The short version
Most B2B founders pick a PPC agency on price and fire it over targets nobody agreed on. Agree the outcome, the timeline and the monthly milestones before you sign.
There is no useful industry benchmark for cost per lead. Work out your own from your deal size, margin and close rate.
Pay for deliverables and outcomes, not activity. Percentage-of-spend pricing pays the agency more when your budget grows, whether or not your pipeline does.
Own your ad accounts and your data, set up tracking before the first dollar is spent, and learn to read the numbers yourself.
Three months in, the agency is reporting strong impressions and a healthy click-through rate. Revenue hasn't moved. When you ask about pipeline, you get a dashboard full of numbers that don't connect to the one you're trying to hit.
That's the most common way a B2B PPC engagement fails, and it usually isn't a performance failure. It's a brief failure. Nobody agreed at the start what success looked like, by when, so there was nothing to hold anyone to.
How B2B PPC differs from B2C
B2B and B2C paid search use the same platforms and the same buttons. The economics are completely different, and an agency that learned its craft selling products online will run your account the way that worked for online shops.
Factor | B2C PPC | B2B PPC |
|---|---|---|
Sales cycle | Minutes to days | Weeks to 12 months |
Who decides | One buyer | |
Deal size | Tens or hundreds of dollars | Thousands to hundreds of thousands |
What a conversion is | A purchase | A form fill, call or demo request |
What success means | Return on ad spend this week | Qualified pipeline and closed revenue months later |
Main platforms | Meta, Google Shopping | Google Search, LinkedIn |
The timing is what trips most agencies up. A click that produces a form fill in week one may not become a signed contract until month six or nine. An agency judging your account on what happened in the last 30 days is looking at the wrong window. Judge it on qualified pipeline created, then on revenue closed from those leads as they mature.
Paid search is also mostly a capture channel. It converts buyers who are already searching. It doesn't create buyers who aren't. If nobody in your market searches for what you sell, our guide to demand generation vs lead generation explains what has to come first.
Google Search or LinkedIn: which first
Start with Google Search if your buyers already search for your category and you need pipeline this quarter. The intent is built in: someone searching for your service has already decided they have the problem.
Start with LinkedIn if you sell high-value deals to specific job titles who aren't searching yet. LinkedIn lets you reach a head of finance at a 200-person company before they type anything into Google. Clicks cost more and results take longer, so it suits larger deals and a measurement window of two to three quarters.
Whichever you choose, fund it properly. In our experience, $1,000 to $2,000 a month is the practical floor for a channel like Google Ads, and more for LinkedIn. Below that, you can't buy enough clicks to know whether the channel works. If your budget can't cover the floor for two channels, run one well rather than two badly. Our guide to how much a B2B company should spend on marketing shows how to work the floor out from your own cost per click.
Work out your own target cost per lead
The most dangerous number in an agency pitch is "we typically achieve a $X cost per lead". Without your deal size and close rate, it means nothing. A $300 lead is excellent if one in four closes at $45,000. It's a disaster if one in twenty closes at $3,000.
Work backwards from your own numbers instead:
Break-even cost per qualified lead = Average deal value × Gross margin × Close rate on qualified leads
Say a typical deal is worth $45,000, your gross margin is 50% and you close one in four qualified leads. Break-even is $45,000 × 0.5 × 0.25 = $5,625. If you want marketing to return three times its cost, aim for a cost per qualified lead under about $1,900.
Notice the word "qualified". Cost per form fill is easy to make look good. Cost per lead that your sales team would actually take a call with is the number that matters. Our guides to how to calculate ROAS and what a good ROAS looks like go deeper on break-even targets.
Agree the outcome before you sign
No agency can promise a result, but any serious one should agree what it's aiming for and by when. Put three things in writing before the contract starts.
The outcome and the deadline. For example: by the end of month three, at least four or five qualified prospects in pipeline from paid search, or two or three closed deals if your sales cycle is short. This is the main thing you judge the agency on.
Monthly milestones on the way. Results take time to build, so agree what progress looks like before the outcome lands. Month one: conversion tracking connected to your CRM, a negative keyword list built, campaigns live, landing pages matched to each ad group. Month two: search terms reviewed weekly, cost per qualified lead reported. Month three: the outcome.
Deliverables, not activity. "We're optimising your account" isn't a deliverable. "Twelve ad groups rebuilt, 200 negative keywords added, three landing pages launched, offline conversions importing daily" is. If you can't count it, you can't check it.
What a well-built B2B account looks like
Most B2B PPC underperformance isn't a budget problem. It's a structure problem. Ask any agency how they'd build yours, and listen for these:
Campaigns split by intent. High-intent searches (your category, your brand, competitors' names, "agency for X") in one campaign. Problem-aware searches in another. Most of the budget goes to high intent.
Tight keyword matching. Phrase and exact match to start. Broad match only once the account has enough conversion history and someone is reviewing search terms every week.
A negative keyword list before launch. Without one, you pay for clicks from job seekers, students and people looking for free templates.
One theme per ad group. Each ad group targets one specific need, with ads written for that need.
A landing page for each ad group. Sending every click to the homepage is the most common B2B PPC mistake we see.
Offline conversions sent back to the platform. Most B2B deals close over email and calls, not on your website. If closed deals and qualified leads aren't fed back to Google Ads, the algorithm optimises for form fills, not revenue. Our guide to measuring attribution in GA4 and Google Ads covers the setup.
PPC agency pricing models compared
Most agencies work on retainers, and almost none will guarantee an outcome. That's normal. What matters is whether the pricing model rewards the agency for the same thing you want.
