B2B Paid Search Is Broken: How to Fix It With ARM Principles

Jul 13, 2026 · GTM Live
🎧 PodShort 53 min squeezed to 3 Ai sprinklerAI Revenue Operations New
Episode artwork
Liam McCormick
Fractional Head of Growth at Corrective Growth
GTM Live
53 min squeezed to 3
Full episode from GTM Live
Quotable Moments

If you are losing 10% to budget, but you're losing 80% search impression share to rank, it does not matter how much money you put into this. Your ads will not show up in a more structured way.

Liam McCormickFractional Head of Growth at Corrective Growth
20:23

You need a lot of demand to already exist for what you're offering. And is there average contract value enough to like eat what's inevitably going to be a higher customer acquisition cost?

Liam McCormickFractional Head of Growth at Corrective Growth
17:20

If you want to be successful, you've got to do the hard things. Anybody can put out thought leadership. Anybody can run paid ads. Anybody can do a webinar. But like, in a world that is so f***ing saturated with all of that sh*t everywhere, you gotta stand out.

Brenda Wylie-DiCarloPresident at Pacetto
52:44
Key Insights
  • Agencies get a bad rap because often a senior person pitches the account, but then a more junior person runs it. As a Fractional Head of Growth, Liam ensures all decisions still run through him to avoid this 'bait and switch' scenario.
  • For B2B paid search, agencies often focus only on platform metrics because they don't have CRM access. This limits their ability to accurately track attribution and understand pipeline, unlike e-commerce where direct sales data is readily available.
  • The B2B paid search landscape is becoming significantly more challenging due to the rise of zero-click searches, massive venture capital investment in AI companies, and increasing CPCs (Cost Per Click).
  • For a B2B company to succeed with paid search today, they must already have a strong existing demand for their brand, category, or the problem they solve, and possess the contract value to absorb rising customer acquisition costs.
  • Impression share is the most seductive upsell in paid search. However, the crucial metric to examine is 'Search Impression Share lost to rank' (not just overall impression share), as this indicates underlying quality issues with ads and landing pages that budget alone cannot fix.
  • Many B2B paid search practitioners and agencies still manage campaigns using outdated methods from 15-20 years ago, failing to adapt to evolving platforms and user behavior.
  • Instead of cutting paid search completely, companies should identify it as a secondary or tertiary pipeline channel. They should reduce budget to a sustainable level and reallocate freed-up funds to demand creation activities in other channels, which can ultimately improve paid search performance.
  • Every marketing budget should allocate a small percentage (e.g., 10%) for testing new avenues, even if it's considered 'fun stuff.' This experimentation is crucial for growth in a saturated market, as companies cannot expect to grow by doing the same thing year after year.
Metrics Mentioned
  • 1% (Conversion rate for outbound efforts from B2B software companies, meaning 1 in 100 BDR-worked leads become an opportunity.)
  • 80% (Percentage of searches that end without a click (zero-click searches).)
  • 93% (Percentage of AI mode sessions on Google that produce no outbound click.)
  • 20% (Increase in Google's ad revenue last year, despite a decrease in user clicks.)
  • 25% (Current Click-Through Rate (CTR) as a percentage of what it was a few years ago for B2B paid search.)
  • 3-4 (out of 10) (Typical quality score for new paid search campaigns or those managed inefficiently.)
  • 50-60% (Reduction in an ad's ability to run due to a low quality score.)
  • $7,000 (Monthly ad spend for a client struggling with B2B paid search (excluding agency fees and other costs).)
  • 15% (Search Impression Share for a struggling client on non-brand keywords.)
  • 30% (Threshold for 'Search Impression Share lost to rank'; if above this, a campaign has a serious problem.)

RevBots.ai View:

  • SaaS Hoarders get trapped in agency relationships that optimize for clicks, not pipeline.
  • AI Sprinkler stage teams must integrate paid search with CRM data to track true attribution.
  • ARM maturity requires reallocating search budget to demand creation when CAC exceeds LTV.
  • All stages should reserve 10% budget for asymmetric experiments beyond 'best practices'.
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