Flash back to five years ago. Many B2B advertisers measured results of SEM advertising on a leads and cost per lead basis, while ecommerce shops focused on revenue and return on ad spend. Thought leaders in the B2B space realized that lead quality was important to measure, and some ecommerce firms gave consideration towards the lifetime revenue of a digital customer.

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Oh, how things have changed.

As digital advertising agencies and their clients become increasingly more sophisticated (and smarter) in measuring the impact of campaigns they are running, we’ve seen the line between what B2B and ecommerce advertisers should optimize towards grow increasingly blurred. Gone are the days when an agency can rightfully claim they specialize in crafting ecommerce – and thus not B2B – digital media strategy and vice versa. If, as an agency, you can excel in one of these verticals, you should excel in the other because of how much their ultimate goals overlap.

Are B2B and ecommerce really that similar?

If you’re wondering how much overlap there actually is between B2B and ecommerce strategies, all you’ll need to do is compare the optimizations we perform for each type of business.

Here’s a sample of what we measure and optimize towards for our ecommerce clients:

·       Revenue and ROAS: Maximizing overall revenue above net profit target of our advertising efforts, factoring in client margins

·       Overall lifetime revenue of an average customer

·       Cost per first-time buyer

·       Enterprise sales (bulk orders or leads from mass potential buyers)

Here’s a sample of what we measure and optimize towards for our B2B clients:

·       Lead quality indicators: AQL, MQL, SQL, SAO, ACV, TCV, pipeline generated, etc.

·       Revenue: Annual or projected lifetime revenue from closed deals, based on data you can auto-import from CRMs back into the Google Ads interface

·       Ratio of closed annual contract value to ad spend on a campaign-by-campaign basis (i.e.: return on ad spend)

What is the result of all of this?

We’re left with ecommerce clients who now essentially optimize based on customer quality and B2B clients who now ultimately optimize based on revenue and return on ad spend.  This is nearly the exact opposite of where the industry stood five years ago.

Image Source: Max Pixel

Techniques that were used five years ago to effectively optimize B2B digital advertising programs towards lead quality now come in handy for our ecommerce advertisers focused on customer quality. Similarly, there are applications from historical ecommerce strategy to apply to B2B strategy today.

If you think about it, this makes sense, right? No matter if you’re a B2B company or an ecommerce site, your goal is to make money to sustain your business. It’s no surprise that digital advertising success, measurement, and optimization have now begun to align under that shared goal.

Looking for help optimizing your B2B or ecommerce business? Contact our team of experts for an account analysis.

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