Reading: 0118 322 4395 | Manchester: 0161 706 2414 | Oxford: 01865 479 625 | info@sharpahead.com | Office hours: Monday-Friday 9:00am - 5:30pm

 | Office hours: Monday-Friday 8:30am - 5:30pm

 | Email  | Office hours: Mon-Fri 9:00am - 5:30pm 

LinkedIn Business Manager and Premium Company Page

LinkedIn Business Manager and Premium Company Page

In this short blog post we review LinkedIn’s Business Manager and new premium company page subscription—and what they offer B2B marketers.

First, the free feature.

LinkedIn’s advertising platform, Campaign Manager, has long lagged behind other paid platforms in terms of how ad accounts, pages, people and audiences are managed.

Finally, LinkedIn have got around to sorting that out with their own version of an MCC or centralised management account.

Business Manager allows organisations, and the agencies they work with, to bring their ad accounts, pages, people, and matched audiences together under a single umbrella.

What do we like about it?

A centralised place to manage access, especially important for large organisations and agencies managing multiple accounts. Access management will make onboarding, and removing, individual access much simpler.

The downsides?

Even when you add a new person to your Business Manager account, you have to then add them one by one to specific ad accounts. This sort of granularity is helpful to prevent giving too many people too much access, but by comparison, Google’s MCC makes the entire access process much easier.

As an agency, adding new client accounts is a bit off a faff; you can only add them via csv which feels a bit silly when you’re onboarding a single new client (but made the initial uploading process of current client accounts super easy).

Overall, though, Business Manager is a step in the right direction, and we absolutely recommend you take advantage of it to enhance management and security of your LinkedIn pages and paid accounts.

Premium Business Page

What is it? Check out the full FAQ from LinkedIn, or read on for the short version!

Summary:

For about $100 per month, organisations can have enable six new features on their company page, including:

Three visible, on-page, features

Custom call-to action (CTA) button, with the premium subscription, you can add a button to encourage visits to “visit website”, “book a demo” or some other call to action. It sounds good, and looks nice, but if it’s anything like the CTAs on personal accounts, probably won’t, in reality, get used much.

A LinkedIn ‘IN’ logo: LinkedIn seems to like badges even more than the Scouts and promotes them as a way to elevate the status of your personal or business profile. This one is just pay to play so doesn’t really feel all that special.

Custom testimonial: We quite like this one! With the premium account you can feature a short (max. 80 character) client testimonial and a logo—a very nice piece of social proof to round out your page.

More stats

With a premium business account, just like a premium personal account, you will be able to see recent visitors to your page. If you have the internal resource to use view these stats on a regular basis, it probably will feel useful, especially for sales teams, but remember people can opt out so it’s not necessarily a full list of visitors.

Auto-invite

This feature automatically invites people who engage with your company posts to follow your page. Sounds good in theory, in practice, we worry it will become an irritant that puts people off visiting company pages or just fades into the background of the user experience.

AI Post Writing Assistance

Feels a little like LinkedIn have jumped on the AI bandwagon with this one, and there are definitely better AI tools out there to help write posts, but if you’ve paid for the account, it’s probably worth a trial (note it’s only in English at present).

The verdict?

$100 feels like a lot for what’s on offer, but if your marketing budgets aren’t tight, we suggest giving it a try and see how useful you find it. 

Finally, a note that LinkedIn are rolling this feature out slowly so you may not have access yet.

If you need help with LinkedIn Business Manager or any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch. We offer a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation.

The impending death of third-party cookies – what does it mean for B2B marketers?

The impending death of third-party cookies – what does it mean for B2B marketers?

An update 

As we confidently predicted in this blog, third party cookies will finally, and for definite, be phased out in 2024. This was however, dependent on there being no issues with the competition authorities.  

And as it turns out, there are issues with the competition authorities! So, third party cookies will survive a little while longer. Google have released an update for more context here or read on to find out what this means for B2B marketers.

Google’s stated timeline has changed from “before the end of 2024” to “not before the end of 2024”. Which the technically minded amongst us will note could be an extension as short as one minute… but most likely, a bit longer.  

