Why Paid Search Keeps Failing B2B (impression-share traps, demand capture vs. creation, when to pull the plug)

Summary

GTM Live Podcast Summary

Episode: Why Paid Search Keeps Failing B2B (impression-share traps, demand capture vs. creation, when to pull the plug)
Date: July 13, 2026
Host: Passetto
Guest: Liam McCormick, Corrective Growth

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Episode Overview

This episode tackles the persistent challenges B2B SaaS companies face in making paid search actually generate pipeline and revenue, rather than just burning budget. Host Carolyn Dilks (Passetto) and expert guest Liam McCormick (Corrective Growth) go deep into the operational realities of B2B paid search—when and why it fails, common agency misalignments, how zero-click search and AI are upending old playbooks, and granular advice on optimization, attribution, and deciding whether to pull the plug or keep tinkering.

The discussion is practical, sometimes candidly critical, with plenty of frameworks for revenue leaders to evaluate their paid search investment—and ultimately, be brave enough to trim fat or test new channels.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why B2B Paid Search Is Getting Harder, Not Easier

• Zero-Click Search & AI Impact:

  • 93% of Google AI mode sessions produce no outbound click, shrinking available paid search clicks ([12:03]).
  • Despite lower clicks, CPCs keep rising—driven by new waves of venture funding, especially in AI.
  • “Google’s making more money from ads at the same time people are clicking on ads less.” (Liam, [13:38])

• B2B-Specific Challenges:

  • Unlike e-commerce/D2C, B2B deals are high-ACV, long-cycle, lower volume, and require tight CRM integration.
  • Standard paid search agency playbooks are poorly matched for B2B, which tends to get stuck with vanity metrics or incomplete data.

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2. Agency Pitfalls and Attribution Gaps

• Disconnect from Business Impact:

  • Many agencies operate solely “in platform”—reporting leads and conversions, stopping at metrics like cost per demo, not pipeline ([07:20]) or closed revenue.
  • “When you work with an agency, 99.9% of the time they're going to just sit in platform and report on platform metrics… That does not happen in the B2B space.” (Liam, [05:11])

• The Quality Score/Attribution Loop:

  • Quality score (match of keywords, ads, and landing pages) massively impacts whether you even show up in auctions and costs per click.
  • Too many B2B marketers have never been “in the weeds” of channel setup/optimization ([09:30]), leaving agencies unchecked.

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3. Paid Search: Demand Capture, Not Creation

• Shifting Strategies:

  • “Google Ads is really just like a demand capture perspective at this point.” (Liam, [15:23])
  • Attempting to “create demand” (ex: competitor campaigns, category education) is less viable with rising costs.
  • Paid search works best for companies in categories with large, existing demand and high enough contract values to absorb costly acquisition.

• Category & Keyword Nuance:

  • Success arises from tightly aligned search terms, ads, and dedicated landing pages (not generic homepages).
  • “When Google's deciding if it's going to run your ad…it’s going to look at your quality score and your budget.” (Liam, [19:52])

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4. Red Flags: When to Pull the Plug or Pivot

• Symptoms of a Failing Program:

  • Account “agency bounce” is rampant—each new agency pitches a new approach but rarely solves upstream strategic issues.
  • Low search impression share and low click-through rates often point to deeper quality or market-fit problems ([25:00]).
  • If paid search produces zero closed-won deals after months, something fundamental is off.

• Triage Steps:

  1. Assess attribution: Are paid search leads progressing, or just filling forms?
  2. Use proxy metrics (lead scoring, fit checks) if the sales cycle is long.
  3. Consider shrinking budget and repositioning paid search as a tertiary channel, not a core pipeline source.
  4. “You don’t need to pull the plug; view it as, hey, this isn’t going to be your primary channel. Start small and maybe you can scale it over time.” (Carolyn, [31:22])

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5. The Impression Share Trap

• Agency “Just Spend More” Mentality:
  • Impression share (“how often your ad shows vs. it could”) is a seductive metric—but needs nuance.
  • Always break out “lost to rank” vs. “lost to budget” ([32:32]).
    • Lost to rank = fixable by improving ad/landing page quality.
    • Lost to budget = can fix with spending (but only makes sense after rank is healthy).
  • “Impression share is the single most seductive upsell in paid search.” (Liam, [32:32])
  • “You might not want to be in the other 85% of those searches… they're so far outside what you do it doesn't make sense.” (Liam, [35:55])

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6. The Demand Creation-Capture Continuum

• Paid search is primarily a demand capture tool, but can play a role earlier in the customer journey, especially with improvements in Google’s AI/search capabilities ([37:02]).
• Last-touch attribution tends to give paid search too much credit; use “all ad interactions” to see touchpoints throughout the journey.

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7. The Next Frontier: AI Max & Performance Max

• Performance Max (PMax):

  • Double-edged: highest volume, but generates a lot of junk leads ([40:57]).
  • Lesser control, even with asset-level restrictions.

• AI Max:

  • Newer format for surfacing paid search ads in Google AI mode.
  • More control than PMax; will become increasingly important as user search queries get longer and more conversational.
  • “You have a ton of control over how you want to show up in AI mode.” (Liam, [42:01])

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8. Branded Search

• Branded campaigns are (still) the highest performing—usually because buyers were influenced elsewhere and Google is just the last step ([46:21]).
• Always split branded vs. non-branded in reporting, or you risk greatly overestimating paid search’s true pipeline impact ([49:01]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Platform Metrics and Business Results:
  “I don’t run paid search without ensuring attribution is set up in the first place. I know it’s going to be a bad client for me if they’re like, oh, we don’t give CRM access, we don’t talk about attribution. ... it’s really, really difficult to align paid search for B2B just working out of platform.” — Liam, [05:11]

• On Industry Skill Gaps:
  “90% of marketing leaders have never seen the back end of Google Ads. So they're just taking what the agency has to say at face value.” — Liam, [08:36]

• On Impression Share:
  “Impression share is the single most seductive upsell in paid search. ... Are you losing to rank or to budget? If it’s to rank, that’s in your control.” — Liam, [32:32]

• On Running Experiments:
  “Every single paid search budget, paid media budget, marketing budget should have a small percentage for testing … You just don’t know what’s going to work.” — Liam, [49:32]

