Summary
A global B2B software company. Highly technical products, long sales cycles, and a buyer who is an engineer rather than a marketer.
We run their Google Ads across five product lines, three languages and a dozen markets, and we host and secure their web presence. Over the last twelve months the advertising put their products in front of 7.2 million impressions, earned 141,573 clicks and produced 763 qualified enquiries.
The number we care most about is a different one. Their search campaigns run at an 11% click through rate, in a category where roughly 3% is normal.
Client identity withheld for privacy.
The Problem With Advertising Technical Software
Most B2B software advertising fails the same way. The product does something specific and complicated, the marketing describes it in language nobody searches for, and the campaign ends up buying enormous reach among people who will never buy anything.
The buyer here is not browsing. They are a specialist with a defined problem, they already know the name of the category of tool that solves it, and they will type that exact phrase. The entire job is to be the obvious answer to a very narrow question, and to not spend money on anything else.
What We Do
One Campaign Per Product
Each product line gets its own search campaign, its own keyword set, its own ad copy and its own negative list. They do not share budget and they do not compete with each other. That sounds obvious and it is the single most common thing we find missing when we take over a B2B account, because it is faster to build one campaign than five.
The payoff is in the click through rates. The most specialist products in the set run at 17% and 14%, because when the search is narrow enough and the ad answers it precisely, the right person clicks and almost nobody else does.
Three Languages, A Dozen Markets
The products sell globally, so the account runs in three languages across markets on four continents. Each language is a separate build, not a translation layer bolted onto an English campaign, because the search behaviour is genuinely different market to market.
Channels That Have To Earn Their Place
The account runs search, Performance Max, display and video. They are not treated as equals.
Results
Click through rate by channel over the last twelve months. Search sits at 11.01% against a typical B2B search benchmark of around 3%. Video sits at 0.08%.
Search and Performance Max between them produce 749 of the 763 enquiries. That is 98% of the result from two of the four channels.
Video produced none. We report that plainly rather than quietly folding it into a blended number, because a client is entitled to know which part of their budget is doing the work. Video and display still have a job in a long B2B sales cycle, which is to make the brand familiar before the search happens, but nobody should be told they are generating leads when they are not.
Twelve months of activity. In enterprise software a single one of those 763 enquiries can be worth more than the entire annual advertising budget, which is why the quality of the click matters far more than the quantity.
Hosting And Security
We also handle the hosting, security and proactive maintenance of their web presence.
For a company selling software to technical buyers, a slow or broken website is not a cosmetic problem. It is the first evidence a prospective customer has about whether this organisation can be trusted to run software that matters. Keeping the advertising and the infrastructure under one roof means the pages the ads point at are ones we are responsible for.
Why It Matters Who Does This Work
It is easy to run a B2B software account that looks impressive. Millions of impressions, a rising click count, a dashboard full of green arrows, and a sales team who never hear from any of it.
The harder version is the one where somebody has taken the time to understand what each product actually does, split the account so the money follows the specific search, and then tells you honestly which channels are producing enquiries and which are not.
That is what we mean by doing what matters. If you want an agency that will learn your product properly before it spends your money, talk to us.