09 June 2011 by Published in: business 1 comment

Do you know what feature would change my life? A way to exclude certain hostnames from seeing our Google Ads.

Doing hypertargeted AdWords campaigns both increases your conversion rate and decreases the advertising spend.  If your sales cycle involves actually interacting with customers, it’s even more important to really target things as sort of a first wave of lead qualification to save yourself a lot of work chasing after dead leads.

For one of my campaigns, I’m targeting specifically b2b users, and 90% of consumer searches turn out to be a waste of time and actually clog up my sales pipeline.  Here’s what I’ve done so far to try and specifically target b2b:

  • Adjusted my campaign to only run during business hours.  This is hit-or-miss, since a lot of executives work late, but the benefit of capturing those searchers is far outweighed by the costs of interacting with consumers
  • Adjusted my geographic targeting to attempt to hit mostly business districts.  Again, a poor approximation, but it’s what I have to work with.
  • Adjusted my ad copy to speak more “businessese” and more consumer-unfriendly words.

But the absolute best way to bin people into consumer or business categories is by hostname.  If I could toss out searches by residential ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, leaving only the “enterprise” ISPs (and I have an enormous list of hundreds of ISPs that convert 50x better than Comcast), that would single-handedly triple my conversion rate.  I would pay thousands of dollars a year to do that.


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