B2B Lead Gen for IT recruitment agency (Poland)
An agency specializing in finding developers for startups needed consultation requests from founders and HR directors.
About the Client
Agency specializing in finding developers for startups (Poland).
Client Request
Consultation requests from founders and HR directors.
Initial Situation
High competition, expensive LinkedIn CPC ($5-10). Decided to test Google Ads. Client's mistakes: treating B2B lead gen like B2C, expecting immediate sales. Their website was a generic 'About Us' page with no value proposition for hiring managers. No case studies, no testimonials, no specific service packages. Previous Google Ads attempt used keywords like 'recruitment' which attracted 90% job seekers, not employers.
Search Advertising
Set up search ads for queries like 'it recruitment agency poland', 'hire developers warsaw'.
Non-target Traffic Exclusion
Used negative keyword lists to filter out job seekers. Our initial mistake: first week we only excluded obvious terms like 'job', 'resume', 'career', but missed variations like 'apply', 'hiring', 'opening'. This wasted 30% of first week's budget on irrelevant clicks. We quickly (day 5) expanded to 200+ negative keywords including 'praca', 'aplikuj', 'stanowisko' and similar. This immediately cut CPC by 40% and tripled lead quality.
Content Strategy
Directed traffic to an expert case study article about vacancy fill speed with an inquiry form at the end.
“In B2B, Google Ads can be more effective than social media if you properly filter out non-target traffic and offer value at the first stage. The key lesson from our early filtering mistake: B2B campaigns require obsessive attention to search term reports in the first 2 weeks. We reviewed search terms daily and added negatives immediately. This hands-on approach in week 1-2 allowed automation to work better in weeks 3+. Many agencies set up campaigns and forget them - fatal in B2B.