Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click
Tired of watered down, poor quality leads from your lead generation company? The last several years, we have been noticing a trend being discussed by our clients. They are telling us that the quality of leads that used to come in from their lead generation services have dropped off the map. At the same time, they’ve noticed that the quality of leads coming from pay per click has remained superb and even gotten better.
Interestingly, one of the sources that lead generation companies use to develop leads is pay per click search traffic. Many will end up marking up the costs to you and then shelling the same lead out to multiple vendors. If this sounds like your situation, perhaps you ought to think about ditching the go-between and head straight to the source of traffic.
Unfortunately, PPC search isn’t quite as easy as it used to be. These days you have a lot of competition and it’s getting increasingly sophisticated. Sure, you can set up a simple web site with contact info and point some ads at it. You’ll probably get a trickle of leads. But if you want to really increase your business and lower your cost per lead or cost per acquisition, you will most likely need to dedicate some resources to it.
We always tell our clients that everything in the pay per click pipeline needs to be optimized. Let’s take a look at a couple items.
Begin with your paid search ad copy. Today’s PPC search engines place high importance on your click through rates. The more an ad is clicked, the more money they can make. So, they have worked into their algorithms things like “Quality Scores” which take these rates into consideration. Fine tuning your ad copy will increase your click through rates. Conducting daily split tests is vital. By testing your ads continually, you will find what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t have the time to do that, then hire a PPC management company. An expert can double or triple the number of people clicking on your ads.
Why is this important? Because it doubles or triples your traffic — and in turn doubles or triples your leads.
But this is just one place to focus your efforts. Take a look at the destination urls — the landing pages where you send visitors. Are you using a contact form? How simple is your contact form? Is your phone number too small? There are always a variety of items you can optimize and test to increase conversions.
Optimizing your site’s landing pages reduces the dollars you spend on each lead. You might be surprised, but even tiny changes can cut your costs per lead in half. We’ve seen it. So put in the effort or invest more funds in these mission critical spots.
Making the jump to PPC search may not be in your company’s core competency. If not, then outsource to a PPC management company. Their experts can mine massive keyword lists, pull keywords from your competitors, conduct the necessary and vital daily split tests, and give you insight into better landing pages.
Once you dump those watered down leads and go straight to the source…the results can be phenomenal.
Tags: Pay Per Click, pay per lead
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