Monday, June 30, 2008

Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click

By Josh Prizer

If you feel like you are spinning your wheels with the same poor quality leads from your lead generation service, you're not alone. In the past few years we've heard from more and more of our clients that the quality leads they used to get from their lead gen services are becoming worse and worse. More people are shifting their budgets to pay per click search where the quality remains strong.

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.

Getting into PPC advertising is not as simple as it used to be. Sure, you can set up a website with some contact info, but the competition has gotten more sophisticated in recent years. In order to really compete and push down your cost per acquisition, you've got to throttle up your effort and skills.

One thing we continually preach to clients is the importance of fine tuning every aspect of your online lead pipeline.

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.

So, why is this key? Pretty simple. Double and triple that relevant traffic and you can double and triple your leads. If you are not working on this, trust me, your competition is. It's worth the time and expense.

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.

Fine tuning your landing pages will lower your cost per lead. We've seen small changes double conversions and drop your costs per lead in half. So, tinkering is well worth the effort.

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.

About the Author:

No comments: