Most B2B PPC underperforms for a simple reason: it's managed like consumer advertising. The agency optimises for click-through rate, minimises cost-per-click, and reports on lead volume. Sales looks at the leads, passes on 80% of them, and tells marketing the quality is poor. Marketing responds by generating more leads. The cycle repeats.
The problem isn't the channel — it's the strategy. B2B paid search requires fundamentally different account architecture. Keyword strategy built around buyer intent stages rather than product categories. Negative keyword management comprehensive enough to filter out the job seekers, students, and irrelevant searchers who share your terminology. Landing pages designed to qualify as well as convert, so the leads that come through are actually worth sales' time. Bidding strategies that import CRM data to optimise for pipeline, not form fills.
When paid search is run this way, the economics change. CPL goes up, because you're filtering harder. But cost per sales-accepted lead and cost per opportunity come down, because a higher proportion of leads convert. The result is more pipeline from the same budget — or the same pipeline from a meaningfully lower budget.
At Harmonic, we manage Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising exclusively for B2B companies. No consumer accounts, no ecommerce, no B2C crossover. Every account structure, bidding strategy, and reporting framework is built for the specific dynamics of business-to-business selling — long cycles, multiple stakeholders, high deal values, and pipeline that takes months to mature.