Solved: How to Set Up Search Ads for Wholesale B2B Furniture?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your situation. Setting up search ads for a B2B furniture export business has its own unique challenges, but it's definitely doable with the right approach. I've worked on quite a few B2B campaigns, and there are some common threads and lessons learnt that should be helpful for you.

This is a bit of a long one, but I wanted to be thorough and give you a proper roadmap. I'll walk you through how I'd think about your overall strategy, the specifics of Google Ads like keywords and bidding, and what you need to measure to know if it's actually working. Getting this stuff right from the start will save you a lot of wasted ad spend down the line.

We'll need to look at your overall strategy first...

Before we even touch Google Ads, we have to be really clear on the fundamentals. A lot of people skip this step and just jump into picking keywords, and that's usually where it all goes wrong. Tbh, for a business like yours, your website and your sales process are just as important as the ads themselves.

First thing to do is get crystal clear on your ideal customer. Who are you actually selling to? It's not just "businesses". Is it procurement managers for large hotel chains? Is it independent interior designers sourcing for big projects? Is it buyers for retail furniture store chains in specific countries? Each of these people will search differently, care about different things, and need a different message. You need to create a persona for them. What are their biggest headaches? Is it finding reliable suppliers? Getting consistent quality on bulk orders? Logistics and shipping? Your ads and your website need to speak directly to those pains.

The second thing is to realise that B2B sales, especially for something as significant as a furniture wholesale order, are not impulse buys. No one is going to click an ad and place a £50,000 order in the same session. The sales cycle is much longer. This means the primary goal of your advertising shouldn't be to make a direct sale, but to generate a qualified lead. Your whole funnel needs to be built around this. What's the first step you want a potential buyer to take? It's probably not "Buy Now". It's more likely:

• -> Request a Wholesale Catalogue
• -> Book a Consultation/Call
• -> Get a Custom Quote for a Project

Your entire website needs to be geared towards getting them to take that one, specific action. I'd take a hard look at your site. Does it look profesional and trustworthy? B2B buyers are risk-averse. They need to feel confident that you're a legitimate, credible operation. This means high-quality photography of your furniture, clear information about your manufacturing process, case studies or testimonials from other clients, and obvious contact information. If your website looks dated or cheap, they'll assume your products are too, and no amount of clever advertising will fix that. You'll just pay for clicks that never convert, and your cost per lead will be sky-high.

A lot of businesses we see have a website that's more of an online brochure. What you need is a lead generation machine. The landing pages you send ad traffic to should be ruthlessly focused on that one single conversion goal. Remove any distracting navigation or links. Use persuasive sales copy that addresses the persona's pain points and presents your company as the solution. Some professional copy can really go a long way here to build trust and encourage them to get in touch.

I'd say you need to focus on Google Search ads...

You're asking about search ads, and you're on exactly the right track. For B2B services or wholesale, especially when you're starting out, Google Search is almost always the best place to invest your budget. Why? Because you're reaching people who are actively searching for a solution. They already have a need, they're aware of their problem (e.g., "I need a supplier for hotel bedroom furniture"), and they are in the market looking for options. This is what we call 'high-intent' traffic, and it's far easier to convert than trying to interrupt someone on social media who isn't in a buying mindset.

Could you use other platforms? Sure. LinkedIn Ads let you target by job title and company size, so you could theoretically target "Procurement Managers" at "Hospitality Companies". But it is very, very expensive. It can work, but I wouldn't start there. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is even harder for your kind of business. The B2B targeting is limited, and you're mostly dealing with users in a leisure context. For now, stick to Google Search and master it.

Your Keyword Strategy
This is the heart of your search campaign. Your initial idea to use keywords like "product word + manufacturer/factory/supplier" is a great start. That's exactly the right kind of thinking. You want to capture people with commercial or transactional intent.