Nothing really changes here: third party cookies are on their way out, and our advice on what B2B marketers need to do to prepare still stands. We’ll keep you posted as and when we hear more. 

Introduction

Third-party cookies have been endangered for some time. But now it’s official – the third-party cookie will go extinct in 2024. It will finally take its place in the museum of obsolete internet technologies, alongside the dial-up modem, Netscape Navigator and MySpace.

Why does this matter for B2B digital marketers?

In a nutshell: because most types of remarketing, and some other intent-based targeting techniques, just stop working without third-party cookies. So some B2B digital campaigns that have performed well in the past will have to be reworked or abandoned.

The ad platform operators are being a little coy – for perhaps understandable reasons – about exactly what the impacts will be and exactly what replacements and alternatives will be offered. So we B2B advertisers face some uncertainty in the coming months. Let me guide you as best I can through what’s happening, when it will happen, and what you should plan to do about it.

Disclaimers: as always, we offer this information in good faith but nothing in this article should be construed as legal advice. And there are a lot of uncertainties here and things might change (for instance if regulators intervene). I’ll do my best to be definitive, but you should read everything that follows with an implicit “My best guess at the moment is…”.

What is changing with third-party cookies, and when?

Google has announced that the Chrome browser will block third-party cookies “in the second half of 2024”. So we don’t yet have a specific date, but I guess the latest possible date consistent with that announcement is 31st December 2024.  

In the meantime, Chrome is already blocking third-party cookies for a random 1% of Chrome users. This is to allow everyone to understand the impact of third-party cookie blocking and provide time for a transition. 

Chrome is the dominant web browser worldwide with around 65% of the market. Safari (18%) and Firefox (3%) already block third-party cookies. I can’t find a definitive statement from Microsoft about the Edge browser (5% market share) but, since it shares the underlying Chromium technology with Chrome, it’s likely Edge will do the same as Chrome. So Google’s pending change to Chrome will mean we bid adieu to third-party cookies from all the mainstream web browsers, representing more than 90% of the world’s web browsers, by December 2024 (and possibly sooner). They may linger in a few obscure or out-of-date minority browser platforms, but they’ll be dead for all practical purposes come 2025. 

Will the sky fall? Are there any massive technical impacts?

Nah. 

There are a few scenarios where in the past a third-party cookie might have been necessary for functioning of some website component. But let’s face it: Safari has been blocking third-party cookies by default since 2020. Other web browsers (including Chrome) have offered the option to block them for many years. If there were a technical problem with your website when third-party cookies were blocked, you’d have heard about it by now. There might be some subtle behaviour changes from some components of your tech stack, but nothing major is going to stop working with your site’s core functionality. 

Of course that all assumes that you are a business using your website as a marketing channel for your own products and services. (What the online ad industry calls an “advertiser”.) It’s a different story if you are a “publisher” (providing ad-funded content) or, worse, an online ad network (providing the tech for advertisers to buy advertising and publishers to sell it). Then, yep sorry but for you, the sky is falling. See below. 

And another situation that will impact a minority of B2B marketers: if your organisation runs multiple websites on multiple domains that need to share user data via cookies for some functional purpose – for example, so that a single user profile can be used across multiple sites – then you will need to take steps. There are some special technologies (e.g. “Related Website Sets” or RWS) that are intended for these situations, and a bunch of associated complexity and uncertainty. Details here.

So just what ARE the impacts?

For most of us as B2B marketers, the main impact is that some types of remarketing, and some types of interest-based targeting, won’t work anymore. Depending on how the different ad platforms choose to handle the transition, the affected campaigns will either stop working altogether, or serve their ads in a more limited set of locations, or – arguably the worst scenario – quietly change their behaviour so that they target a wider audience of mostly the wrong people. 

Some types of targeting can survive. For example, contextual targeting – where an ad is shown based on the content of the page containing the ad – can still work within the scope a single web page. And targeting that takes place entirely within a single logged-in platform (like a social platform or behind a premium publisher’s paywall) won’t have to change. But run-of-internet remarketing/retargeting – the ads that follow you around the internet and remind you of previous website visits – and interest-based targeting can’t work without third-party cookies. And nor can some types of display advertising that are targeted using a third-party profile (offered by some social platforms, for example). 

