B2B PPC for long sales cycles: why clicks cost £10 to £35, one keyword list for SEO and paid, a worked budget, and what a B2B PPC agency should report.
A click on a B2B search term can cost £10, £20, sometimes £35, and the person clicking is rarely the person who signs. They're one of four or five people on a buying committee, and the deal might close six months after that first search. On paper that looks like a poor fit for pay per click. In practice, B2B PPC is one of the most dependable pipeline tools we run, because the economics work backwards from the deal size rather than forwards from the click.
This piece covers what makes B2B paid search different, how to build an account around commercial intent when volumes are tiny, a worked budget with real numbers in it, when LinkedIn earns a share of the money, and what a report should show when the goal is pipeline rather than clicks.
Why are B2B clicks so expensive, and does it matter?
They're expensive because the deals behind them are large, and the auction has priced that in. A term like "erp implementation partner" or "commercial fleet telematics" might get 90 searches a month in the UK and cost £25 a click, because every firm bidding on it knows one signed contract is worth £40,000 or more. Google's auction is a rough proxy for deal value.
So the question is whether the arithmetic from click to contract holds up. A £25 click, a 5% lead rate and a one-in-eight close rate puts a signed deal at around £4,000 in media. Against a £40,000 contract that's a spend most finance directors would sign off. Against a £3,000 one-off job it isn't.
Two things follow. Deal value has to be in the model before anyone touches the account. And every step between the click and the contract needs measuring, because a 5% lead rate becoming 3% turns a good channel into a poor one without the Google Ads dashboard ever looking any different.
Should SEO and paid be working from the same keyword list?
Yes, one list, and the two channels should argue over it. What we do on any B2B account is build one keyword universe for the market: every query group a buyer might use, from "what is [category]" through to "[category] provider uk", with volume, cost per click, current organic position and paid impression share against each. Then the channels divide it up.
The logic's simple once the sheet exists. Where the site already ranks first or second for a commercial term, paid can usually back off, or drop to a low bid that only catches the position when a competitor pushes in. Where ranking is 12 months of work away because the top of the page is owned by two big vendors and a comparison site, paid does the heavy lifting and organic goes after something more winnable. The sheet gets reviewed each quarter, because positions move. There's more on the method in our integrated search strategy piece.
One steer on the channel itself, because it matters more than any tactic in this guide. Paid search is rented. B2B cost per click in the accounts we run has gone up somewhere between 10% and 20% a year for the last three years, and a business whose whole pipeline sits on Google Ads feels that every January. It's a line I've used on client calls for a while: over-reliance on Google Ads will eventually come back to haunt some companies.
The fix isn't to stop paying, it's to move a share of the budget, we'd usually say 20% to 30%, into ranking for the six or eight commercial terms the account currently pays the most for. Two years on, the paid account is smaller and the pipeline isn't.
How do you build an account when the volumes are tiny?
Most of the B2B accounts we run have fewer than 2,000 commercial searches a month across the whole keyword universe. At that size the default Google Ads setup, broad match plus Smart Bidding plus a large budget for the algorithm to learn from, tends to burn money, because the system never gets enough conversions to learn anything and fills the gap with loosely related traffic.
What works instead, in order:
- Start from commercial intent and work outward. The first campaign is exact and phrase match on the 20 to 40 terms where someone is looking for a supplier: "[category] provider", "[category] company uk", "[category] pricing". Nothing informational yet.
- Give category and competitor terms their own campaigns with their own budgets, so a £30 competitor click doesn't quietly eat the money meant for your own category.
- Treat the search terms report as a weekly job, not a monthly one. On a low-volume account, one poorly matched query on a £25 term can be 15% of the month's spend. Negatives added on a Tuesday save money on the Wednesday.
- Write landing pages for the committee, not the searcher. The operations manager who clicked will forward the page to a finance director who didn't. A pricing range, an implementation timeline and a named person to talk to do more for a B2B landing page than a fourth testimonial.
One reassurance. An account that's been run on broad match and Maximise Conversions for a year is usually 70% sound underneath. The keyword research was done, the ad copy is fine, the conversion actions exist. The fix is match types, negatives and campaign separation, and it's a fortnight's work rather than a rebuild.
What does a realistic B2B PPC budget look like?
This is the model we build for every B2B account before spending a pound. The numbers below are typical of a mid-market UK services account; swap in your own and the rest recalculates.
- Media budget: £6,000 a month
- Average cost per click: £18, so about 330 clicks
- Click to lead rate: 5%, so about 17 leads at around £360 each
- Lead to sales qualified rate: 35%, so about 6 SQLs at roughly £1,000 each
- SQL to closed won: 25%, so 1.5 deals a month at about £4,000 in media each
- Average contract: £30,000 a year at 60% gross margin
Add a £1,500 management fee and the account costs £7,500 a month to run and brings in roughly £45,000 of annual contract value each month, or £27,000 of gross margin. With a four-month sales cycle, the money spent in January starts coming back in May and, if the contracts bill monthly, has paid for itself by around month eight. After that the cohorts stack. That's a channel worth funding. It's also a channel with three rates (lead, SQL, close) that need checking every month, because a two-point drop in any one of them moves the payback by months.
Run the same model with a £1,500 media budget and you get about four leads a month and one deal every three months or so. That isn't a bad outcome, but it's too few conversions to learn from. Below about £2,500 a month in media, for most B2B categories, we'd usually suggest one tightly targeted exact match campaign on the five best terms, with the rest of the money going on the landing page and the CRM, rather than covering the whole universe thinly.
How do you get lead quality, not lead count, into the account?
The Google Ads dashboard stops at the form fill. The business cares about what happened next, and on most B2B accounts a fair chunk of the form fills are students, suppliers, job seekers and people outside the UK. Bidding to form fills means bidding for those too.
The fix is offline conversion import. Google Ads attaches a click ID, the GCLID, to every visit. HubSpot, or Salesforce or Pipedrive, stores it against the contact. When the sales team moves that contact to "sales qualified" or "closed won", the CRM sends the stage and a value back to Google Ads as a conversion. In plain English, the account learns which clicks became customers rather than which clicks filled in a form, and Smart Bidding can then optimise towards SQLs with a value attached.
On accounts where we've switched the bidding target from leads to SQLs, cost per lead often goes up a little and cost per qualified opportunity comes down. That's the trade you want.
Two practical notes. The form needs to capture the GCLID in a hidden field, which is about an hour's work. And the sales team needs to move deals through stages within a few weeks, because Google Ads only accepts conversions up to 90 days after the click. A legal services client of ours found that enquiries had been silently failing between the website form and their IT setup for a stretch, and real fees were lost before anyone noticed. No one had done anything unreasonable; the form had worked when it was built. It's why a monthly test submission is on every checklist we run.
The report should follow the same logic. For a B2B account the first page shows SQLs and cost per SQL, pipeline value created, closed won revenue where the cycle allows, and impression share on the core commercial terms. Clicks, click-through rate and cost per click belong on page three, as diagnostics. How the numbers reconcile between GA4, the ad platform and the CRM is covered in our marketing attribution guide.
When should LinkedIn take some of the budget?
LinkedIn is the right second channel when the search demand isn't there. If your keyword universe adds up to 300 searches a month in the UK, Google will run out of people to show your ad to, and a LinkedIn campaign aimed at 2,000 named accounts by job title reaches buyers who haven't typed anything yet. Clicks are cheaper than B2B search, £6 to £12 is common, but intent is far lower, so the first campaigns should offer something a committee member would actually download, with retargeting to follow.
It's a poor second channel when Google search demand exists and the budget is under about £5,000 a month. Splitting £4,000 across two platforms leaves neither with enough conversions to learn from. We'd usually spend it all on search until impression share passes 80% on the core campaign, and add LinkedIn from the next budget increase.
Questions we get asked
How much do PPC agencies charge?
For a B2B account spending £3,000 to £10,000 a month on media, a management fee somewhere between £1,000 and £2,500 a month is the range we see most often, either flat or as 10% to 20% of spend. The fee should buy a weekly search terms review, conversion tracking checks, landing page changes and a monthly report in pipeline terms. We've broken the models down in what a PPC agency costs in the UK.
What is a PPC agency?
A company that plans, builds and runs paid search and paid social accounts on your behalf, usually Google Ads and Microsoft Ads first, with LinkedIn and Meta where they fit. For B2B the useful test of one is whether it reports on qualified pipeline from your CRM or on clicks from the ad platform.
How does PPC work?
You choose the searches you want to appear for, write an ad, and pay each time someone clicks it. The price is set by an auction against everyone else bidding on that search, weighted by how relevant Google thinks your ad and page are. In B2B the searches are few and the clicks are dear, so most of the work is in choosing which searches to pay for and proving what the clicks turned into.
How do SEO and PPC work together?
They share one keyword list. Paid covers the terms organic can't win yet and gives you six months of live data on which terms convert, which tells SEO where to invest. As organic positions arrive, paid steps back on those terms and the budget moves to the next gap.
How do we increase PPC conversions?
In this order: check the tracking with a test submission, tighten match types and negatives so the clicks are from buyers, then work on the landing page. A visible price range, a short form and a real person's name on the page are the three changes that have moved conversion rates most for our B2B clients. Ad copy comes last.
Is Google Ads worth it for B2B?
When the deal is worth more than about £5,000 and the search demand exists, yes, and the worked model above is how to check. Where the deal is smaller or the category has almost no search volume, we'd say so on the first call and look at organic or LinkedIn instead.
Where we fit
We run paid search for B2B companies where the deal size makes a £20 click sensible and the pipeline is measured in the CRM rather than the ad platform. For AM Phillip Trucktech, an industrial B2B client, the paid search work cut cost per lead by 32%, lifted qualified enquiries by 41% and saved about £120,000 a year. We're a small team, and the person who builds the model is the person who runs the account.
The plain next step is a second opinion on your account or your model. Our search advertising page explains how we work, and a conversation is the easiest place to start.