• On Growth Mindset:
  “How are you expecting to grow when you’ve done the exact same thing at the exact same budget for the past three years? Time to try something new.” — Liam, [52:01]

• On ClickUp’s Comedy Ads (Stand Out Creative):
  “ClickUp is the case study on running good AI mouse campaigns. They absolutely nailed it.” — Liam, [53:17]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Zero-Click Search & Market Trends: [12:03] – [14:58]
• What Makes B2B Paid Search Work (Company Profile): [15:23] – [18:18]
• Keyword/Quality Score Best Practices: [18:27] – [23:09]
• Account Troubleshooting & When to Pull the Plug: [25:36] – [31:22]
• Impression Share Explainer & Pitfalls: [32:32] – [36:26]
• Paid Search: Demand Capture vs. Creation: [37:02] – [40:47]
• AI Max & Performance Max Discussion: [41:27] – [46:21]
• Branded Campaign Strategy: [46:21] – [49:01]
• Liam’s Hot Tip / Testing Mindset: [49:32] – [52:01]

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Actionable Takeaways

• Never run paid search “blind”—integrate with CRM, fix attribution, and ensure you see what actually drives pipeline.
• Don’t scale spend without fixing quality score/ad structure first.
• Always differentiate between branded vs. non-branded results in attribution and reporting.
• Run ongoing controlled experiments (10–20% of budget) in new surfaces like AI Max, PMax, or video/YouTube.
• If the data says paid search is a tertiary channel for your business, treat it as such—reinvest the rest.
• Don’t get fooled by agencies selling “more spend” to chase impression share—demand answers on rank losses and root causes before spending more.

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Connect with Liam:

• LinkedIn: The only “Liam McCormick” with his spelling.
• Web: correctivegrowth.com (light website, but includes info/offers)

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Final Thought

“If you want to be successful, you got to do the hard things. ... In a world that is so fucking saturated ... you gotta stand out.”
— Carolyn, with Liam citing ClickUp as a leading example ([53:06])

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A must-listen episode for B2B leaders rethinking their relationship to paid search, agencies, and go-to-market experimentation.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I'm so excited to introduce my guest today, Liam McCormick from Corrective Growth. He's run paid search for years, and he will tell you it's harder for B2B than it's ever been. And today we're getting very tactical. We're going to talk about what makes a company right for paid search, when to pull the plug on the channel, and why spending more just to improve your impression share is not always the right answer. But one housekeeping item first. And it's about our workshop that we're hosting next week. So, at Posetto, we've analyzed dozens of B2B software companies this year, and literally across all of them, outbound converts. Basically 1% of everything a BDR works. That's 1 in 100 of those people that you have to call actually make it the other side to an opportunity. That's a standard because there's just so much noise in the space right now. And there's one person who knows how to reach your target audience better than anybody I know. That's Steve Armenti, and he's running some of the most sophisticated ABM programs out there. And on July 15, he's sharing the whole thing in a live workshop. We've got over 200 people already registered, so trust me, you want to be in the room for this one, go to pasetto.comJulyworkshop and join us. Okay, guys, here's Liam. Enjoy the show.

[B]

You're listening to GTN Live, a podcast by Passett.

[A]

Okay, awesome. Well, listen, I'm glad you made it happen despite all of the construction and chaos happening in your house.

[B]

Yeah, Such is life.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm recording, and I think we should just dive right into it.

[B]

But, Liam, let's get after it.

[A]

Yeah. So would love for you to just share a little bit more about your background and your agency that you're running right now.

[B]

I'm going to correct you. I don't run an agency, but I'll get into that at some point. I do. I do, but I don't. At the same time, I try to, like, not brand myself as an agency just because I think, like, agencies get a bit of a bad, bad rep. And so how do you refer to yourself then?

[A]

Just explain.

[B]

Yeah, so I don't know if I figured that out yet. Like, from a branding perspective, it's mostly like I come in as a fractional head of growth, but then I bring in the execution layer with me. So I started this, like, before everyone decided to go Fractional, I guess. Like, I started this almost two and a half years, three years ago now. And so I was, I was really early to the game and I was just like coming in as a fractional head of growth where I was doing all of the execution work. And then as more people started to come through, I was like, they're paying me more than it would make sense to like have someone be button clicking in like a paid search account. And so I remained as like a fractional head of growth, but now have like a small team of people to like help me execute just faster for clients. So like design LinkedIn folks, Google folks, Reddit, et cetera, et cetera. And so I brought in this fantastic group of really skilled folks to come help me be able to move a little bit faster. And so I feel like the reason I try to not brand myself as an agency is because I see what happens a lot of the time because I take over a lot of agency, like paid search accounts. It's like they get pitched by someone and then they loved talking to that person and you know, whether that's the founder of the agency or someone more senior at the agency. And then you kind of get a bit of a bait and switch sometimes where it's like a more junior person is coming in to like run your accounts now. And I was trying to be the antithesis of that. So I run point on all of my clients. Every single decision still runs through me for all of my clients, even if I'm not necessarily always the one. Like putting negative keywords in the negative keyword list in a paid search campaign.

[A]

It's funny, we have a really similar, you know, posetto small, sort of like boutique consultancy. But we have this same situation when people think of us as an agency because they'll tell us like, oh, well, we've been burned by an agency before for.

[B]

Right. I can't tell you how often I get that exact thing, which is like. Which is why I'm like, oh no, I'm not an agency. But like, I am, but I'm not.

[A]

I should have known better from my own experience. But that's awesome. It sounds like a really great background. And just for the audience listening, how you and I got acquainted was, well, Refine Labs has a slack community, the Vault, which I'm sure many of our listeners will know what that is. But anyways, I went into the Vault a couple weeks back because we have a client at Passetto who has been really struggling to make their paid search work. They've been going at it for over a year. They've switched agencies three times, they're spending a lot of money on it and they're sort of at this point where they're like, do we just throw in the towel? And so I wanted to get some objective third party advice from people who know this world really, really well. Because it's also something that many of our clients and Most of the B2B space really struggles with is like getting paid search to work in a manner that's actually efficient and not just burning their budget. So you came in and you gave me some really, really good advice. And then, you know, we started talking and I had said, why don't you come on the show and maybe we can just unpack this more because I think what you had to say was so informative. Thank you.