In case it seems arbitrary why some types of targeting are going away and others are staying, it might help to understand WHY these specific techniques are reliant on third-party cookies. So let’s have a technical interlude. 

What are third-party cookies (and why are they necessary for remarketing)?

I’m gonna do my best here to be punchy but NGL – this is technical and obscure. I won’t be offended if you skip to the next section!  

Let’s start with FIRST-party cookies. They’re bits of data that are stored by a web browser in response to a request from the site that the browser is viewing. That same website can read and write the cookie data. Other websites can’t. (Hence “first-party” – the cookie belongs to the same website that the browser visited.) Typically, a first-party cookie is used to retain some state that is important to the website across pages or across visits – for example, the contents of a shopping basket.  

So if I visit AcmeAlternativeArchitects.com, I might receive a first-party cookie like this: 

And if I separately visit BetterB2bBrowsing.com then I might receive a separate first-party cookie like this: 

Other websites can’t access the data in the first-party cookie, the browser doesn’t allow it. So first partycookies can’t be used for sharing data across sites: 

Now you might already have a clue how third-party cookies are different. When a web browser visits a site, the site may ask for data to be stored in, or read from, a THIRD-party cookie. That cookie data is sent to a different site that may have no relationship at all with the site that is being visited.  

So here I am on AcmeAlternativeArchitects.com and that site uses a third-party cookie on BetterB2bBrowsing.com. Data can be sent to, and read from, that cookie like this: 

Note that I’ve not deliberately visited BBB.com at all here. As the user of the browser I probably don’t even know that website exists. Access to BBB.com and the exchange of data in the associated cookie is hidden away in the background of my browsing session.  

Subsequently, I visit CheapClassicConcrete.com and I’m a bit surprised to see an ad for AcmeAlternativeArchitects! That remarketing strategy is possible because the two websites I visited, AAA.com and CCC.com, are behind-the-scenes sharing data about my browsing history via the third-party cookie on BBB.com, like this:  

Remember – in this scenario I’ve never explicitly visited BBB.com and I probably don’t even realise that it exists. 

In today’s online advertising environment there are a LOT of different ad networks who are all interested in profiling and tracking users. So many websites set and read a LOT of different third-party cookies. This is what leads to privacy notices like this one: 

Because third-party cookies can share data about my browsing history across multiple sites, they can be used to drive some powerful marketing strategies, including: 

  1. Remarketing, where I see an ad for a website that I previously visited (perhaps even for a specific product from that site); and 
  2. Intent-based targeting, where my browsing history is analysed in more general terms (for instance, to infer that I might be interested in booking business travel to Australia) so that advertisers can show me products or services related to that trip. 

You can perhaps see why third-party cookies give rise to privacy worries. 

Google’s upcoming change to Chrome will act to stop this data sharing by changing the way the browser works. So in the future, requests to read a third-party cookie will just be blocked: 

Although existing third-party cookies will still hang around on users’ browsers, they won’t be accessible and there won’t be any way to use them to target advertising (or, indeed, for any other purpose). 

What will happen to our ad campaigns when third-party cookies are blocked?

Remarketing and other campaigns that rely on third-party data on display ad networks will not be able to work in their current form once third-party cookies go away. 

There might be replacement technologies of a sort. At the time of writing there are ideas around to offer something a bit like display remarketing, for example, but without the use of cookies. These ideas are still evolving, and the ad platform companies haven’t yet been explicit about how they will handle the transition to any new technical approaches. They’ve some understandable reasons for that: 

  • Some ad technology companies (like some specialist third-party ad networks) may fear they will be very badly affected by this change, to the point where their business model may no longer be viable. They may be hoping for a reprieve (e.g. if the competition regulators intervene) and certainly don’t want to scare off their customers prematurely. 
  • Other ad platforms (notably the big platform/audience owners like Google, LinkedIn and Meta) won’t be so badly affected, and may even benefit in some cases (because e.g. remarketing inventory will shift inside the “walled gardens”), but they are keeping their options open about exactly how they are going to handle the transition until the regulatory aspects are clearer. 
  • Some technology companies are working on alternative ways of targeting ads that will work without third-party cookies. Google in particular, with some partners, is actively working on alternatives to third-party cookies via an initiative called “Privacy Sandbox”. But no one is being very forthcoming with details here. Perhaps that coyness reflects a desire to avoid premature scrutiny by privacy campaigners and regulators for what are likely to be somewhat controversial approaches. 

