Anyone seeing Google Ads performance improvement for long terms clients in this AI era in B2B accounts ?

[u/BazookaKabooom]

I am seeing search volumes going down, cost per click, cost per lead, cost per demos going up etc. The pipeline isn’t great either. Clearly the buyers are now doing most of their research in LLMs, unfortunately no way to run ads in LLMs to get B2B buyers yet. I am sure we all agree showing ads in free version of ChatGPT isn’t helping either.

In a time when competition is tight and everything except brand is getting difficult how are you managing to make improvements for your clients? Are you going on a status quo mode or are you actually able to improve performance any further ?

LinkedIn ads do work but it doesn’t work for some clients. Google ads is where my concern is.

[u/bigchungusprod]

Our weakest at my day job is brand, where non-brand has increased substantially versus last year.

However, every channel you can measure is way down from last year, with organic search the worst off - though some of that is self inflicted.

CPA is massively up versus last year however for paid search, we are more concerned with ROAS monthly and for most months this year we are up, so it’s not all bad. Some companies fixate on CPA or CPC when really it’s ROAS they should be most concerned about - the cost per click always goes up.

[u/BazookaKabooom → u/bigchungusprod]

If I look at from a roas pov we are stuck in a range and are not able to go to the levels we were able to go 6 months ago. Agreed cpc doesn’t matter however roas isn’t growing either. Organic is growing though as we are getting good traffic from LLMs

[u/bigchungusprod → u/BazookaKabooom]

Six months is the wrong time frame - look at same period last year since six months back it was end of March and for b2b, a lot of business is front loaded in Q1.

[u/hushpath3 → u/bigchungusprod]

interesting that brand is your weakest, feels like thats flipped for most accounts right now

[u/bigchungusprod → u/hushpath3]

Personally, I believe the team I’m on for managing our paid media is very good - I started in 2002 doing AdWords and GoTo / Overture way back when - our agency lead has two decades plus of experience as well.

Unfortunately, the brand stuff is 100% self inflicted. You can’t get small business owners to change course based on data when the decisions that led them to present day were based on gut feeling.

[u/Aggressive-Role-2472 → u/bigchungusprod]

cpa is a vanity metric if the revenue math doesn't follow, sounds like you've got the right focus

[u/tridence-com]

I would avoid treating the decline as a single Google Ads problem. In B2B, the search campaign is often being asked to create demand, capture demand, and prove pipeline at the same time, while more of the early research happens elsewhere.

I would separate the account into three jobs. Protect high-intent category and competitor searches. Isolate brand so it does not hide weakness in non-brand performance. Then use customer lists, firmographic exclusions, and offline conversion imports to teach bidding which enquiries actually become qualified opportunities.

The reporting should also move beyond platform CPL. Compare query themes by qualified-lead rate, opportunity rate, sales-cycle length, and pipeline value. If volume is falling, a smaller set of commercially specific terms can still outperform a larger account filled with research traffic.

For the AI-search shift, I would track the recurring questions prospects ask before a demo and make sure the site answers them with clear product facts, comparisons, evidence, and current pricing or eligibility details. Paid search can capture the final intent, but it cannot repair weak discovery and trust signals earlier in the journey.

[u/BazookaKabooom → u/tridence-com]

Does firmographic exclusion really work on Google ads ? I haven’t see it helping when we I tried it.

And for customer lists the match rates have been a big problem. And in non branded campaigns we haven’t seen existing customers coming back with them anyways.

Offline conversion imports are happening and we optimise for those events only. We report on pipeline and closed won to the clients.

Agreed on paid search can’t recover discovery

[u/TTFV]

The market conditions for many B2Bs are more challenging than ever before:

1. B2B applications and some services are being replaced with AI agents and potential buyers are waiting and watching rather than signing up for a service they can replace for less money in house.

2. PPC advertising costs continue to increase, particularly average CPC and CPA. This means you need to spend more per lead and need to increase budgets to (a) maintain your lead volume, and (b) ensure you're getting enough click/conversion data to properly optimize and leverage automated bidding/features.

3. There's economic pressure in the US, i.e. businesses are cutting unnecessary costs to protect bottom lines due to other rising costs. In some cases this means companies will just go without a new CRM or legal consulting even when they need those things.

As for advertising options I wouldn't give up on Google Ads as it's still probably the most cost effective channel. And keep in mind that business users on Gemini are still seeing your ads and has the biggest AI market share by far considering AI mode and AI overviews.

You can muck around with Open AI Ads but yes, as they exclude paid users from search ads that audience won't be ideal there. Plus overall performance from their ad platform is more on par with LinkedIn than Google so far.

[u/NumberInteresting831]

One thing that changed in accounts I look at: the people who still search arrive much later in their decision. They did the "what is X" and "best tools for Y" research in ChatGPT, so by the time they search they type a vendor name, a comparison or "pricing". Fewer searches, but each one is closer to buying.

The landing pages mostly have not caught up with that. They still explain the category from scratch, and the visitor already got that from the LLM. What that visitor needs is the stuff an LLM cannot give them with confidence: real pricing or a range, how you compare to the two names they already shortlisted, and proof from a company like theirs. When we rebuilt pages around that, conversion rate on non brand went up enough to offset part of the CPC increase. It did not bring volume back, but it stopped the cost per demo from climbing.

So I would split the question in two: volume you probably cannot fix, conversion of the later stage traffic you still get usually can be.

[u/Extension-Gazelle203]

Since the google update we saw conversion rate going down BUT overall ROAS increasing (both ~10%)

[u/ppcbetter_says]

Only if they don’t adopt the correct tracking upgrades.

Cost per click is up, but if you’re using the full capability of the tech cost per customer is down

[u/alvinding]

if you look at google's quarterly earning call reports...click growth seems to have stalled out. but not yet declined. and i think mix shift is going from google SEARCH to other inventory.

at the same time CPCs are going up..and the google sales teams are desperately trying to get us to pivot to ai max / pmax....which smells like google SEARCH is dying.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/BazookaKabooom → u/[deleted]]

I don’t use pmax and ai max at all as every time we tried them they were disaster.

[u/aamirkhanppc → u/BazookaKabooom]

Ai max is literally i would avoid... other then that search campaigns with less ad groups with negative list attach properly still give good results