[B]

And again, I run a lot of paid search, but when you work with a paid search agency and all they do is paid search, we're going to talk about the problems with running paid search for B2B companies. But a lot of those problems get enhanced or magnified when you're working with an agenc because they're looking at platform for the most part. And that really works for E com D2. Cuz you're going to report like all of those kinds of companies are going to report back right from a Shopify account to like the exact dollar valuation that was purchased from a Shopify store that's going to get fed right back to platform. That does not happen in the B2B space. And so paid search is. So when you're looking at it in a B2B space, it's really tweaky and super different. So when you work with an agency, 99.9% of the time they're going to just sit in platform and report on platform metrics. And I've again tried to be the antithesis of this where like yes, we look at platform, but every single one of my clients, I am in their CRM working with them. Either we're putting it together or having someone on their team like actually fix their attribution and understand from a paid search or a paid media perspective in general, like how this functions. I don't run paid search without ensuring attribution is set up in the first place. I know it's going to be a bad client for me if they're like, oh, we don't give CRM access, we don't talk about attribution. That's not something you can have access to. I'm like, this isn't going to work because it's really, really difficult to align paid search for B2B just working out of platform.

[A]

It's crazy. And I really feel like that is a weak area of a lot of agencies. And I see it firsthand at Passetto mostly because we're sort of like that connective tissue, right? We're in the CRM and we're also seeing what the channels are producing and able to sort of identify that there's waste and where the real ROI comes from. And it's funny because anytime you bring in an agency, they really stop at conversion rate. They can't go any further because they're not plugged in to this. And I'm just like it's mind blowing to me in my role and I'm sure for you too that there is not more responsibility on behalf of the agency in that world.

[B]

100%. It's always blown my mind when you see paid search reports come out all the time. Like we got you this, this many leads and we'll for, for simplicity's sake we'll call them like most B2B companies are looking at book demos and it's like we had this many demos booked and it was this cost per demo and here's where it came from. And you're like that is great in the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. This needs to evolve in what they're reporting. But you will work with these agencies for like six months. And the reporting's always been the same. It doesn't ever adjust to where it needs to be. We're not reporting on, on pipeline and close one. And if you have a long sales cycle like hey, these leads came through. Can we look at a rough idea of propensity to purchase? And that's where I have found big issues again with agencies working directly with like marketing leaders. It's like the agency knows paid search well the marketing leader and whether they have some rev ops people, they know their internal setup and attribution really well. I find it hard where someone finds the real connective link that can work on the operation side and understand attribution, understand reporting but also like call the agency out on how to talk about Google Ads at the same time. Like so it's like being able to speak both languages is essentially what I tried to solve for a really long time because when I was just me doing the work, maybe one of my clients was working with an agency and for you know, that agency had been reporting directly into a VP of marketing or head of Marketing. And they're going, we did this, this, this, and this. And if we're being honest, 90% of marketing leaders have never seen the back end of Google Ads. So they're just taking what the agency has to say at face value. And when you bring in someone that has lived kind of both sides of that life before, it's like, I can see where this agency is going wrong in their strategy and what they're trying to do, and then I can go help attempt to fix it on the back end at the same time. And so you kind of need to be able to speak both languages if you are working with an agency. You just need to have that level of understanding what they are actually doing and what they're actually telling you that they're doing.

[A]

Yeah, that really resonates for me especially too, because I come from a world of marketing leadership, but I got to that point without ever actually being in the weeds of executing. Like in channels.

[B]

Most have.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. That seems to be really the norm for a lot of leaders, especially the really senior ones, where they're really putting a lot of trust in their agencies to just execute and believe that they know what they're doing. But when it really comes to the technical details, it's very hard for them to make strategic adjustments when they've not been in the channels and not been doing the setup and the optimization, et cetera.

[B]

Correct. Because again, they are incentivized for the most part. When I run paid search for anyone, I run at a blanket cost at set intervals for how much you're spending per month. Like, I really try to not tie what I'm being paid to run paid search to a percentage of ad spend because that inherently incentivizes an agency to attempt to get you to put more budget in. So they're going to, you know, they're incentive. They're incentivized in the wrong direction, in my opinion. And so when an agency is, I don't mean to harp on agencies, by the way, they have their place, but it just comes down to like paid media in general, paid search, anyone coming in to run go to market programs on your behalf. Those things need to be aligned to business results. And a demo is maybe like a tertiary business result. If you're getting 70 demos through paid search a quarter, you're like, that could be great. But it is like, it's not. It is a. It's pointing you in a potential direction, but it's not the actual full story of what's happening.

[A]

Yeah, I don't think it's throwing shade on agencies at all. I think this is generally just a PSA around. If you want your paid search to be effective and optimized to the best that it can be, it really requires the ability to have that connective tissue. Whether it's bringing in somebody external or your agency and plugging them into CRM or just having a person boots on the ground be able to make that connection right like that I think is the real key takeaway from that. I do have a lot of questions for you as we know because I sent you the listen in advance. So maybe this is a two parter. We don't know but I wanted to just start with some context setting. I want you to tell me what's happening in the market. I'm hearing from a lot of people that paid search is getting way less efficient these days with the rise of like zero click search and things like that. So tell me what you're seeing. What are you seeing in the industry with respect to paid search?