Will Privacy Sandbox maintain the status quo?

Erm, probably not. At least for B2B marketers. 

You can read about Privacy Sandbox here. At the moment, details are scarce. Quoting from the FAQ (as of the date of this blog article): 

So a lot of ambition and aspiration, but precious little detail so far. 

In early iterations of Privacy Sandbox, Google has trialled a number of technologies including “FLOC” (Federated Learning of Online Cohorts). These use aggregate data (combining the browsing patterns from many individuals) to avoid individual privacy concerns. Another approach is called “Topics” and involves a form of contextual targeting, where the content of the visited web page is used to infer a user’s interests in a generalised, privacy-friendly way. But there doesn’t seem to be any certainty yet about the exact techniques that will finally emerge from the Privacy Sandbox to “replace” third-party cookies. 

Without more detail I can only speculate at this point. But I can’t see how Privacy Sandbox will achieve its stated objectives of preserving individual privacy and still allow the sort of fine-grained tracking that is needed for remarketing to niche B2B audiences.  

I can believe that some privacy-preserving technique working with aggregate or modelled data could do a reasonable job of predicting mainstream consumer behaviours – for example, is a person in market for a winter sun holiday, or for a new saloon car. But the niche, specialist nature of most B2B purchases is going to be too difficult. There are millions of different B2B product and service categories, and in some cases only a few hundred individuals in market for any given category at any given time. I think it’s an intractable data science problem to model and predict all of those behaviours, without using any third-party data, in any way that is useful for ad targeting. 

So while I’d love to be proven wrong, I think it is likely that whatever emerges from Privacy Sandbox will be of limited value to B2B marketers. Don’t expect anything like a pin-for-pin replacement for third-party cookies. Remarketing to anonymous visitors is going to die along with the third-party cookie. 

What steps should I take now?

First off, audit your current use of remarketing and intent-based targeting campaigns and figure out which ones are going to break when third-party cookies die. Get the best from them while you can. And be ready to stop those campaigns at short notice. 

Secondly, think about alternative strategies that you might be able to use, for example: 

  • It will still be possible to target audiences based on first-party data (subject to appropriate consent). For instance your list of email subscribers can be used to build an audience for display advertising on many social platforms. Can you make more use of this? Can you grow your email subscriber base, for instance by offering a newsletter? 
  • Keep an eye on Privacy Sandbox and similar initiatives. Perhaps credible techniques that are useful for B2B will emerge. (But as I explained above, I’m not optimistic on this.) 
  • Search remarketing (“RLSA”) will probably still work in a more limited form. Can you make better use of this? 
  • Remarketing strategies that can be implemented entirely within a social platform will still work. For instance if someone views your videos on LinkedIn, you can remarket to that person ON THE LINKEDIN PLATFORM.  
  • Contextual targeting techniques that target ads within the scope of a single web page, based on the content of that page, will still work. And we might see some innovation here from the ad networks. Be on the lookout for new contextual ad strategies for B2B use cases. 
  • Some less mainstream B2B targeting techniques use IP addresses instead of cookies. (Typically to target users on the internal network of specific companies.) These will continue to work. If the targeting options align with your campaign objectives, you might  be able to use these approaches. 

You might notice a theme here – internet-wide display networks won’t be able to offer remarketing, but the search engines and social platforms will still be able to offer remarketing within their own “walled gardens”. So an unfortunate consequence of the demise of the third-party cookie is a shift of power in favour of the large platform owners like Google, Meta and LinkedIn.   

First-party data strategies – just good old-fashioned B2B marketing

It’s arguable that third-party cookies have made B2B digital marketers a bit lazy. In a world where our ads can follow anonymous prospects around the internet, we didn’t need to try so hard to build relationships. Those days are ending. 

However you feel about the demise of strategies that rely on third-party cookies, it’s no bad thing to brush up your first-party data strategies. Having an explicit, opted-in marketing relationship with your desired audience – based on data that you own and control – is valuable in so many ways.  

Think about these aspects of your marketing mix: 

  • Do you have an email newsletter with compelling content? Do you promote it strongly at the top-of-funnel touchpoints? And via appropriate social channels? 
  • Do you have compelling “lead magnet” content that is good enough to be gated, so that it can capture contact details with marketing consent? 
  • Do you make good use of offline strategies to build your subscriber base? For example, if you use outbound telemarketing, can those calls be used to gather email subscribers? 

Even quite small changes, for example making a newsletter signup function a little more prominent on your homepage, can over time make a big difference to the growth of your first party data. And in the cookieless future, the quantity and quality of our first party data will increasingly determine our success or failure as B2B digital marketers. So it’s a great time to bring fresh energy and focus to your data strategies. 

Need help?

If you’re worried about the impacts of this change on your B2B digital marketing strategies, please feel free to get in touch. And watch this space – we’ll keep you updated via this blog and our newsletter as we learn more about some of the areas that are currently uncertain.  

Some FAQs

Q: Does this mean I don’t need to worry about cookie consent anymore? 

A: Absolutely not. GDPR and similar laws worldwide still apply to cookie use and you need to take the necessary steps to be compliant. Your site will still be setting and reading first party cookies, and they need consent. And even if Chrome and most other mainstream browsers are blocking third-party cookies, you still need consent for any legacy or niche browsers that work with third-party cookies. However you COULD take advantage of the fact that third-party cookies are going away to simplify your consent handling somewhat – there’s no need for those cookie warnings about “we and our 258 advertising partners value your privacy” if you’re no longer sharing cookies with advertising networks. So consider removing those advertising tags, and stripping back your related privacy messages, once third-party cookies go away. For information on cookie compliance see our blog article.

Q: Will Google Analytics and other tracking technologies stop working? 

A: No. Google Analytics and most other sensible and ethical tracking technologies have used first-party cookies for a long time. They won’t be impacted by the disappearance of third-party cookies.  

Q: Will programmatic and ABM strategies be impacted? 

A: Yes. These terms cover a number of different technical approaches. So they will be impacted to different degrees when third-party cookies are retired. You’ll need to look at the details of individual programmatic and ABM campaigns to assess the likely impact. But it’s likely there will be a significant impact. 

Q: What about advertising and targeting within apps, not websites? 

A: It’s different. And it’s complicated. Too complicated to get into here. In general, apps are less regulated and less dependent on browser functionality. So they are likely to be less impacted by Google’s pending change. 

Q: I’m not sure whether any of my existing campaigns are going to be impacted by this change. Can I safely just leave them running? 

A: We can’t be sure about that yet. In the past, some ad platforms have made “stealth” changes to targeting options that have made running campaigns behave in very wasteful ways – for example this change. So I don’t think it’s safe to assume that your existing campaigns can be left to run. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how the ad platforms handle this change. Watch this space. 

Sign up for our B2B digital marketing insights to stay up to date with the latest remarketing changes and best practices.  If you want to find out more how to optimise and test your B2B digital marketing campaigns or have any questions about B2B digital best practice, get in touch!

What’s Google Search Console, and why is it particularly important for B2B?

What’s Google Search Console, and why is it particularly important for B2B?

Google Search Console (“GSC”) is Google’s way of communicating information about Google’s view of a website back to that website’s owner.

Some key facts about GSC:

  • It’s free and open access. Anyone with a website can use it.
  • It’s an essential tool if you are remotely serious about SEO and content marketing.
  • You can use GSC to ask Google to remove certain content from search results.
  • GSC provides some important hygiene functions that might mitigate or avoid several harmful scenarios where something has gone technically wrong with your website.
  • It provides an important safety net when you are making major changes to your website or domain, like a restructure or switching to a new CMS.
  • You can only use GSC on a website that you own, and you have to authenticate your domain with Google before you can use it. Until you do this, you’ll miss out on the benefits of GSC.

