It is well known that B2B services usually generate higher volume items and less traffic than general public main stream goods and services.
It comes as no surprise that Cost-Per-Click in these areas is usually higher when compared to B2C models. Of course this is not definite rule but you can generally expect to see this trend.
We have been conducting ongoing pay per click and display advertising research which is now in its 13 month.
One of the themes in our research is the effects of online marketing for sale of low traffic (niche) high ticket items.
One of the flavours in this “luxury items” theme is a difficult B2B market.
In group of companies from B2B sector where typical order for goods or services is above £1000 we found research and data harvesting was responsible on average for 37% of traffic!
This figure includes corporate research, direct competition, marketing agencies and academic related traffic. None of these visitors have any intention of purchasing the goods and services they are searching for but they are responsible for significant portion of your advertising costs.
Dealing with these visitors is quite important and usually it is key to your increased conversions.
When we analysed budgets, quality of traffic and different types of conversions on these websites we found out few interesting results:
- On average increasing online marketing budgets by 100% decreased costs per conversion by 33% (research conducted up to saturation point in particular niche category based on initial campaign optimisation and setup without additional adjustments).
- Services or goods price introduction in advertising decreased traffic by 20% on average with increase or no impact on level of the most vital enquiries (sales, service requests, booking enquiries etc). Interestingly among all websites these which were selling B2B services reacted more spontaneously to this exercise with all receiving higher than 20% traffic decrease respectively goods sales websites were less responsive to the same changes.
In this case two dimensional impact was registered immediately. Directly by clicking on your advertising “Marauders” use your budget and stop your potential customers from seeing your ads. This decreases your budget abilities by over one third at this same time inflating costs of your advertising. You loose potential leads and money – serious marauders 
Of course analysis of all figures gave us an immediate reply to some of our long term headaches and it was quite surprising to find out how quickly some improvements could be made.
This particular research is conducted based on campaigns optimised for conversions with little emphasis on brand which we thought is a key to receive sensible results.
It looks like flooding market with high level budgets is giving you much better presence to your real audience but at this same time campaign optimisation is vital for better results.
For example setting up relevant caps on ad viewings and spreading your budget evenly is perhaps one of the most important tasks to avoid increased cost per conversion.
You can’t get rid of marauders but you can definitely make their impact less significant in your overall online marketing.
We plan some publication of this data later this year let us know if you are interested in receiving copy of our research findings.