[B]

So bingo, like zero click search is transforming search in general. So paid and organic. It's a wild amount of people. I'm actually, I'm like trying to pull up the stat that I've been running from this morning. So in AI search and this is specifically Google, take this with a grain of salt cause I was talking to Google, the Google Ads team last week. So I spent a bit of time training the Google Ads team on how I run Google Ads for B2B companies because they were really interested in that and the like produce results is like 80% searches and without a click, 93% of AI mode sessions produce no outbound click. And so like most people depends how you're using Google. I don't end up in AI mode all that often when I'm googling anything. But there's the potential that a lot of people do is like 93% of the time if you've ended up in AI mode is no one's clicking on anything. And so what we're seeing is a really shrinking of clicks. The other big thing right now is there is a massive volume of venture backed money going into companies right now. And so you're seeing a shrink in the market of overall clicks and at the same time a huge, huge, huge rise in CPCS because of all the venture money going into a lot of AI companies right now that are just absolutely blowing up the search market in terms of costs. So they're eating these AI companies. Their whole goal right now is to grind market share and figure out how to get market share coming from folks. And so it's like these two coordinating factors at the same time is the market for clicks is shrinking and CPCS are rising because there's so much money being put into Google. So we're right now talking like there's way less people clicking. And so you would think based off of less people clicking that there is less. Like Google's making less money. Google's revenue from ads went up 20% last year. And so like this, all of this is combining and like Google's making more money from ads at the same time, people are clicking on ads less. People are just clicking less. And so CPCS and click through rates, especially in B2B, CPCs are climbing. Click through rates are really, really starting to drop right now. And so this comes back to a conversation regarding Google Ads is a hard place. It's always been a hard place for B2B. It's been a hard place since I started in B2B. It's getting harder. And this is where it comes to like running intelligent paid search at this point is like there's a ton of things to do, a ton of things not to do. I'll let you take it from there for more questions. But yeah, CPCs are inherently rising. I don't necessarily see them going down or coming back down. And click through rate is 25% of what it was a few years ago, right?

[A]

Yeah. Wow. As if paid search wasn't already a really hard channel. Like we've been talking about how companies burn money on paid search for years and now the stakes are just getting so much higher. Correct. So what would you say if you were to compare and contrast? What would you say would be the profile of a company where paid search can work really, really well for driving pipeline? And then maybe what's the profile of a company where it may be just be a waste of money for them.

[B]

So if we were to talk about like the old like demand creation, demand capture situation, like I once and potentially still could make an argument that you have some ability to create demand or create awareness around your product from other offerings in your area, that's out the window at this point. So Google Ads is really just like a demand capture perspective at this point. Why I'm saying that is that means that what would make a company primed to do well in a paid search landscape is already having a bunch of demand, whether it is for their brand or for their category or for the problem that they solve that needs to be built. So a Good example. Because people might be wondering how do you create demand potentially in paid searches? Like there's two ways, right? You could run competitor campaigns, which I have thoughts and opinions on competitor campaigns, as does everyone. But a lot of people forget that there's demand for other ways of solving a problem that you potentially have a new way of solving. And so a great example that I always use is Covid hit like March 2020 Peloton ran a massive paid search campaign on people buying gym equipment. So it was like with the, with the concept of like you don't need gym equipment, you need a peloton. And they ran that across a bunch of paid search. And so what they did was they saw that there was a bunch of demand for gym equipment, realized that they could harvest that demand over to them. That could potentially still work, but with the rising cost is like it's just not a landscape to attempt to create demand for B2B companies like Kind of using that at this point. Same with competitor campaigns. It's like the cost to run a competitor campaign because quality score is going to be super low. Was already crazy expensive. Now it's just going to be even more expensive. So I would just stay away from that right now. So you need a lot of demand to already exist for what you're offering. The second thing is because of the rise in CPCs, you likely need to be able to handle from a contract value the ability to take the hit on the customer acquisition cost rate. So those would be like the two things that I look for is like is there volume for stuff that they're already, that already exists in the space and is their average contract value enough to like eat what's inevitably going to be a higher customer acquisition costs? I'm specifically talking in like a non branded high intent paid search space right now. So for category specific problem specific phrases, kind of a different story when it comes to brand but for branded searches. But right now those are the two things I always start with when I'm trying to figure out if I'm even going to recommend these people on a paid search.

[A]

Right. And what is the different story then? If you're talking about like non branded, maybe like category keywords and things like that. Tell me about that scenario.

[B]

So if you're bidding on category specific keywords is like the volume needs to be there. A lot of people, they just start and I don't really have a problem with just starting. But most of the time the strategy really isn't there for a lot of it. It's in like, they found a bunch of category keywords that they want to bid on. It could be good, it could be bad. And so they start and so they write some ads and they drive it all to the homepage and then they're really wondering why CPCs are even higher than they usually were. I think this is part of the feedback that I gave you for, like, the initial place to start was like, what does quality score look like? People really disregard how much quality score comes in to the equation when you're running paid search. And for anyone that doesn't know, in layman's terms, quality score is essentially like, how well does the keywords that you're trying to run ads on match what your ad says, match what your landing page says? How fast your landing page loads, does it load well, Mobily? Essentially, the experience from someone searching through to taking the action that you wanted, that you wanted them to take. And a lot of the time you see when people are just starting off, you have a quality score sort of in like a three to four space, which usually means you have reduced your ability to run ads significantly, like 50%, 60%. It's wild. When you have such a low quality score, the reduction. So when Google's deciding if it's going to run your ad, it's going to look at two things. It's going to look at your quality score and it's going to look at your budget. And so in your paid search campaigns, you'll see sort of search impression share loss 2, and there's going to be loss to rank and loss to budget. Loss to rank is if you're losing a bunch to rank, it essentially means your quality score is bad. If you're losing a bunch to budget, it just means you're not bidding enough. And so if you're looking at it like 50%, 50%. Right. It's like if you're losing 10% to budget, but you're losing 80% search impression share to rank, it does not matter how much money you put into this, your ads will not show up in a more structured way. And not enough people look at those two things. They kind of go, oh, we'll just overpay, we'll just over, like, we'll just keep putting more money in. At the end of the day, Google is a referral system and it's only as good as the things that it refers you to. And so is it possible to pay to be in auctions? Yes, to an extent. You can overpay to be in auctions, which is Back to the competitor campaigns. Your ads going to your quality score is going to be like a three. That's okay. You just need to know that you're going to have a low search impression share and you need to make sure your budget, you're at your search impression share loss to budget as well. And so not enough people, when they're looking sort of in their category keywords are like, okay, how do you structure keywords? And then how do you structure ad groups? And how does your keywords fit in those ad groups for a quality score purpose? How do you make landing pages that actually both are well structured and reflect your ad group well enough? And then when you're writing your ads, it's like there's a balance between writing an ad that converts and writing an ad that works well from a quality score perspective. So, you know, eight years ago, 10 years ago, the first headline in a lot of paid search campaigns was just like the words that was in your head. So they were doing single keyword ad group skags. And it was just like you typed in CRM software and your first headline was CRM software because you got a massive quality score bump. Because the exact thing that they search for is the exact thing in your ad is the exact thing on your landing page. Google's way smarter than that at this point. But at the end of the day, there's a whole really long process when you're looking at running ads to category keywords. It's like, where do they fit in ad groups? How does that ad group match to your ads? How does that ad match to your landing page? How have you structured your landing page to actually convert?

