Thursday, June 12, 2008

Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click

By Josh Prizer

If you are like a lot of companies dependent on client leads to keep afloat, you may be noticing a trend from some of the lead generation companies out there. Not only are the leads expensive, but they aren't as strong as they used to be. We are hearing this again and again from our clients who are shifting their budgets to crank up the stronger quality pay per click search leads.

A lot of lead generation companies are using pay per click search to gather their leads. They will then mark up the cost it took to acquire them, or they will send them to multiple vendors and the quality to you is often poor. If this is your problem, maybe it's time you skip the middle man and go straight to the source.

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.

The first place to begin is with your pay per click ad copy. It's fairly easy to place an ad and launch it. However, the pay per click engines are putting more emphasis than ever on "Quality" algorithms. If you are unable to make the daily effort to test your ad copy, you are going to fall behind those that do. A good PPC management company will run daily split tests for their clients. This is who you are up against more and more these days -- experts who double and triple the click through rates of their clients' 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.

If you can optimize your landing pages over time, you can now take that traffic and double or triple your lead conversions. We've seen it time and time again. So, put in the effort, it is worth the time.

If you don't know where to start when it comes to Pay Per Click search, hire a PPC management company. They will develop keyword lists, find keywords from your competition, advise you on some ideas for your landing pages and conduct those daily split tests.

So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.

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