B2B Google Ads: 195 qualified leads in a year on a 146,000 UAH ($3.2K) budget

There is a classic of the genre in Ukrainian PPC: an agency takes on a B2B client and runs it like B2C. It launches Performance Max, sets up a “purchase” goal because the site “looks like an online store,” and then wonders why there are no leads, or why they are irrelevant. And then the client comes to me for an audit. How I run projects like this: Google Ads for B2B and service businesses.

Contents

1. Background: the audit and what it turned up
2. Why B2B is not just B2C with a bigger budget
3. What we did
4. The numbers over 365 days
5. The campaign structure has barely changed over the year
6. Conclusion
7. FAQ

That is exactly how this case started.

Background: the audit and what it turned up

The client is a B2B business selling industrial heating units for production floors, warehouses and plants. No potbelly stoves or household heaters — serious heating for serious facilities. Orders with six zeros are not unusual here. Orders with four zeros are almost nonexistent — simply because there are no cheaper products in the range.

Audit of 3 Google Ads Accounts #6: Heating

The client came in for an audit over a year ago with a simple complaint: the budget is being spent, there are no leads, and the ones that do come in are bizarre and have nothing to do with the business.

The audit showed a typical picture.

Mistake 1: Performance Max in a narrow B2B niche without proper signals. PMax learns from conversions. In a narrow B2B niche with industrial equipment there are, by definition, few conversions. There is nothing to learn from. The result: the system grabs everyone in sight because it does not understand who the target client is.

Mistake 2: broken tracking. Without tracking you have nothing at all. You cannot manage what you do not measure. On top of that, the agency was running YouTube — for industrial B2B.

Mistake 3: a “purchase” goal for a B2B audience. The site is built on OpenCart and looks like an online store. But B2B clients do not buy industrial heating through a shopping cart. Ever. They call, send emails, submit tender requests. Optimizing for “purchase” in a niche like this means catching the wrong audience.

And so we get 332 “conversions” in one month at 67 UAH ($1.5) each :)

Why B2B is not just B2C with a bigger budget

This is a separate topic worth understanding before you even take on B2B advertising. A B2B audience communicates differently, makes decisions differently, and the deal cycle is different.

In this case, the deal cycle can stretch up to half a year. Someone finds you in an ad in January — the order comes in June. And that is normal for industrial B2B. There have been orders that covered all ad spend for the entire year — with a single contract.

If you take B2C approaches and try to apply them to B2B, you will always burn money. Always. Because a strategic mistake cannot be fixed with tactics. You need to understand this at the start, not after the budget is gone.

Write it down, print it out, hang it above your desk: the wrong strategy is not fixed by the right bids and keywords.

What we did

Call tracking. The main inquiry channel in this niche is phone calls. Without call tracking we cannot see the most important thing. We connected GetCall.

The right goals. Instead of “purchase” — calls, form submissions, emails, online chat inquiries. Everything B2B clients actually do.

Search campaigns as the foundation. Not Performance Max, not Display, not YouTube. Only Search — where a person is already looking for something specific and is ready to make contact. Plus one Shopping campaign for a more mass-market category with steady demand according to trends.

No Performance Max at all. And we will never launch it in this niche. Narrow keywords, few conversions, a specific audience — PMax would do exactly what it did for the previous agency.

Traffic as clean as possible. Throughout the year we regularly clean up search terms. We do not need impressions everywhere for everyone — we need the most relevant queries from people who are actually looking for industrial heating for a business.

The numbers over 365 days

The budget at its peak was 30,000 UAH ($667)/month. There is simply nowhere to spend more: the keyword pool in a narrow niche is limited. We could launch PMax and “spend” more — but that would be spending for the sake of spending, not for results.

A cost of 746 UAH ($17) per lead may seem expensive. But the cost per click here is 50–70 UAH ($1.1–1.6). With a CPC like that, a cheap lead is physically impossible. And with an average order like this, even if a lead cost 1,500 UAH ($33), the advertising would still be extremely profitable. One order covers all ad spend and my fee with a big margin to spare.

There is also a share of inquiries whose attribution got lost — calls without UTM tags, direct visits, untracked emails. They never made it into the ad account. The real number of inquiries is higher than 195.

The campaign structure has barely changed over the year

And that is a good sign, not a bad one. When the strategy is chosen correctly from the very start, you do not need to rebuild anything drastically. It has been tweaked, cleaned up and optimized a bit — but overall it is the same as a year ago.

The client is happy. We talk regularly and have calls. He cannot disclose detailed deal figures for commercial reasons — but the very fact that we have been working together for over a year speaks for the result.

Conclusion

There is no magic setting that saves a bad strategy. If the wrong approach is chosen at the start, no keywords, bids or optimizations will help. Strategic mistakes are fixed only by changing the strategy.

B2B is a separate world with its own logic. If you do not understand how a B2B client makes decisions and communicates, you should not take on this segment.

A similar approach — Search, call tracking and manual bidding — in the AC repair case, where the conversion rate hit 24% instead of the forecast 10%.