Most marketing plans start at the top of the funnel: get known, build interest, then hope some of it turns into sales. For a B2B company buying Google Ads, that order costs money it can't spare. By the time a buyer types a search that names what you sell, most of their decision is already made, and the short list of suppliers they'll call is already forming.
This chapter maps what B2B buyers search for at each stage of a purchase, using real Keyword Planner volumes, and shows why the budget goes to the bottom of that funnel first. It builds on Chapter 1, which set up the tracking that tells you which of those searches turn into orders.
B2B Buyers Finish More Than Half Their Research Before a Supplier Hears From Them.
Three different surveys, run by three different research firms on three different groups of buyers, land in the same place.
Gardner, a trade publisher that surveys buyers at US durable-goods manufacturers, found in its 2025 study that "more than 55% of the entire purchase process is completed before a buyer contacts a vendor." GlobalSpec and TREW Marketing survey engineers, and their 2026 report says 62% of the technical buyer's journey happens online before contacting a vendor. 6sense surveys buyers of larger purchases, $25,000 and up, and in 2025 it put the first contact with a supplier at 61% of the way through the journey.
The same 6sense study found something sharper. Buyers chose a vendor from the short list they had on day one of their search 95% of the time. The list forms early, and most of the work after that is checking the names already on it.
That changes the job your ads have to do. You are rarely persuading a stranger who has never thought about the problem. You are making sure your company is on the list when someone who already knows what they need goes looking for who can supply it. Our post on B2B buyers deciding without you in the room covers what that means for the rest of your marketing. This guide covers the searches.
Problem Searches Barely Show Up in Keyword Planner. B2B Buyers Type the Product or the Supplier.
The method behind this guide sorts searches into five stages of awareness, the same way for every business:
- Unaware: the buyer doesn't know there's a problem yet.
- Problem aware: they know something is wrong.
- Solution aware: they know what kind of product or service fixes it.
- Supplier aware: they are looking for companies that provide it.
- Most aware: they are ready to ask for a price or a quote.
Each stage has its own marketing goal: create awareness, drive interest, influence a decision, and finally get someone to act. The useful question for a B2B budget is how many people actually search at each stage. So we pulled US monthly volumes from Google's Keyword Planner for searches across the four kinds of B2B company this guide uses as examples: made-to-order manufacturers, equipment makers, distributors and service firms.
For manufacturers, equipment makers and distributors, the problem stage is almost empty. "Conveyor belt slipping" gets about 10 searches a month in the whole country. "Warehouse out of space" and "shipping costs too high" register zero. Plant managers have these problems every day. They just don't type them into Google as problems. They type the answer.
The solution stage is where the volume appears. "Managed it services" gets 22,200 searches a month, "injection molding" and "pallet racking" 18,100 each, "packaging supplies" 3,600. One step down, the supplier searches are smaller and closer to a sale: "managed it services near me" 9,900, "fastener supplier" 2,900, "injection molding companies" 1,900, "conveyor manufacturer" 1,600.
Service firms are different. IT and staffing problems do get searched: "high employee turnover" gets 390 searches a month and "computer keeps crashing" 590. The second one is mostly people at home, though, not office managers shopping for a support contract. The big IT search in this group, "it support for small business" at 4,400, reads like a buyer who already knows the answer and is looking for someone to provide it. Treat it as a solution search.
"3PL Fulfillment Services" Draws Over Twice the Bid of "3PL Warehouse." Advertisers Know Which One Buyers Type.
Keyword Planner also prints a bid range beside each search: its estimate of the cost per click that won a top spot lately. Those ranges say how the advertisers already in the auction value each stage: the search for a supplier usually costs more than the search for the product.
"3pl fulfillment services" tops out at $73.64 a click, more than twice the $30.78 for "3pl warehouse." "Cnc machining services" tops out at $32.00, eight times the $3.92 for "cnc machining." "Managed it service provider" reaches $85.00, against $60.00 for "managed it services." Of the 18 supplier searches we pulled, 12 drew a higher top bid than the product search they pair with. Most of the exceptions were distributor searches like "electrical supply near me."
