Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click

By Josh Prizer

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.

Jumping into Pay Per Click isn't just a matter of setting up a website and contact information. You can certainly get results doing that -- we see it all the time. But to truly compete and drive your cost per lead down, you need some sophistication.

When you launch a paid search campaign, you need to realize that everything in your pipeline, from what keywords to appear on, what ads to run, where to send them, how to get them to take action, etc. -- all of that can be managed and optimized. Let's examine two of these areas.

Let's start with your PPC ad copy. You can certainly just place an ad and let it ride, but with the PPC algorithms placing more and more importance on Quality Scores, you need to pay close attention to your ads. If you can't conduct daily split testing on your ads because of the time and effort, then try outsourcing to a PPC management company. A good firm should be able to double or triple your click through rates.

Maybe that doesn't sound important, but it is. Doubling and tripling your quality traffic can do the same for your number of leads. And, it can lower your costs per click in the process.

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.

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.

Ditching those weak, watered-down leads and going right to the source can help your business boost its results dramatically.

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