Agency insights
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
How adding pricing to Google Ads headlines increased B2B lead qualification by 27%
Published March 2025. Last updated July 2026.
B2B advertisers often waste money on B2C leads when there are consumer versions of your products or services.
One of my clients—a training provider—had this exact problem. Her perfect lead is a company that wants to train its staff. But she was getting too many inquiries from individuals hoping to improve their skills.
This is the kind of thing that optimising for qualified leads can help with. But, B2B lead generation campaigns often struggle with automated optimisation. They usually don't have enough lead volume to make Google's machine learning work well.
So you have to make manual interventions to improve performance.
The Intervention
Adding a price to the headline is one such intervention.
The thinking was that the price would deter individuals without scaring off B2B buyers.
You see, my client's prices are high for B2C. Individuals looking for training have lots of options, starting with free courses on YouTube. But for B2B, my client is competitive and within the range of what you'd expect to pay.
By putting the cost in the ad, we aimed for two things:
- Filter out price-sensitive consumers.
- Signal to B2B buyers that we're the kind of business they're looking for.
Campaign Setup
The campaign has been using the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy with a target CPA set for a while. We didn't change this.
The primary conversion action is a lead form submission. This conversion includes qualified (B2B) and unqualified (B2C) leads.
We are tracking qualified leads, but we're not optimizing for them at the moment.
The Results
Here are the results after a month.
| Period | Leads | Qualified | % Qualified | Cost | Cost per Qualified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Without price | 29 | 14 | 48% | 2738.02 | 195.57 |
| With price | 36 | 22 | 61% | 4174.51 | 189.75 |
- Qualified leads increased by 57% (14 → 22).
- Qualification rate improved from 48% to 61% (a 27% relative increase).
- Cost per qualified lead dropped a little, but not enough to mean anything.
Interpreting the Results
These results suggest that adding the price to the ad improved our qualified (B2B) lead rate. I say "suggest" because low-volume B2B campaigns don't generate enough data for a high degree of confidence.
In practical terms, it looks like it made things better and didn’t make things worse. For now, that's good enough to keep the pricing in the headline.
If you're running B2B Google Ads and think there might be room for improvement, I have some availability for new clients. Let’s take a look at what’s working, what’s not, and how to get you more of the right leads.
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