Google Ads for a B2B Material Handling Equpiment Manufacturer: Less Spend, More Qualified Leads
Project Goal
In July 2025, I took over the Google Ads account of a German B2B manufacturer of material handling and elevator systems for industrial use. The company was already spending €4,000–5,000 per month, but results were only mediocre. The goal was to use the budget more efficiently and noticeably improve the quality of leads generated.
Challenge
There was barely any solid data foundation for campaign decisions, the account wasn’t set up cleanly, and it was optimized for the wrong goals. In the complex B2B lead-gen space, that’s especially critical — you need to understand the inquiry process in detail, whether it runs through forms or phone calls, and match keywords precisely to actual search intent.
Project Details
The first step was a thorough account cleanup: removing irrelevant search terms, restructuring campaigns by search intent, and splitting them into more specific ad groups. A dedicated ad group for the generic keyword “material handling” brought cheap clicks but not many qualified leads — so that approach was scrapped.
Many searches were actually about construction hoists — a completely different target audience. These search intents had to be deliberately excluded to avoid wasting budget. Generally, anything from the B2C space had to be excluded. As a trained engineer, a general technical understanding helps me here, even without prior knowledge of elevator or material handling technology.
Expanding into Switzerland and Austria was another key theme. What started as a purely German focus grew into these additional markets — bringing in additional, high-quality leads from factories, with click costs surprisingly close to those in Germany thanks to strong relevance between keywords, ads, and landing pages.
I deliberately avoided using Google’s lead form ads, since they often produce spam or low-quality leads. Instead, the focus was on genuine inquiries from real companies via website forms or phone calls — relevance over volume.
Results
The monthly budget was reduced from €4,000–5,000 to €2,000–3,000 — while lead quality improved significantly at the same time.
- More efficient media spend: Click costs of €2–4, occasionally up to €5 — standard for the B2B industrial sector, but far more precisely targeted thanks to better keyword alignment.
- Strong lead quality at fair cost: Qualified leads often for €100–200, averaging around €150 — a solid figure for this complex B2B segment.
- New markets unlocked: Additional, high-value leads from factories in Switzerland, with CPCs at a similar level to Germany.
This Strategy for Your Project
If you have an existing but underperforming Google Ads account, or a complex B2B sales process spanning multiple countries — this is exactly where I come in. Get in touch, and we’ll take a look at your account together.