GSC isn’t the most glamorous tool in a technical marketer’s armoury, but it’s foundational for SEO. And if you have a PR or legal crisis around some website content, or if something goes badly wrong with Google’s view of your website (for example, if your site is hacked), GSC can be an absolute lifesaver. So even if you don’t care much about SEO, it’s worth making sure you have GSC in place and that your team has some familiarity with it, just in case of a future technical or content-related emergency.

Why GSC is particularly important for B2B digital marketers

GSC is important to all digital marketers and there’s nothing B2B specific about GSC: its functionality is defined in technical terms, and it doesn’t know or care whether your website’s target audience members are consumers, businesses or something else. But GSC is particularly useful in B2B marketing for a couple of reasons:

  • B2B companies are often dealing with niche audiences, so B2B websites often have low levels of traffic. Whereas a B2C site might have thousands or even millions of visitors each day, and hundreds of transactions per hour, a specialist B2B site might just see a handful of daily visitors. If something goes wrong with a high volume B2C site, someone is likely to notice pretty much straight away – the transactions stop coming, or someone will call the contact centre with an error report. But with a niche B2B site it’s quite possible that a problem won’t be noticed for days or even weeks. That’s where the proactive monitoring and alerting features of GSC really help. It’s another pair of eyes, constantly on the alert for website problems.
  • B2B websites often cover very specialist areas of content. It’s easy for there to be misalignment between the intended purpose of your content and Google’s understanding of it. If that happens, you won’t reach your intended audience via Google Search. The diagnostics that GSC provides help to detect and fix this sort of misalignment. Even if you’re not particularly focused on SEO, it’s still worth understanding the basics of how Google views your website content.

That second point leads us nicely to the first feature of GSC that I want to highlight.

Search Performance reports

A key SEO-related function of GSC is the Search Performance report. Here’s an example from the Sharp Ahead domain:

This example shows how many clicks my website received for particular searches on Google, and also how many impressions. For example our content was shown 730 times on Google for the search “alternatives to webinars”, and received 5 clicks.

I can find out about these clicks from other sources, like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity. But this data about Google search impressions is unique to GSC. Search impressions have marketing value, even when the viewer doesn’t click. So this impressions data is very valuable for assessing and improving SEO and content marketing.

I won’t go into all of the detail here, but you’ll note that this report has a lot of options: for example, you can break down performance geographically, or by device type (mobile vs tablet vs computer).

Note also that these reports can cover up to 16 months of historical data – great to build up enough impressions to make sense of niche search queries where daily volumes are small, and useful to look at seasonal trends too. But the historical data isn’t retrospective, it is only present from the moment you first verify your site with GSC.

So if you don’t have GSC yet, verify your site today so you can start building up this valuable history!

Inspecting a URL with GSC

Another core SEO-related function of GSC is “URL inspection”. This allows you to check Google’s view of a particular page from your site. Here’s an example report from the Sharp Ahead website:

An important highlight is at the top of the report “URL is on Google – it can appear in Google Search results”. This confirms that Google knows about the page and is, in principle, willing to show it in Google search results. This feature allows you to tell the difference between a page that can’t get any search traffic – because it isn’t known to Google, or because Google has excluded it from search results for some reason – and a page that just isn’t getting any search traffic – because it doesn’t rank highly enough against SEO competitors.

There’s a lot of more detailed information in that URL inspection report which is important for SEO.

Some of the other things that GSC can do for you

There are dozens of functions in GSC and I can’t cover them all here. But here are some highlights that are likely to be of particular interest to B2B marketers: 

  • You can ask Google to “urgently remove” content from Google Search. You might need to do this if, for example, there’s a breaking legal issue around some of your web content. 
  • You can ask Google to immediately reindex a page from your website. Typically you don’t need to do this – Google checks your site regularly and will automatically find your new content quickly enough – but if a change is time sensitive (for example, a key team member has left the company to work for a competitor, and you want the outdated information purged from search results), or if you are testing something new for SEO purposes, this can speed things up. 
  • You can tell Google if you’ve moved your site to a new domain. This can speed up migration of Google’s search content to that new domain, and help to preserve the SEO value of the old domain. 
  • Google will use GSC to inform you if it finds invalid content metadata on your site. For example, if you run real-world events, you might use structured markup https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/event to inform Google about them so that they can appear nicely in search results, like this:

If there’s something wrong with that markup, your event won’t appear and you’ll miss out on that additional search placement opportunity. Google will tell you about the problem in GSC.

Google will inform you – in the “Security Issues” section of GSC – if it detects a serious issue with your website such as the apparent presence of malware.

This last feature is especially important. If Google thinks your site has been hacked it will display a notice to that effect in search results:

(See https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/190597) 

That’s a bad look for any brand. 

Hopefully your site will never be hacked or otherwise compromised by malicious content. But if that ever happens, you’ll want to know and to do something about it right away. GSC is one way to monitor for that. 

Authenticating your website for GSC

It makes sense that Google won’t share all of that powerful functionality in GSC with just anyone. You have to prove to Google that you are a legitimate owner of the website in order to set up and access GSC for that site. 

It may be that GSC has already been set up by your company, or by a web agency acting on your behalf, but you personally don’t have access. If so, there are methods to add extra users to an existing GSC account. Contact the person who owns your GSC setup. 

If you don’t have GSC in place at all, you’ll need to authenticate by verifying your site ownership with Google. There are multiple methods for this which Google details here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080?hl=en 

I strongly recommend you choose the Domain Property method if you possibly can. This is because it covers all variants of your domain and subdomain via a single verification step. Especially in B2B marketing, it’s likely that you’ll use a number of subdomains (for instance for landing pages, with a system like Unbounce, and for marketing automation with systems like Hubspot and Constant Contact). Even if you are attempting to exclude those subdomains from Google’s index, they might creep in and cause SEO problems. The Domain Property method makes sure you get data on all of them via GSC.  

Note that Google doesn’t collect search performance data for your property until you first verify it with GSC. The data isn’t retrospective. So even if you don’t plan to put any effort into SEO for a while, it’s worth getting GSC in place so that a timeline of past data can build up. 

Other search engines are available

I’ve focused on GSC which is a Google-specific tool. While Google is often the most important search engine, it’s not the only one. 

There is also a Microsoft equivalent of GSC called Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT). It offers similar functionality to GSC with some nuanced differences. Once you have GSC in place, it’s a good idea to set up BWT as well. BWT may become proportionately more important as Microsoft’s new AI developments make inroads into generative search. 

Other search engines have their own equivalent tools and it may be worth setting these up if other search engines are important to your business. For example, Baidu Webmaster Tools may be very useful to you if you do business in China. 

But that said, Google Search Console will be the most valuable single tool for most B2B marketers. So if you are pressed for time and resource, start by getting GSC in place and making use of it. The other tools can wait if need be. 

GSC habits and processes

As you’ll see from this overview, GSC is a complex tool with a lot of important functionality. To get the best of it you need to build some habits and put some processes in place. I’ll cover that in a future article. Sign up for our newsletter to be one of the first to read it, and for other B2B digital marketing news and best practice tips. 

If you need help with Google Search Console or any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch. We offer a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation.

Get expert help from top PPC specialists:

  • Choose the right blend of PPC platforms
  • Optimise your campaigns’ performance
  • Increase your paid advertising ROI

Or contact us directly on
01865 479 625 or
info@sharpahead.com

Office hours: Monday – Friday 9:00am – 5:30pm

Thank you for downloading our doc...

Check out our in-depth guide to B2B SEO content using Google's EEAT guidelines

B2B Digital Rocket Fuel
straight to your inbox

Add your email address below to receive our biweekly newsletter and stay up to date with the latest B2B digital marketing news and insights.

You'll also get instant access to our growing catalogue of marketing resources.

    “An invaluable resource for getting the latest and greatest ideas and tips on B2B digital marketing. My students also benefit from the industry insights”.

    Louize Clarke, Founder, The Curious Academy