Most B2B PPC accounts look fine on the surface. Impressions are climbing, clicks are coming in, cost-per-click is within range. Then someone asks “is this actually working?” and the answer gets vague fast.
The first 90 days of any new PPC effort, whether it’s a new account, a new agency, or a renewed push on an existing one, either build the measurement foundation that makes scaling decisions possible, or they don’t. Most accounts that “underperform” later aren’t actually failing at media buying. They’re failing at one of three things: defining what a conversion is worth, tracking it accurately, or sending the right traffic to the right page. Get those three right, and bidding and targeting become solvable problems. Get them wrong, and no amount of optimization fixes it.
This is a framework for auditing where your account, or a prospective partner’s approach, actually stands on each of these three dimensions.
Test One: Does Your Account Treat Conversions as Equally Valuable?
In B2B, a whitepaper download, a newsletter signup, a contact form submission, a demo booking, a pricing-page inquiry, and a sales-qualified opportunity are not interchangeable. They sit at wildly different points in the buying process and carry wildly different probabilities of becoming revenue.
The diagnostic question: open your conversion actions in Google Ads. Are they all weighted the same, or treated as equally “successful” in reporting? If a campaign optimizing toward “conversions” can’t distinguish between a newsletter signup and a demo request, it will, predictably, optimize toward whichever is cheapest and most frequent. That’s usually the newsletter signup.
The fix isn’t complicated in concept, even if it’s effortful in practice: assign relative values to conversion actions based on their historical likelihood of progressing to revenue, and feed those values into the platform via conversion value rules or offline conversion imports. An account that hasn’t done this is, by definition, optimizing toward volume rather than pipeline, regardless of how skilled the person running it is.
Test Two: Can You Trace a Lead From Click to Closed-Won?
This is the test most accounts fail, not because it’s conceptually hard, but because it requires coordination across tools that often don’t talk to each other by default: Google Ads, your analytics platform, and your CRM.
The diagnostic questions:
- Which conversion actions are counted in Google Ads, and which are excluded from bidding signals entirely?
- Are offline conversions (sales-qualified opportunities, closed-won deals) imported back into the platform, and on what cadence?
- How are duplicate or re-submitted leads handled, do they inflate conversion counts?
- When sales marks a lead as disqualified, does that information ever flow back to the ad platform, or does it just sit in the CRM?
If the honest answer to the last question is “it sits in the CRM,” then your bidding algorithm is optimizing on partial information indefinitely. It will keep finding more of whatever generated the leads that looked good at the top of the funnel, even if none of them closed. For teams setting this up, Google’s guide to offline conversion imports is the canonical reference for implementation requirements and upload cadence.
Test Three: Does Your Landing Page Strategy Match Buyer Segmentation?
A generic landing page with a broad headline and a form is often the actual bottleneck in accounts that are blamed for “PPC isn’t working.” Expensive B2B clicks deserve page experiences that match the visitor’s context.
The diagnostic question: pull up your top five campaigns by spend. For each one, what landing page does it send traffic to, and does that page’s messaging match the buyer role, search intent, and offer stage implied by the campaign’s targeting? A campaign explicitly targeting CFOs that lands on the same generic “request a demo” page as a campaign targeting individual contributors is a signal that landing page strategy hasn’t kept pace with targeting sophistication.
| Diagnostic | Strong Signal | Weak Signal |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion value definition | Conversion actions are weighted or value-tiered based on revenue likelihood | All conversions treated as equally “successful” in reporting |
| Tracking & attribution | Offline conversions (SQLs, closed-won) flow back into the platform on a defined cadence | Sales outcomes live only in the CRM, with no feedback loop to ad platforms |
| Landing page alignment | Page messaging varies by buyer role, intent, and offer stage | One generic landing page serves most or all campaigns |
Where Automation Fits, and Where It Doesn’t
Google Ads now includes substantially more AI-assisted campaign expansion, asset generation, and query matching than it did even a couple of years ago. These features can genuinely help, when an account has passed the three tests above. They can also amplify the underlying problem when it hasn’t: an automation system fed bad value signals and incomplete tracking will optimize, efficiently, toward the wrong outcome.
Before turning on (or evaluating someone else’s use of) automated campaign types, it’s worth being explicit about:
- Which conversion signals the automation is allowed to optimize toward
- Which landing pages or URL expansions are in or out of scope
- What audience exclusions need to stay in place regardless of what the algorithm “wants” to do
- How often performance against business outcomes (not just platform-reported conversions) gets reviewed
This is less a one-time checklist and more an ongoing governance question, the answers should be revisited as the account, the product, and the available data all change.
Applying This Framework
If you’re auditing your account, run through the three tests literally, pull the data, answer each diagnostic question honestly, and use the table above to flag where the gaps are. If you’re evaluating whether to bring in outside help, the same framework works as an interview structure: ask a prospective partner how they’d approach each of the three tests for your specific account, and pay close attention to whether their answers are concrete or generic.
For further context on how PPC partner evaluation criteria are discussed more broadly, SaaSAgency.org catalogs how SaaS-focused agencies describe their approach to these questions, though the framework above should be the basis for that conversation regardless of who’s on the other side of it.