Adwords & ABM: Leveraging Google’s Targeting Tools
I ain’t got nothin’ ‘gainst the East Coast
You want some people, well they got the most
Bob Seger, “Katmandu”
Yeah, we like our old-time rock-and-roll around here upon occasion. That particular earworm jumped into our heads when we were thinking on the topic of how to use Google as part of ABM lead targeting.
Because when it comes to people, Google — at some point or another — comes in contact with practically everyone on the web. According to the highly-addictive Internet Live Stats.com, Google sees 3.5 billion searches per day, or 1.2 trillion per year or, if you prefer to think small, a mere 61,000 or so searches per second.
That’s a very tempting lower-funnel smorgasbord for a B2B marketer aiming to find leads, especially if they’re hoping to identify buyers inside ABM-targeted accounts.
That’s the issue, of course. There’s too much on that buffet line. Marketers using AdWords may have high hopes at the onset, expecting their AdWords phrases to generate bazillions of leads. They’re not being very targeted, though, sad to say. As powerful as Google AdWords can be, you’ve got to use it properly to net effective ROI.
One ad network, Disruptive Advertising, studied 2,000 customer Adwords accounts and found that 61% of ad spend went to search terms that never convert, and the average AdWords account wasted 75.80% of it’s budget.
Maybe the scariest stat they found, though? 6% of keywords produced 100% of the conversions. As in, 94% of their keywords drove absolutely no ROI.
Net-net? There’s a lot of room for improving targeting efficiency in AdWords and capturing better, high-value leads. Instead of “leads” that were never really leads at all.

Using Audience Targeting (and more..!)
Fortunately, Google already has tools that help, many of which arrived when it launched AdWords Enhanced Campaigns a few year ago. More features have gotten added as time went by (and Google found itself competing for ad dollars against Facebook, LinkedIn and others).
It all should start with the marketer, though. 360º personas must be crafted that really represent ABM targets, personas that are constantly updated.
Then, marketers can develop AdWords campaigns against those targets based on insights derived from first-party data sources like CRM databases, or by using tools such as Google’s own RLSA and Customer Match. Targeting to similar or affinity audiences is now possible via AdWords, too.
Segmentation via Adwords can leverage specific category interests among an audience, shown by the types of pages they frequent, and age and gender demographic targeting; you can even take weather, location, time of day and type of device being used into account.
Provided you’ve started out with the right persona-building in your ABM campaign, AdWords provides plenty of options. Just a few?
- By uploading a list of targets to Customer Match for Google Search, your bids can be increased so you’re gaining a top position when these targets are searching your keywords.
- Personalize ads in users’ Gmail inboxes.
- By using similar audiences, expand your reach to potential prospects that share interests with your core list or buyer personas.
We’ll have more to say about using AdWords for ABM in the near future. For today, we’ll just end by saying that the more precise a marketer can be in using AdWord’s available strengths, the more actual leads they’ll uncover. That helps you conduct actual ABM leads management, rather than getting stuck in that quicksand of 94% keyword waste.
Then, my friends, is when you can really start to rock and roll.
Originally published on www.MarianaIQ.com
