PPC can be a truly remarkable sales channel. Nowhere else are you able to target hand-raisers with such precision. With paid search, someone actually tells you I want “this” and as marketers, it’s our job to provide them with information to help meet their need. If your company’s primary marketing objective is to drive leads for your sales team, you might often run into the issue of “quality” when it comes to your PPC leads. While quantity is important, the qualified leads are the ones that end up generating real profit. In this blog, we will discuss the 3 fundamental keys to improving your PPC lead quality.
Account Structure:
Like with many things in the world, a strong foundation typically leads to success. The same can be said for your Paid Search account. Without it, you can assure yourself that you’ll be wasting a lot of time and money. Keep the following in mind before you start building an account from scratch:
- Campaign structure: The account structure should be carefully planned with your business goals in mind. Consider which geographies are most important to target, how much budget should go to certain product lines, and what type of reporting you’ll need. Proper planning will allow for precise budgeting and simpler optimizations which will lead to more profitable results.
- Keyword targeting: When it comes to keyword targeting, you want to ensure that you have strong coverage over a wide range of keywords relevant to your business. After you finish identifying your initial keyword list, select the ones that you believe will drive the most qualified traffic and deliver the top leads. These terms will likely be longer-tailed iterations with less traffic volume.
If enough historical data is present (sometimes your best guess must do), we highly recommend focusing on best-performing geographies and keywords. This high priority campaign will then receive a bulk of the budget, to ensure that your top performing keywords will receive maximum impression share.
Ad Messaging:
Once you have your keyword set finalized, it’s time to move onto the ad copy. Leveraging the appropriate messaging can be crucial in further qualifying traffic before you even incur the cost of a click. Often our clients will bid on expensive keywords that are applicable to both larger enterprises and smaller ones. This is inevitable because many organizations have similar product types but different target markets. This is where strategic messaging comes into play.
When we onboard a client, one of our biggest interests is their target market. Are we going after CMO’s, companies with XXXX+ employees, or companies that drive $XXm in annual revenue? We’ll take these insights and include them in our PPC ad messaging to further qualify our traffic. We know our keywords are applicable to multiple customer sizes, but we need only be concerned with the smaller percentage of qualified traffic. Look at a recent ad copy test below:
As you can see, while our No Qualifier ad drove more front-end leads, it was our Qualifier ad that drove 150% more qualified leads. The cost per qualified lead is also much lower, almost 77% lower than the No Qualifier ad. We sacrifice performance from metrics like CTR and conversion rate, but we make up for it in the volume of qualified leads we generated with our Qualifier ads.
Back-end Tracking:
Lastly, and arguably most importantly, you will need to ensure that your back-end tracking is linked back to your PPC campaigns properly. By using hidden fields within your forms, you can pass valuable PPC specific information from a landing page URL to your marketing automation or CRM system. This is very important for PPC advertisers because it will allow us to better understand which of our ad groups and/or ad messaging are driving the most qualified leads.
We recommend including parameters like campaign name, ad group name, offer type, and messaging for starters. This way, when you run a Qualifier vs. No Qualifier ad copy test, you’ll be able to tell which ads are generating the qualified leads. This level of tracking also can help you cut costs on areas of the account that never drive qualified leads and will allow you to reallocate to more profitable areas.
If you were interested in learning more about improving your PPC lead quality, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com or by phone at 781-591-0752.
