When it comes to understanding which B2B marketing tactics really work, who better to ask than Melissa Mackey? A well-respected industry leader with over a decade of digital B2B marketing experience under her belt. She's currently the Search Supervisor at Gyro , who was voted B-to-B Agency of the Year by Ad Age. Melissa also runs her own blog Beyond the Paid and is a frequent contributor to #PCCPodcast on T witter .

AdStage's Director of Product, Paul Wicker, taps into her expertise to reveal insights on how to run successful B2B campaigns. Listen to the full #PPCPodcast and check out some of the highlights below:

How-to for Ad Testing

Focus on Your Goal First

What do you want people to do? Once you identify your goal, write your call-to-action based on that. It’s important to start with your CTA to ensure you save plenty of space for it.

Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition

What sets you apart from your competitors? Figure this out. Craft your ad copy to your specific goal and selling proposition, and make plenty of ads for each ad group upfront.

Less is More

Don’t put all your ads to market at once. The fewer ads you test at a time, the faster you can learn. Running too many ads prevents you from getting any statistical significance. Don’t waste money on losing ads you didn’t know where losers yet. Instead, run two at a time and pick a winner. Keep testing winners with the ads in your approved ad list.

Always Check in on Your Progress

Keep testing your bids and take action. If you’re not testing, you’re losing money!

Tools to Measure Statistical Significance

AdAlysis

AdAlysis is a low-cost ad testing tool and saves you hours of time that lets you see winning ads on a daily basis. It can get cumbersome having to download excel sheets from AdWords and run calculations manually, especially if you're running the same test across multiple ad groups. You can also try the AdAlysis multi-ad group tests.

Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer has another handy statistical calculating tool that saves you time. Plug in your data into a spreadsheet and it will measure the statistical significance and confidence level of your impressions, clicks, and conversions for you.

Useful KPIs to Determine Winning Ads

• Cost per conversion : Tracking your costs might be a no-brainer with advertising, but to track cost per conversion, make sure you’ve added a conversion tracking pixel on your landing page so you can report on and optimize campaigns for this.

• Conversions per impression : This metric tells you how many times you converted out of each impression opportunity rather than just the click opportunity. This can be useful for clients with many offline conversions that can’t be tracked in AdWords and Bing.

• CTR : For difficult-to-track calling data, click through rate can be a useful metric. The hope is that you get people to your landing page and they’ll call.

Have We Come Full Circle on the Value of Impressions?

Impressions are valuable, but definitely on the bottom of the list of metrics worth optimizing.

That being said, impressions from a display ad can directly affect your search volume, even if it didn’t receive many impressions. This is the kind of performance lift that makes display difficult to measure, but impressions are definitely making an interesting comeback.

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