[A]

Wow. Yeah.

[B]

Not enough people look at this stuff, right? They're just sort of like, okay, we're going to throw a bunch of keywords in this campaign. Maybe we split out ad groups properly. Probably not. And then they're going to throw all of these people to the homepage. Homepage is a bad experience because it doesn't say anything that they were searching for in the first place. And then they wonder why Google Ads isn't working for them. And it's like, I think you can do that. And I, I do this a lot where I'm trying to pick a landing page when in the first 30 days is like, we're not going to create new landing pages for the most part. It's like, we're going to pick a landing page that potentially works and we're going to see if we get a couple of leads through, if we can prove out that this channel has some viability first and then we'll figure out how to build better landing pages and those sorts of things. So it's a bit of a process to go all the way through that.

[A]

It feels too like chicken before the egg sort of situation because I do feel that many agencies or many even internal practitioners are and could be running paid search based on sort of like the old keyword way of doing things.

[B]

You would be shocked how many people that have been running Google Ads for oh I got 15, 20 years of running Google Ads. Are running Google Ads like they were running it 15 years ago. A hundred percent, 100%. This happens all the time.

[A]

Yeah. And it's sort of the similar prognosis for what we see across the board in go to market. Right. Like I think so much of the industry has become accustomed to operating the way that things worked two decades ago. Right. And it's just we're at the like a total crux in that journey right now where Maybe there's like 5 to 10, maybe 15% of the industry that has evolved and adapted to what the new world looks like. So I reached out, I told you a little bit about one of our customers who's trying to make paid search work for them. So I want to sort of use that as like a little bit of a case study here because they're not the only one. Right. We have a lot of, you know, people in our portfolio that are similar. So just a little bit of a background for this company. They are a very high acv, sort of low volume business selling in a very mature category. I won't name the category. And they've been trying to get paid search to work for the last year or so. They've switched agencies maybe two or three times in the last probably year and a half. When we look at all of the closed one deals, I think there has been zero closed one where paid search has been part of that journey and maybe like three opportunities, probably a couple million in flight right now where paid search has been part of that. So their cost per click I believe on non brand is like less than 1%.

[B]

Do you mean their search impression share?

[A]

It's 15%.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So at what? So basically their agency is telling them hey you've been with us for like 2/4, you need to give it more time. But like at what point does that answer stop being acceptable? Right? Like they're at this point where they're like we don't want to keep spending. They spend 7k a month on just the Ad costs, Nevermind the agency fees, never mind the resourcing that goes into that, nevermind all of the other like fully loaded costs that go into supporting paid search. So in that situation, what do they do? Do they pull the plug on paid search? And this is not specific to them, by the way. You know, I've spoken to many CMOs who are in a very similar situation a lot to unpack.

[B]

Okay, so the agency bounce around is difficult because you're probably going to see each agency is going to come in and have a problem with the way the previous agency ran stuff, right? They're going to come in, they're going to audit your account, they're going to tell you, oh, we do stuff this way. That agency was doing stuff a different way. This is why our way is better than that agency. And so at the end of the day, if I was going to do diagnosis, it's like, do you pull the plug? It's really hard to say, right? So for me this would come down to I always, I started the call with this. I always start essentially with like, what's the attribution setup actually looking like? So inevitably you're getting some paid search leads. Are they qualified to purchase? Are they moving through pipeline at a rate that makes sense, Are they even closing? And I know we're talking with a large company, so I think we're talking like a really long ACV on this. And for anyone listening that has a long ACV that's trying to understand if any program is going to work for you is like you've just got to find a way to proxy it earlier on in the life cycle to understand if what's coming through, like what's the potential behind these companies. So whether you're doing some sort of like lead scoring mechanism or you're even just eyeballing it to understand if these are potentially good fit leads like you just need and you're just marking them as like good fit, bad fit. You can send all that information back to wherever you want, but you need something earlier on in the proxy lifecycle. So that's my first step when I'm coming in is like, what have the leads actually started to look like? What's the attribution setup looking like? And then the second one is like, then you're in account from there. Like let's, let's say you got 10 leads from, from paid search over the past X amount of time or past six months, even though the account is not necessarily looking healthy, is like, okay, there is inevitably some good business that's starting to come through. This is when you sort of have, this is why I always have conversations with clients where I'm like, this is not necessarily a dead channel, it just might be a tertiary pipeline channel for you. As in like, let's accept the fact that this is not going to be an absolutely perfect nailed on. This is where you're getting all of your business from. There's no problem with having Google Ads sit as a secondary or tertiary pipeline revenue source for you. But the problem is when people don't admit that, then essentially they're going, we're just going to keep putting money in money and money and money. And instead of like, okay, doing the analysis of how much it would cost to be in all the other searches that you're missing from search and pressure sharing again, we go back to like, how is the account actually set up? Usually when you have, you know, whatever, a 0.5 sub 1% click through rate, this is just a mismatch on what's actually happening in this account. 99% of the time it's like something's going wrong. There's a bunch of keywords in here that are wrong or the ad groups are set up. A lot of the time it's like, oh, we have a bunch of broad matched keywords. So even if you have a category keyword, it's broad match. And right now, if you're broad matching any keywords in B2B, your search term report, which is where you actually see the search terms that people are searching for, can be all over the map. And so usually you just have to go through and cut waste. Okay, so if, if you can prove that this is driving some decent leads you need to go through. And it's just like it is cutting it down to the points where this was actually driving good. Where are the places in the account that are actually driving good leads? So you like flim the account right down to that point and then you're essentially looking for like, okay, where do we actually take it from here? Does it have any place to go or is this just what it is? So I see a lot of budgets that I'm like, okay, you have $7,000 set aside, you're getting X amount of leads. They are turning into this amount of pipeline, this amount of revenue. We're actually just going to cut this budget by 50% so we're taking seven grand, we're putting it down to $3,500. This is a tertiary pipeline source for you and it's going to Run and it's going to get you X amount of leads roughly turns into X amount of business results roughly per month. And then you take the other budget and you figure out where else to go now with that. Right. And so I think that's A lot of people get stuck in, oh, we've decided that we're spending $7,000 on Google Ads per month. And they get in this mindset of it's either this amount of budget we set or it's $0. And most of the time it's somewhere in the middle. It could be more. Right? It's like, say someone's spending seven grand, they're having a great time with it, and it's doing a lot of good things. You could put more money in, assuming that there's room to grow. I think a lot of people see paid media, paid search working well and just decide that they're going to double their budget. And it's like, it doesn't really work like that. Like, double budget does not mean double leads is something I have to have a conversation with people a lot about is like, you might be tapped out on what you can do at $7,000 based off of your account, but most of the time it's like, we're just gonna, we're gonna trim the fat on this account. We're gonna take it down. And then back to my previous point is like, we're gonna go create demand in other places with that $3,500 that we just saved. And here's the thing. If you create more demand for when you start creating more demand, your paid search starts working better. So you might find that you put $3,500 into a demand creation and then your paid search starts to work better. And then you might have some room to like, re budget because more people are. Now you've had some effect on the market where more people are searching for your category, you have more people searching for the problem that you solve, et cetera.

