A UK manufacturer selling into the Middle East
B.E.C Perimeter Security Ltd, a UK company making turnstiles and revolving security gates, wanted buyers in the Arab states. No local office, no regional sales team, no existing brand recognition in the market. Just a product and a budget.
That is a normal B2B problem. The buyers exist, there are not many of them, and they are almost impossible to reach with broad advertising. Search is different, because someone typing “turnstile supplier” is telling you exactly what they want.
“I have had a number of enquiries and not just for turnstiles but other
products as well.”
Gary Barrs, B.E.C Perimeter Security Ltd
What the campaign returned
This campaign ran in 2014. The click prices below are far lower than you would pay today, particularly in the UAE, so read the structure rather than the numbers. The approach still works. The rates have changed.
- 598 clicks on the ads
- Under $200 total spend for all of them
- 500+ new targeted visitors to the site
- Roughly 3 potential customers on the website for every $1 spent
Where those clicks came from:
- Egypt: 216
- Saudi Arabia: 99
- Iraq: 65
- UAE: 45
- Jordan and Turkey: 34
- Yemen: 24
- Lebanon, Qatar, Cyprus, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Israel combined: 85
That country split is the part worth studying. A UK manufacturer with no regional presence reached buyers in eleven markets in a month, and the biggest source was not the one anybody would have guessed.
What we told the client afterwards
An honest campaign review includes what did not work. Ours said:
- Demand is real, and so is the competition. There is clear appetite for these products across the region, and other suppliers are bidding for the same searches.
- We lost about 41% of available search impression share to budget. The ads were eligible to appear and simply ran out of money. That is the single biggest constraint on this account, and raising the budget was the obvious next move.
- Chase qualified leads, not visits. Traffic was cheap and plentiful. The goal for the next phase was enquiries, which means conversion tracking and a page built to capture them.
- Widen the keyword set. Buyers search for these products in several different ways, and we were only covering some of them.
Why this works for B2B
B2B audiences are small, specialised and expensive to reach through display or social. Search flips that. You are not interrupting anyone, you are answering a question somebody has already asked, which is why a modest budget can produce real enquiries in a niche category.
The catch is that the same narrowness makes waste expensive. In a market with the highest cost per click in the world, a handful of wrong clicks a day costs more than the campaign above spent in total. Tight keywords, negative keywords and working conversion tracking are what separate a campaign like this one from an expensive lesson.
For the full approach, see how PPC brings in B2B leads, or our Google Ads management service.
Selling something specialised to a small pool of buyers? Tell us the product and the markets, and we will tell you whether search can reach them. Call or WhatsApp +971 50 304 7470.B2B Google Ads: common questions
Yes, and often better than social advertising does, because a search is a stated intention rather than an interruption. B2B audiences are small and specialised, which makes them expensive to reach by display or social targeting, but easy to reach the moment they search for the product. The trade-off is that wasted clicks hurt more when your buyer pool is small, so negative keywords and conversion tracking matter more, not less.
Yes. Google Ads targets by location, not by where your business is registered. The campaign in this case study was run for a UK manufacturer and reached buyers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE and seven other markets. What you need locally is the ability to answer enquiries quickly and quote in a way regional buyers can act on.
It means your ads were eligible to show but did not, because the daily budget had run out. Google reports it as lost impression share (budget) in your campaign columns. In the campaign above it was around 41%, so roughly four in every ten available appearances were missed. If your account shows a high figure here, raising the budget is usually the cheapest available improvement, because the demand is already proven.
Most B2B advertisers here start between AED 3,000 and AED 15,000 a month in media spend, then scale once cost per enquiry is known. Niche B2B keywords are often cheaper per click than consumer categories like real estate, but the volume is much lower, so success is judged on enquiry quality rather than click count.
