like ChatGPT can offer a viable alternative. It can be used to evaluate lead strength efficiently, especially when time or resources are limited.

Once you’ve established a system for identifying quality leads, the next step is to refine your algorithms. With a clearer understanding of what constitutes a strong lead, you can train your tools to find more of them, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns.

By focusing on these steps, businesses can better manage and optimise their lead generation processes, leading to stronger, more reliable results.

Fluency with paid media

When it comes to optimising B2B lead generation campaigns, focusing on primary platforms like Google and LinkedIn is often the most effective strategy. For Google campaigns, two crucial levers are placements and data integration. Start by grouping raw search queries into tightly-knit themes. For accounts with a history, ensure you break out all relevant queries, particularly evergreen and high-performing ones.

Using CRM data to track leads through advanced stages of the funnel can provide invaluable insights. This enables you to move beyond simple cost-per-lead (CPL) metrics and make more informed budget allocation decisions aimed at growing your sales pipeline. Prioritising budget allocation for placements that deliver higher-quality leads is critical to this process.

When using Google, carefully evaluate network placements. Avoid Search Partners unless you’ve maximised returns from other networks, as leads from these placements tend to be lower in quality. Similarly, mobile traffic often produces less qualified leads, partly due to the platform’s limitations, such as difficulty in reading and researching content. Consider reducing mobile investment until you achieve desired efficiency metrics in later-stage lead activities.

Other campaign types, like Performance Max (PMax), display, and Demand Gen campaigns, present their own challenges. While these campaigns generate a high volume of leads, many tend to be of lower quality, often driven by bots or fraudulent activity. Despite Google’s push for using PMax, the platform isn’t yet optimised for driving high-quality leads. If you choose to use these campaigns, focus on improving performance through brand and query exclusions and down-funnel conversion optimisation. However, in most cases, it’s better to reallocate your budget to more reliable strategies.

On LinkedIn, the key to driving better-quality leads lies in leveraging its precise targeting capabilities. Start by focusing on attributes such as company size, ensuring you’re not targeting small businesses for enterprise-level products or vice versa. Additionally, filter by job titles, avoiding categories like sales or business development roles that are already highly active on LinkedIn. Align closely with your client or in-house team to refine targeting and identify opportunities for improvement.

Finally, evaluate lead quality by geographic location. Geographic variations can significantly impact lead performance, and some regions may present unique opportunities. For instance, if a specific area has a particularly strong sales team that increases the likelihood of converting leads into customers, adjust your strategy to capitalise on this advantage. Fine-tuning these elements across channels can make a substantial difference in the success of your B2B lead generation campaigns.

The B2B industry is not typically recognised for groundbreaking creativity in its campaigns. However, a well-thought-out creative strategy can significantly enhance performance, especially when targeting the right audience. Strategic creative can serve as a valuable tool for qualifying leads and steering your campaign in the desired direction.

When targeting a broad audience, your creative assets should act as a filter. Use messaging that directly speaks to your ideal audience, such as mentioning “enterprise companies” or incorporating technical language. This approach helps deter unqualified clicks from users outside your target demographic. While click-through rates (CTR) on these ads may be lower, the quality of leads tends to improve.

For narrower, niche-focused targeting, make your messaging more inviting and designed to encourage engagement. Ads like those from Rippling, which highlight clear value propositions paired with a reward or incentive, can perform exceptionally well. Such ads strike the right balance between accessibility and relevance, ensuring higher CTR while maintaining lead quality.

It’s also crucial to be cautious with popular or trendy topics, such as generative AI. While these themes can generate a lot of clicks, they often attract a wide range of users who may not align with your ideal customer profile. Without adequate lead qualifiers in your targeting or creative approach, these clicks can clutter your CRM and lower the overall effectiveness of your campaign.

One frequent question in the B2B realm concerns the use of forms requiring a business email address. Testing is essential to determine what works best for your campaign. On one hand, business email addresses are more valuable than personal ones and often indicate a higher level of interest. On the other hand, non-forced forms have shown promise in increasing conversion rates (CVR).

To strike a balance, consider including “enter business email” as a prompt in your forms but allow all email types. This method still encourages professional email submissions without discouraging potential leads. If your sales team is ready to act on leads, ensure they’re aligned with this approach to maximise results and avoid missing opportunities. By refining your creative and form strategy, you can elevate the quality of leads generated while maintaining a user-friendly experience.

Back-end data integration

Back-end data integration plays a crucial role in optimising platform bidding algorithms. The goal is to train these algorithms to identify users whose characteristics most closely align with the most valuable ones already in your CRM.

While this approach will likely result in fewer conversions, it’s important to set the right expectations with clients or managers. The leads you do capture will be of higher quality, with a greater intent to convert.

For example, we recently worked with a client to help them bring in leads that closely matched CRM accounts as the primary conversion. Since focusing on these matched account leads, the client has seen a 30% improvement in the proportion of high-quality leads.

It’s worth noting that this approach will drive up the cost per lead, but it should ultimately reduce the cost per opportunity. The key to ongoing success with this strategy is to continually feed the system richer and more varied data, helping the algorithm refine its targeting over time. This enables better prediction of revenue and ensures your lead quality improves consistently.

Another advanced tactic involves using weighted revenue to attach specific values to different funnel events. Essentially, the lower the engagement within the funnel, the greater the weight attached to it. This can provide more nuanced insights into lead quality.

However, it’s important to note that you’ll need enough data density for this strategy to be effective. It’s recommended to focus on the lowest-funnel event that has enough data to be useful in training the algorithm, such as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) if opportunities are insufficient.

Ultimately, this strategy serves as a starting point. As more data enters your CRM, you’ll need to continually optimise your campaigns to achieve the best results.