[A]

Yeah, it makes total sense. It's definitely aligned with my mentality, which is maybe you just don't need to pull the plug, but view it as, hey, this isn't going to be your primary channel. Start small and maybe you can scale it over time or maybe you eventually pull the plug. But I want to talk to you about the impression share piece because I was observing as like sort of like an objective third party on a agency call for an agency that has been struggling to make paid search work. And the advice and commentary from the agency was, hey, your impression share is very low and you're bidding in a very competitive environment, which means you need to spend more to increase your impression share. And I was very shocked to not have more discussion around the underlying quality of the pages, the conversion experience, all of the other things that might go into making that ad effective other than just you need to spend more because you're bidding in a really mature competitive category. So walk me through that impression share argument. Feels really seductive for somebody who doesn't understand the nuances of how to make the ad or the channel actually work. Right? So tell me a little bit about that. Let's go down that path a little bit more.

[B]

Impression share is the single most seductive upsell in paid search. It is what everyone likes to talk about. I do like to talk about, like, I'm not going to sit here and be like, again, when I diagnose an account. I will always look at search impression share. But what most people say is like, oh, you have this much search impression share. Let's say you have 8% search impression share. Let's say in a very mature market you need to spend more. Let's take your exact example. And it's like, okay, but where are we losing impression share? I think that that doesn't get talked about enough is like, where are you actually losing impression share? Like, are you losing impression share to budget? Are you losing impression share to rank? And not enough people are actually looking at if they're losing impression share to rank. Because it's not an easier fix, it's an actively more difficult fix. You can just put more budget in to get more search impression share from search impression share loss of budget. So you've hit the nail on the head that are not enough people. So when you look at search impression share loss to rank, that's your immediate place that you should be looking like. So in your campaigns, like, what is your search impression share loss to rank? Like you. This is everything at marketing, right? Is like, if you have a 3 out of 10 quality score across the board and you're losing 80% search impression share to rank. How many times we heard over the years you got to fix your fundamentals before you can grow, right? Like, have a good baseline. And so like, you should just sit there and figure out how does your account need? Do you need more ad groups? Do you need less ad groups? Do you need better ad copy? Do you need better landing pages? Do you, do you need better conversion on your landing pages? Right? Like that's, that's the biggest place to start. And so when when you're trying to get pushed into a conversation about search impression share and they're just talking about search impression share as a whole. Anyone listening to this that's having this argument, ask them what your search impression share loss to rank is versus your search impression share loss to budget because they're about 50% in terms of your actual built in search impression share. So Search impression share breaks down Search impression lost to rank, Search impression share loss to budget. If your search impression share lost to rank is like above 30%, you have a real problem that you need to start looking into because you're losing search impression share on the basis of things that are directly within your control. That I'm going to put costs no money, but it costs someone's work, so it costs some money to actually fix. The other thing I really want to point out is like you should stress test search impression share. Just because you're only in 15% of search impression share, that doesn't even mean you should be in the rest of those search impressions. You got to remember, like, people forget that it all comes down to match types and it all comes down to keywords. And so like you legitimately might not want to be in the other 85% of those searches for those keywords because they're so far outside of what you actually do that it doesn't make sense for you to be in them. And so like, let's say you're, you know, HubSpot and you're running ads on CRM software. And so an agency would tell you, let's say that you're losing a bunch of search and pressure share on the keyword CRM software. But if you were to go look like 85% of that search and pressure share ends up being like CRM for plumbers, CRM for lawyers. Those just aren't searches you actually want to be in. And so a lot of people forget that. Like the search impression show that you're actually a part of it probably shouldn't be 100%. You don't want to be in 100% of those searches. The margin that you're in, as long as it's starting to convert. Those are the actual. There's an X percentage on any search impression care metric that those are the high intent, those are the highest intent capture, those are the customers you care about. You probably don't want to be in the rest of those anyways. And so those would be like the two things that I really, really look at in terms of when, when you're getting Seduced by search impressions.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I had another thought on that. Maybe we can end with this question because I know we're coming up soon on time, but we talk a lot about building and creating demand obviously. And so there is this notion in B2B, whether or not it's wrong or right, that paid search is really a demand capture channel. Right. So last thing that somebody does before they convert on a form, right. And that it can't necessarily create it. So I think you sort of alluded to this in the beginning, but walk me through your mindset a little bit more. Do you agree? Do you disagree? And like how should people budget for that?