Searches that ask for a quote sit at the very bottom, and they are tiny: "injection molding quote" gets 170 searches a month and "cnc machining quote" 90. Their bids jump the most over the product search. "Injection molding quote" reaches $73.84, more than five times the $14.03 for "injection molding."
One kind of bottom-looking search went the other way. Price and cost searches, such as "managed it services pricing" ($31.00) and "injection molding cost" ($11.04), drew lower bids than the product search in every pair we checked. Our reading: people asking what something costs are often still researching, and advertisers have learned that.
So a new B2B account starts with the supplier and quote searches. They become the opening keyword list for Isolation, our name for a first campaign built on exact match keywords and hand-set bids. Someone typing "injection molding quote" has a part, a drawing and a deadline.
"CNC Machining" Gets 135,000 Searches a Month. Machinists and Machine Buyers Type It Too.
The big solution-stage searches look like the obvious prize. Many of them are crowded.
Keyword Planner reports "cnc machining" at 135,000 searches a month, but it groups that search with "cnc machinist" and "cnc machine" under one number, so people looking for machinist jobs and people shopping for a machine are counted in the same 135,000 as buyers looking for parts. When we gave Keyword Planner the website of the CNC machine shop in our example set, its top suggestion was "cnc machine," an equipment search, not a buyer's.
Staffing has the same problem from the other side. "Staffing agency near me" gets 246,000 searches a month, and it is typed by employers who need workers and by workers who need jobs. The staffing firm in our example set aims 8 of its 9 current ads at job seekers. That's a sensible business for them, and a sign of who is searching.
None of this means big searches are off limits. It means they belong in the middle of the funnel, after the account knows what a buyer looks like, and with the filters a later chapter in this guide covers for keeping job seekers, students and equipment shoppers out.
Search Ads Reach the Buyer Who Is Ready. YouTube and LinkedIn Reach the Buyer Who Isn't Yet.
Each of Google's campaign types fits a stage of the funnel.
- Search sits at the bottom. It answers the supplier and quote searches, and it is where a B2B budget should start.
- Demand Gen, which runs on YouTube, Gmail and Google's Discover feed, reaches people earlier, before they search. Google is also moving its Display campaigns into Demand Gen.
- Display banners on other websites, in our experience, earn their keep reminding past visitors more than finding new buyers.
One gap matters for B2B. Google can aim some campaigns at company size and industry, but it has no way to target a job title or a specific company. LinkedIn can aim an ad at a job title, an employer or an industry, and practitioners who run both say its leads usually cost more, which is why many B2B advertisers run it beside Google rather than instead of it. Our posts on picking the two channels that work and on creating demand instead of chasing leads cover that side of the plan.
The Bottom of the B2B Funnel Fits Any Budget. The Top Needs More Money and Conversion Data First.
We build B2B accounts from the bottom of the funnel up. That runs against most marketing plans, which begin with awareness. But the bottom is where the searches carry the most intent, and it is where Google's bidding learns what a qualified lead looks like.
The order runs like this:
- Month one: Isolation on exact match supplier and quote searches, plus a brand campaign for your own company name.
- Months 2-3, typically: a second campaign we call Exploration, using broad match and letting Google set bids toward a target cost per lead, to find searches you didn't think of.
- Months 6-7, typically: Performance Max, which runs across Google's channels at once.
- Later: Demand Gen on YouTube and Gmail, and AI Max at the very end.
Read those months as a typical timeline. Volume is the real trigger: an account should log about 30 qualified leads a month before either Exploration or Performance Max goes live, and a large account that spends more can reach that mark well before month two. Many smaller B2B accounts take longer, and some stay at the bottom for good. Chapter 7 explains why that's fine.
A large budget can start a little higher sooner, with an early YouTube test beside Search. A small one should spend every dollar on the searches that ask for a supplier or a quote until the tracking from Chapter 1 shows which of them turn into orders.
Next: Why a Long B2B Sales Cycle Changes How You Judge the Budget
Chapter 3 works out what a B2B lead is worth when the order arrives months after the click and the customer keeps buying for years. Every chapter is listed on the Google Ads for B2B guide home. If you'd rather have someone run it, see our Google Ads management.
