Holini

Across the B2B Google Ads accounts we audit, we’ve seen cases where more than 50% of the budget was leaking in the wrong direction. Whether it is a conversion goal teaching the algorithm to chase signals that never turn into revenue, ads running on placements no real buyer ever visits, or bid strategies pulling spend in the wrong direction entirely - most accounts have more working against them than for them. At Holini, our senior-only team has audited 100+ B2B tech companies. We know what to look for, we find it fast, and we know exactly how to fix it. Watch our Google Ads audit findings to see the most common causes of budget waste and how we eliminate them.

Your pipeline has stalled. The team is running tests - new audiences, new creatives, new campaign structures. But without a clear diagnosis, every change burns budget on the wrong problem. Every week of inconclusive action is more spend gone in the wrong direction. The gap between your current pipeline and your target grows. And competitors who moved faster are already capturing the results you are leaving on the table. At Holini, we have diagnosed this exact plateau across 40+ B2B tech companies. Watch our 2024 Google Ads audit findings to see the most common causes of a paid plateau and how we fix them.

There is a growth lever in B2B marketing that very few teams are using yet. I call it AI-positioning, and it may be the highest-return work your marketing does this year. Here is what made it concrete for me. I opened a clean incognito window and asked an AI which marketing agency it would recommend for an industrial ventilation manufacturer. It named four. Ours was not one of them. I asked why, and the answer was specific: our site positions us for B2B software, not heavy industry. Our strength reads as paid search, not full-funnel work. It even named the software clients behind that read. Here is the uncomfortable part. We are expanding into exactly that kind of industrial work, and we can deliver. The AI was not wrong. It was reading a positioning we had outgrown. That is the trap for any company: the AI recommends what you have published, not what you can do. You will not see the gap until you ask the AI yourself. Your buyers run the same check before they decide. Forrester found that 94% of B2B buyers now use AI during the buying process, not only to find vendors. They use it to weigh the options and to justify the choice. Until recently you could earn that trust without proving much. Most buyers are not engineers, so a confident pitch carried them most of the way. They rarely read the documentation. Now every buyer has something that does the deep read. It goes through everything you publish and grades you against your competitors like an engineer would. This changes what decides the deal. Put yourself in your buyer's shoes: can the AI find enough proof to recommend you over the alternative? Often it cannot, because the proof is not on your site in a form it can read. You can see exactly how you are judged, the same way I did. Ask the AI how it grades and recommends vendors in your category. It hands you the rubric it applies to you. Then check your proof against it from your ICP's angle and fix the gaps. This is where it becomes a marketing problem, because the presentation is yours to control. You decide how clearly your site states who you are for and what you solve, what proof you put in front of the AI, and which credible third-party signals you point it to. Quality beats volume here. A single verified award or review can outweigh fifty scattered mentions. Here is what that is worth. Say you win three in ten of the deals where you make it to the shortlist. Move that to four in ten, because the AI now points the buyer to you instead of a competitor. That is a third more revenue from the same pipeline. No new leads, no bigger budget. To be fair, a person still chooses to check you in the first place, so the emotional pull has to be there. The AI's answers are not stable either, shifting between sessions and between models. The direction holds anyway. So this week, pick your three highest-value ICPs, ask the AI and see whether it recommends you. If it does not, let it tell you what is missing.

Testimonials are the top-performing content type in Germany. In Spain and the US it’s case studies. Brazil, whitepapers. Canada and India, webinars. You probably have all four. The order you lead with should change by market. Most companies take what works at home and translate it. That’s one finding from Google’s International Growth Agency Program, where we’re now a Certified Partner. It gives us market data and specialist teams that aren’t in the Google Ads interface, so we can rank markets and explain why, and say what a market costs before you commit. We wrote up what that gets our clients, plus more findings.

I rarely see ad customizers used in B2B accounts, and they can have a considerable impact on your CAC. In B2B, search volumes are often much smaller than in B2C and CPCs can be expensive. Even a five- or six-figure monthly budget can leave ad groups thin in data. Thin data means you should consolidate. Google's own account-structure guide says to move single-keyword ad groups into themed ad groups. Google also states that the more you split up traffic, the more you restrict Smart Bidding from finding the most conversions at your target. Consolidating often clashes with relevance, though. You now have a lot of keywords in one ad group, without a headline written for each of them. Keyword insertion, a common fix, repeats the keyword as it is written in your account, and that is not always the headline you want. An ad customizer lets you write the headline for each keyword yourself, inside one consolidated ad group. That headline can also say who the product is for. Before they click, that headline can filter out searchers who will never buy. If your CAC has gotten out of control, this might help you lower it and move the savings into new growth experiments or channels. The article covers where to use ad customizers first, the setup in four steps and the limits worth knowing.

€60,000 a year on a Google Ads brand campaign, defending against nobody. I see this pattern in most B2B accounts we audit at Holini. Whether to bid on your own brand is the one Google Ads argument every marketing owner has had at some point, and I have never heard a decision rule that holds up. Here is the one I use, and it takes 10 minutes, most of them in auction insights. There are only three reasons to pay for a click on your own name. A competitor with a stronger offer sits on your brand terms at a high impression share. Your generic campaigns are too thin on conversions to feed Google's automated bidding, so brand is the cheapest way to get conversion data into the account. Or your name is also a common word, and Google serves the word before it serves you. None of the three applies in most accounts I open, and brand still takes 20-40% of the spend, at €5-10 a click. The article below walks through the check and the thresholds I use, two real accounts and what to do with the money once nobody is left to defend against.