8 Steps To Overcome The Most Hated B2B Phrase Using Mirrored Campaigns

This past Christmas, the phrase “doing more with less” achieved new meaning as I watched my nephew gleefully resuscitate his stubby, short crayons with Crayola’s Crayon Maker into fresh, new, color-packed crayons.

Kids with crayons to employees with goals, the “doing more with less” saying has certainly achieved epidemic proportions. No department has able to hide from its grips and CMOs ensure every last penny is squeezed from each marketing initiative.

Yet, savvy marketers still search for additional opportunities. Check out the insights of how mirrored exact and broadmatch PPC campaigns open the gate to truly deliver more without effect to your budget, while also expanding your reach.

In my experience, B2B marketers are often challenged with finding the right audience, choosing the proper message and ensuring they are continually driving new leads to fuel the sales funnel. Using mirrored broad and exact match Google PPC campaigns will solve all of these B2B challenges.

The approach is tiered; it will allow your campaigns to capture conversions at a more effective CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) through the exact match campaigns. Meanwhile, the broadmatch campaigns provide the opportunity to further curate your keyword set.

Check Out This Old Dog’s New Trick

A very successful B2B software services firm was recently faced with the challenge to increase leads, reduce their CPA and maintain the same budget.

Unfortunately, David Copperfield was busy, but in one week’s time, their equally magnificent account team was able to reduce their CPA by 50 percent.

They also saw their lead volume increase by 183 percent, the result of launching mirrored broad and exact match campaigns.

Had the same lead volume been achieved on the old CPA, the marketer would have been required to spend an additional $9,000 that week.

How To Launch Your Mirrored Campaigns

Step 1: Duplicate all your campaigns. Clearly label the duplicate campaigns as broad match to avoid confusion. Be sure to include all adGroups, keywords and negative keywords. Assign the broad match type to all keywords within the broad match campaigns.

Step 2: Change all the keywords in the initial campaign to exact match. The exact match campaigns should serve as your top converters; this action ensures the historical keyword data within Google remains intact. Mirrored campaigns work best after the initial campaign has been running for a period of time allowing for both budget and historical keyword data to build. At least one month of data is suggested.

Step 3: Create a negative exact match keyword in the broad match campaigns, one for every keyword in the exact match campaigns. This will ensure that your exact match keywords ads are triggered only from the exact match campaigns.

Step 4: Increase exact match campaign CPC bids. Depending on how often you are required to optimize bids to maintain your desired position, increase exact match campaign CPCs 50-75 percent more than the broad match campaigns. This will further ensure your exact match keywords serve first.

Step 5: Spread your initial budgets between the two campaigns, apply a higher budget level to the exact match campaign—try a 60/40 split to begin. Once your campaigns have been running for a period, apply budgets to the exact match campaigns, which are one to two times the initial campaign’s budget.

You want to ensure that your exact match campaigns have enough daily funds available to serve an ad each time a query triggers one. If you find your exact match campaigns are reaching their caps, apply additional budget until there is budget to spare. After a few weeks time the exact match campaigns will level out and daily spend will rarely change.

Step 6: Refine and Optimize. While your CPA will decrease and leads will increase as a result of the exact match campaigns, you will want to continually pull search query reports (SQRs) on at least a weekly basis, if not more frequently. You will find that the broad match campaigns will reach their daily spending caps, though not all queries mapped to this campaign are good queries.

The SQR reports will show you which keywords drive clicks and spend but do not result in leads, meaning they should be applied as negative keyword in the broad match campaigns. Keywords that are producing conversions should be added to the exact match campaigns as exact keywords, they should also be added to the broad match campaigns as negative exact match keywords. This again ensures keyword phrases are being triggered from the correct campaign, driving the reduced cost conversions.

Step 7: If you are unsure which campaign is serving for a keyword phrase, test them. Use the Google Keyword Tool while signed into your adwords account. Simply enter one keyword phrase and hit search. Below the search button, Google will identify exactly which campaign would serve an ad for that query.

Step 8: Measure your success. Combine the conversions and spend of each exact match campaign with its broad match counterpart. Review the number of conversions and calculate the CPA. Compare the results witnessed with the broad and exact combined campaigns to that of the original unduplicated campaign to examine the success of this initiative.

Mirrored broad and exact match campaigns are not limited to tough economic times; it’s truly a best practice one should employ at all times. While you go on to recycle your search campaigns to produce additional leads and lower your CPA, I’m going to finish showing my nephew a few new crayon color combos to liven up the refrigerator.

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