You asked if you should choose them based on search volume. The answer is yes and no. High search volume is good, but relevance is far more important. A keyword with 10,000 searches a month that's only vaguely related to what you do is useless. A keyword with only 50 searches a month that perfectly describes what a buyer for a 100-room hotel would search for is pure gold. You need to do some proper keyword research to uncover these gems. Think beyond the obvious. What jargon does your industry use? What specific product lines do you have? Think about the end-use.

Here’s a sample of how I might start grouping keywords. This helps you structure your campaigns later on.

Keyword Match Types
You asked when to use Broad, Phrase, and Exact. This is a crucial question. Here’s the simple breakdown:

• -> Broad Match: Be very careful with this. Google's definition is very loose. If you bid on 'wholesale furniture', you might show up for 'used furniture for sale'. It can spend your budget incredibly fast on irrelevant traffic. Tbh, for a new campaign with a limited budget, I would avoid it completely unless you are using it with a very smart bidding strategy that is already proven to work.
• -> Phrase Match: This should be your workhorse. It's the best balance of control and reach. If your keyword is "hotel furniture supplier", you'll show up for searches like "best hotel furniture supplier in europe" or "find a hotel furniture supplier". It keeps the core meaning intact. Start most of your keywords on phrase match.
• -> Exact Match: This gives you the most control. Your ad will only show for searches that are almost identical to your keyword. You'd use this for keywords you *know* are highly valuable and convert well. For instance, once you see that "contract hospitality furniture" is getting you great leads via phrase match, you might add it as an exact match [contract hospitality furniture] to bid more aggressively on it.

My advice: Start with 90% Phrase Match and maybe 10% Exact Match for terms you are very confident about. Then, the most important job you have in the first few weeks is to check your 'Search Terms' report every single day. This shows you what people *actually* typed to trigger your ad. You will find a lot of irrelevant searches. Add these as 'negative keywords'. This ongoing process of adding negetive keywords is absolutely fundamental to running a succesful and profitable search campaign. It's how you prune away the wasted spend and focus your budget on what works.

You probably should think about campaign structure and bidding...

Okay, let's talk about how to set up the campaigns and what bidding strategy to use. Don't just chuck all your keywords into one campaign and one ad group. That's a recipe for low relevance, low Quality Scores, and high costs.

A Sensible Campaign Structure
You need to group your keywords into tightly themed campaigns and ad groups. This allows you to write super-relevant ad copy and send traffic to the most relevant landing page. A good structure might look like this, based on the keyword themes from before:

• Campaign 1: Hospitality Furniture
  • Ad Group A: Hotel Furniture (Keywords: "hotel furniture supplier", "hotel beds wholesale", etc.) -> Ad talks about durability for high traffic, directs to Hotel Furniture page.
  • Ad Group B: Restaurant Furniture (Keywords: "restaurant chairs wholesale", "commercial dining tables", etc.) -> Ad talks about style and customisation, directs to Restaurant Furniture page.
• Campaign 2: Office Furniture
  • Ad Group A: Office Desks (Keywords: "wholesale office desks", "bulk standing desks", etc.) -> Ad talks about ergonomics and bulk discounts, directs to Desks page.
  • Ad Group B: Office Chairs (Keywords: "bulk buy office chairs", "ergonomic chairs b2b", etc.) -> Ad talks about comfort and warranty, directs to Chairs page.

See the logic? Everything is aligned: the user's search, the keyword, the ad copy, and the landing page. This alignment tells Google your ads are highly relevant, which leads to a higher Quality Score. A higher Quality Score means you can often pay less per click than your competitors to get a better ad position. It's one of the few 'free lunches' in paid advertising.

Your Bidding Strategy Question
You asked about Max CPC, Max Conversion, or Manual. Let's clear this up.