[B]

Oh, so I agree and disagree at the same time. Like all of these questions are always nuanced. So yeah, when you think about paid search, right, it's like it's, there's going to be so many times where someone comes through. Let's say you're running, you got non branded high intent. You even potentially have like subsection of your non branded high intent that's running as like a remarketing list for search ads campaign. And then you're running branded. And so what happens is like someone finds you because they were searching for your category, they come to your website and then they leave. They're searching competitors and you're running, they're searching for other things in the category again. But you haven't, you have a remarketing list for search ads come up. So you're bringing it back through that and then they come to your website and they come back to the brand. And so if you're only looking at that in a like demand capture sense, you're going to, and you're going to just sort of look at it like oh, someone, this was someone that was searching for our brand. And it's like not really the case of the situation, right? Like if you're defining demand creation as like just demand creation for your brand, then your non branded high end tent campaigns are creating demand for the business, right? Because there's a potential that someone didn't know about. You googled your category, found your non branded high intent campaign because you're on your category key terms and came to you through that. And so it's hard. You'll see like if you use HubSpot, you'll see like they have the ability for you to look at it as first hatch, last hatch and all ad interactions. And I will always go, I will always look at all of them. But the all ad interactions is the place where you actually get to see what people talk from your Google Ads because it, this is the nuance, right? It's like are you going to define someone searching your category and finding your product as like that was demand creation for your brand or was that demand capture for your category? Right. Like there's a bit of a gray area there. And so I think Last touch like really can over credit paid search because it shows up as a final touch on a form submit and you're saying that's the only thing that happened here and like you're looking at brand, you're like oh so many people are just searching our brand and it's like well go look at the all ads interactions like go, go set up. If you're not using HubSpot you probably should set this up anyways. If you're using Salesforce or something it's like go set up like First Touch, Last Touch conversion tab. Go see what actually happened when they first came through, what's the most recent thing that they've done and when they actually converted to take their action, what's happening there. And so it is going to be mostly a demand capture channel especially as we see cpcs really start to hike which we talked about at the start. But there is the potential for that path to be a little bit longer and I think people leave that out a lot of the time.

[A]

Yeah, definitely. The reason I ask is because when I look at this data a lot of times where obviously companies measure everything against last touch, right. What was the last thing that person did? But when you actually look upstream what I tend to see is that paid search can show up somewhere sort of like in the middle of the journey. Maybe it's not the first touch all the time, it's not the last touch, but it still has a place. And yeah, it's just interesting when you think about the role of the channel from a different lens of like oh you know, we're just. It's like a bottom of funnel capture channel.

[B]

Especially with some questions about this pre conversation we nick into the this is going to change with AI Max and B2B brands running PMAX which I've tested on a bunch and like this, the AI Max ads are sort of going to like flip this script for how much demand you can create coming out of Google.

[A]

Okay, can we talk about that? So I know Performance Max. A lot of people, I see a lot of people using it. I see a lot of people using it and then turning it off just because.

[B]

Turning off pmax.

[A]

Yes, it's interesting because I find pmax to be sort of a double edged sword because on the one hand it's always the top campaign that produces the most results. When I say results I mean like actual pipeline. But at the same time it also produces a lot of junk.

[B]

The most junk. Yep. It's a bit of a. Yeah, so

[A]

that's a hard one to navigate because it's like basically you're spending a lot for the results that you're getting. So a lot of times I do see, you know, companies turn that off and when they see that. But what is this AI Max thing? Tell us about that.

[B]

So AI Max is essentially search ads coming up in AI mode in Google. So PMax has gotten more interesting with. They've given, Google has given more transparency into pmax like where your ads are displayed, et cetera, et cetera, which they didn't used to give. The issue is you still have no control over that. So like if you're seeing 50% of your PMAX campaigns is going to display is like you don't have the ability to like turn off that.

[A]

But correct me if I'm wrong and keep me honest, can you not set restrictions on where the ad will show?

[B]

You can set restrictions but you still don't really have the ability to control it as well as what like AI Max is going to do. Okay, so PMax has the ability to show up in AI in AI mode. It has the ability to essentially show up anywhere. So technically you can for pmax like you get like asset level performance. You get some, you can do negative keyword lists, brand exclusions, you can do like search partner. Yeah, you get like search partner placement visibility. You can do account level placement exclusions. So like, but at the end of the day it's like it's not a massive amount of control for what B2B is going to want. Like again I always test PMAX like I will always see if it's going to function and we're going to like always adjust the parameters. But the difference between PMAX and AI Max or the AI Max allows you is only. Okay, so it is specifically search ads in AI mode. So it is an actual unlock and you have a ton of control over how you want to show up in AI mode. So it's like if you took like, if you took the PMAX AI mode and just like put it over in two search ads. The thing is it's in AI mode and so it depends on your audience and I think people forget about this a lot is like what does your audience Actually like who is your audience? Like how maybe versed in AI and feeling good about using AI mode? Are they going to be, are they going to have like a net potential like negative outlook on using AI mode in Google. And so I think a lot of that comes down to are your searches turning into AI mode? Anyways in the first place I think Google stated like it's like 1 billion searches or something like that. They've moved over to AI mode. But for the most part you will only trigger an AI mode ad when someone is like really long tail searching for something. Like when you're having a conversation with ChatGPT.

[A]

Like a question.

[B]

Almost like a full blown question question.

[A]

Yes, got it. I see myself personally doing a lot more of that in Google now.

[B]

Do you? I never do. Oh no, because I do it all the time with like Claude and ChatGPT. But I've not, I don't think I've had that flip switch into Google where I've actually started because it will give you like the AI mode summary and you can go back and talk with it. I've, I've like not really started to like have the actual conversation with Google AI mode yet.

[A]

Yeah, I don't have conversations but if I'm looking I've got like a six year old. Right. And he's constantly being like can you just search that up? He always asks me a question, he's like just search it up. So I open Google and I'll ask a quick question. Like the other day I had said what kind of sharks live in freshwater or something like that. And if you just want a quick answer it's pretty good. But I'm not going to have a sit down and have a conversation with it. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah. And I think like it'll be interesting to see if that behavior changes because like when we're talking about Google Ads being like a demand creation piece, my envisioning for that is it's going to be when people are having conversations with Google to get to a point. Right. Because like you would and doing their research because you would place right now quad chatgpt perplexity into a demand creation sort of bucket right now, right? Where people are having conversations and they're finding your brand or your webpages through those. That's going to be similar to how people inevitably use AI mode at some point in the relatively near future. But now your ads are going to show up in like conversations people are having with Google and so like it is going to just get higher and higher and higher intent as like people kind of zoom in on what they actually want it to be. And so there's the ability for you now to like ChatGPT has ads. So it's going to be like kind of a similar solution to this. Right. It's going to continue down the line of like people are going to continue talking, the intent gets higher as the conversation goes on. But if you're there in some sort of advertising space as people are looking at this like and it runs directly on search ads. Right. So like you're only going to appear roughly in what you are already running search ads on. It's just like another segment of Google at this point.

[A]

Yeah. And on that note, like one thing I see a lot, I'm sure you see it too, is that branded campaigns are usually the highest performing. No, no surprise. There's no. But I always think that's people going into Google and literally typing in your brand name and then converting. It's like they got there from somewhere

[B]

and I think they did get there somewhere.

[A]

How they got there.

[B]

That's what I mean.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And it's just like so much of is overlooked just around the journey. That's why I love just the journey from point A to point to pipeline creation to close. What are all of the things that they did? There's just so much nuance in that 100%.

[B]

We started this conversation with zero click searches and like I don't click on that many things out of LLMs. Right. And it's very likely going to be the same in AI mode when people are carrying on conversations is like they're going to see your brand in the ad that you ran in AI mode and they're probably not going to click it and then they're going to go back. Maybe they even just have a conversation directly in AI mode about your brand or they're just going to start a new search and put in your branded term. And so like now they went from, in Google, from your Google Ads having no idea about what you do to now coming through a branded search space. I meant to bring this up earlier is like branded search people have strong opinions. Like strong opinion, yes, strong opinion, no. But when you need to create demand at such a high level because of this like massive increased cost in cpt, brand of search is starting to go down across all of my clients now. Brand search is starting to go down and it's doing a really good job because people, you now have a larger, I think bucket to create demand, create awareness in different places. And so more people are going to be searching for your brand and as long as your metric hold out, they're really, really cost affordable to run. They're the exact opposite of competitor campaigns where your quality score is almost guaranteed to be like a 9 or a 10 out of 10. And so because AI mode, because everything's ending in zero click searches for the most part is in Google. It's like people are going to just Google your brand a lot. And so depending, again this is in flux with depending what your brand name is. If you have like some generic brand name that means a different thing and a Wikipedia article is going to come up, running branded ads gets a little bit more difficult. But like inevitably, like most people should at minimum test out running branded ads. Hot tip. If you're working with an agency, please have them split out reporting on branded from not branded. There is a 80 to 90% chance if they're reporting on a blended situation in your account, your account is likely being propped up on your branded search.

[A]

Yeah, definitely. That's very, very interesting. Okay, well, thank you. This has been an amazing conversation. I love how tactical we went. Some of it a little bit over my head, but I think it's going to be awesome for this audience. Before we go, I want to ask you two things. So I'm going to ask you where people can find you and learn about your business, not agency. And also if you're going to leave people with like, you just gave me a hot tip, but like one really big takeaway that they can go and you know, have a think on as it relates to paid search, what would that be?

[B]

Yeah, so like most B2B marketers, my main, my main channel for any sort of content is LinkedIn. My guess is my name will be somewhere in the show Notes. I think I'm the only person on LinkedIn that has my name spelled the exact way that it's spelled. So if you spell my name correct, I'm going to be the only one that you can find which is, which is great. And then my website is not super built out. Correctivegrowth.com it has like all of the things that I offer. If you're really interested in chatting a little bit more and then hot tip. Okay, so this is the hot tip that I gave the Google Ads team when I was chatting with Google Ads about running Google Ads for B2B. They're coming up with new stuff all the time and they came to me with a problem of like we, we have a difficulty getting brands to try New stuff. They just want to run search ads. Search ads, search ads. And I'm like, yes, I get it. Most, a lot of companies mostly should be running search ads, but you never know what's going to work. And so I love an 80, 20, whatever your okay feeling about 80, 20, 90, 10, every single paid search budget, paid media budget, marketing budget in general, should have a small percentage for testing, testing AI Max, testing, PMAX, testing YouTube ads. You just never really know what's going to work. And most of this stuff, it's not super high lift, right? Is like you need a couple of creatives. You probably already have them for LinkedIn. You might have a video for LinkedIn already go has some fun stuff for them. You just don't know what's going to work. And so if you've ran search ads at 10 grand a month for the past three years, it's doing X, Y, Z. You've never really looked outside search ads, you've never looked outside new stuff. Take a small percentage of your budget and see if there's some asymmetrical upside to running something new. Now.

[A]

I love that thinking. I think that's a great piece of advice, especially coming from somebody who literally had this conversation with the people at Google. I'll just like round that out with. My thought is I think it's really hard to get B2B marketers thinking in like experimentation terms. I think so many marketing leaders are very binary in their thinking. It's like we do this or we don't, or we're gonna kill this or we're not. You know what I mean? And it doesn't have to be that way. I think there's so much to be said about, hey, I'm noticing this issue. I'm gonna go try this thing. And it's not like I'm gonna devote 90% of my budget. I'm going to try this thing and test it and play with it. And I, I really love that way of thinking, transparently.

[B]

It's why I've branded myself as a fractional head of growth, because it allows me to like, I'm going to come in, we're going to set up stuff properly, we're going to get your programs functioning. I push every single marketing leader I work with to test new things. And like the nice thing is like I've done in kind of the growth space, most stuff and you should always just like 10% of budget, of time, of whatever you got, trying to figure out the next avenue. I feel like companies talk to me a lot because they're not growing. And it's like, how are you expecting to grow when you've done the same thing for the past. You've done the exact same thing at the exact same budget for the past three years. Time to try something new.

[A]

Yeah. I had a really great conversation with somebody recently who said, if you want to be successful, you got to do the hard things, right? Anybody can put out thought leadership. Anybody can run paid ads. Anybody can do a webinar. But, like, in a world that is so fucking saturated with all of that shit everywhere, gotta stand out. You gotta stand out. And I think ClickUp does an amazing job. I really admire them for their comedy ads that they do.

[B]

That's so funny.

[A]

I'm not sure if that started as an experiment, but so cool to see that.

[B]

ClickUp is the case study. This is so funny. ClickUp is the case study on running good AI mouse campaigns. Yeah.

[A]

It's amazing.

[B]

They absolutely nailed it.

[A]

Yeah. Great. Well, on that note, Liam, thank you so much. I would love to have you on again soon. And I think that was an amazing conversation. Thanks for being here.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

Sa.