Model | Typical range we see | Does it reward results? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
Hourly | Billed per hour worked | No. Rewards time spent. | Only if you already own the strategy and just want execution |
Percentage of ad spend | 10% to 20% of monthly spend | Poorly. The fee rises when your budget rises. | Avoid unless tied to hard pipeline targets |
Flat monthly retainer | $2,500 to $8,000 a month | Neutral. Predictable for both sides. | Most B2B accounts, with agreed milestones |
Retainer plus bonus | Lower base plus a bonus on agreed targets | Yes, if the target is qualified pipeline | Accounts with clean tracking and clear goals |
Pay per qualified lead | A fixed fee per lead that meets agreed criteria | Most closely | Tight definitions of "qualified" and reliable CRM data |
Percentage-of-spend pricing deserves the extra scrutiny. An agency on 15% earns more every time it recommends a bigger budget, whatever that budget produces. That doesn't make every such agency dishonest, but it means the advice to "scale spend" has a built-in conflict of interest.
// The Rule
Pay for deliverables you can count and outcomes you can check. Never pay for activity you can't see.
Red flags in B2B PPC agencies
Reporting that stops at clicks. Impressions, clicks and click-through rate are inputs. An agency that leads with them, and can't show cost per qualified lead, usually has no access to what happens in your CRM.
You don't own the account. Your ad accounts, conversion history and audience lists belong to you. Keep owner-level access to every account, and ideally view the results through a reporting tool you control, not only the agency's own reports.
"Set it and leave it." Agencies that launch campaigns and then wait weeks for the algorithm to "learn", even when the search terms clearly show the wrong intent or the wrong traffic. Bad traffic should be cut the day it's spotted.
Blaming the platform. "LinkedIn takes time to move away from that audience" or "Google is in a learning phase" as the explanation for month after month of poor leads. Platforms have quirks. A good agency works around them and shows you what it changed.
No offline conversion tracking after the first month. If it isn't set up by the end of month one, the account is optimising for the wrong thing.
How to audit your paid spend in 30 minutes
Before you hire anyone, or to check the agency you have, make sure your analytics and CRM tracking are set up properly, then answer four questions yourself:
What's my cost per qualified lead? Take the last 90 days of paid leads, count the ones that reached a real sales conversation, and divide spend by that number. If nobody can give you this, tracking is broken.
How much spend goes to high-intent searches? If more than 40% of budget goes to broad or early-stage keywords, the account is built wrong for B2B.
What are people actually searching? Open the search terms report for the last 30 days. If more than 10% of spend went on clearly irrelevant searches, nobody is managing negatives.
What happened to the leads? Check every paid lead in your CRM from the last six months. How many became opportunities, and how many closed? That's the only answer that tells you whether PPC is producing pipeline.
Being able to read these numbers yourself is the best protection you have. You don't need to run the account. You do need to know whether it's working.
Worked example: what good looks like at 90 days
// illustrative example based on patterns we see in B2B paid search accounts
Aldermere Group is a B2B consulting firm selling a $45,000 advisory engagement to heads of finance at mid-sized companies. It had run Google Ads for six months with a previous agency: $6,000 a month in spend, 40 to 60 leads a month, and two or three qualified leads among them. The agency reported a cost per lead of about $110 and called it a success.
The leads were mostly students, job seekers and very small businesses, arriving through broad match keywords nobody had reviewed.
The rebuild took 30 days. The account was restructured into three tight ad groups for high-intent searches. Broad match was paused. A 200-term negative keyword list went in before spend resumed. Landing pages were rewritten for heads of finance, and offline conversions were connected to the CRM.
At 90 days, spend was $5,500 a month. Leads fell from about 50 a month to 12, but eight of the 12 were qualified. Cost per qualified lead dropped from about $2,400 to $690, well under the $1,900 target from the formula above. Two of the eight from month two closed by month four: $90,000 in revenue from $11,000 of spend.
Fewer leads, better leads, more revenue. That's what a B2B account looks like when it's built for the buyer instead of the dashboard.
When to bring PPC in-house
Keep it with an agency when you don't have paid search expertise in the team, the account is less than a year old, or it needs more strategic work than one person can handle alongside other jobs.
Bring it in-house when the account has 12 to 18 months of clean conversion data, the structure is stable and the work is mostly routine optimisation. At that point a skilled hire can run it for less, with tighter links to your CRM. Plan the handover over two to three months so the knowledge doesn't walk out with the agency.
Not sure your paid search is producing pipeline? We'll run the 30-minute audit above on your account for free and show you where the money is going.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a B2B PPC agency cost?
Most B2B PPC agencies charge a flat monthly retainer, commonly between $2,500 and $8,000 a month, on top of the ad spend itself. Some charge 10% to 20% of ad spend instead, which ties the agency's fee to budget size rather than results.
What is a good cost per lead for B2B PPC?
There is no reliable universal figure. A B2B company can calculate its own break-even cost per qualified lead by multiplying average deal value by gross margin and by the close rate on qualified leads, then setting a target below that to allow for the return it wants.
Should a B2B company start with Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads?
Google Search usually comes first when buyers already search for the category and pipeline is needed quickly. LinkedIn suits higher-value deals aimed at specific job titles who are not yet searching. With a limited budget, running one platform at a proper level beats splitting it thinly across two.
How can a founder tell whether a PPC agency is working?
The clearest test is cost per qualified lead and what happened to paid leads in the CRM, not clicks or click-through rate. A founder can also check the search terms report for irrelevant searches and confirm that offline conversions are being sent back to the ad platform.
When should a company bring PPC in-house?
Bringing PPC in-house tends to make sense once an account has 12 to 18 months of clean conversion data, a stable structure and mostly routine optimisation work. A gradual handover over two to three months protects what the agency has learned about the account.