• -> Manual CPC: This is the old-school way. You set a maximum bid for each keyword. It gives you ultimate control but it's incredibly time-consuming to manage and it doesn't leverage any of Google's powerful machine learning. I wouldn't recommend it for most people today.
• -> Maximise Clicks (what I think you meant by Max CPC): Avoid this. Its goal is to get you the most clicks possible for your budget. It does not care about the quality of those clicks. It will often find the cheapest, lowest-quality traffic that is unlikely to convert.
• -> Maximise Conversions: This is where you want to be. You tell Google what a 'conversion' is (e.g., a lead form submission on your "Get a Quote" page), and you let its algorithm go and find users who are most likely to complete that action. It's a powerful, automated strategy that optimises for what actually matters: getting leads.

There's a catch, though. For "Maximise Conversions" to work, you absolutely MUST have accurate conversion tracking set up. The system is only as smart as the data you feed it. If your tracking is broken, you're telling the machine to optimise for the wrong thing, and it will happily waste all your money doing it. Setting up conversion tracking properly via Google Tag Manager is the non-negotiable first step before you spend a single pound on ads.

You'll need to get the measurement right...

This brings us to the final, and perhaps most important, piece of the puzzle: measurement and what to expect. Running ads without solid measurement is like flying a plane with no instruments. You're just burning fuel with no idea where you're going.

As I mentioned, setting up conversion tracking is step zero. You need to define what a "lead" is for your business and track it accurately. This allows you to calculate your Cost Per Lead (CPL), which will become your most important metric.

So, what should you expect your CPL to be? This is the million-dollar question. It varies massively by industry, country, and competition. We worked with a B2B software company and saw CPLs on LinkedIn around $22, but for other campaigns targeting niche decision-makers, it can be much higher. You have to work out your own numbers. If you close 1 in 10 leads, and the average order value is £20,000, then you could happily pay up to £2,000 per closed deal. That means you could afford a CPL of up to £200 and still be very profitable. You need to understand your own business maths to know what a "good" CPL is for you.

To give you a rough idea of the maths: If your average Cost Per Click (CPC) is £3.00, and your landing page converts visitors into leads at a rate of 4%, your CPL would be £3.00 / 0.04 = £75. This shows you that improving either your CPC (through better Quality Scores) or your landing page conversion rate has a massive impact on your final cost.

Beyond CPL, you need to watch a few other key metrics in Google Ads:

• -> Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who see your ad and click on it. A low CTR (e.g., below 2-3% on Search) usually means your ad copy isn't compelling or your keywords aren't relevant enough to the ad.
• -> Impression Share: The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total times they could have been shown. If this is low, it means you're losing out to competitors either because your budget is too low or your ad rank (a mix of bid and Quality Score) isn't high enough.
• -> Search Terms Report: I'll say it again because it's so important. Live in this report. It's the truest source of feedback you have. You need to be checking it religously and adding negetive keywords.

This is a data-driven process. The goal in the first month or two isn't necessarily to be hugely profitable. The goal is to gather data, learn what works, trim what doesn't, and build a stable, predictable lead generation system that you can then scale.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in. Running B2B paid search effectively is complex. It's a world away from boosting a post on Facebook. To make it a bit clearer, I've broken down my core advice into a table of actionable steps. This is the roadmap I would follow if I were starting your campaigns from scratch tomorrow.

As you can see, getting this right involves a lot more than just picking a few keywords. The principles are straightforward, but the execution and continuous optimisation require expertise, time, and attention to detail. This is a full-time job, and it's what we do all day, every day for our clients.

Getting from a standing start to a profitable, scalable lead generation engine is a process of constant testing and refinement. An expert can significantly shorten that process, helping you avoid common expensive mistakes and find profitable pockets of traffic much faster. We've taken on B2B clients and systematically reduced their lead costs by focusing on exactly these kinds of structural improvements, better targeting, and relentless optimisation.

If you've found this initial guidance helpful and you'd prefer to have an experienced team manage this process for you, we'd be happy to chat. We offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a closer look at your specific situation and discuss what a tailored strategy for your business would look like.

Hope that helps!

Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh