Many of the lead gen business owners I work with seem to make all the same mistake and use simple metrics to determine success in their paid search marketing campaigns.
You can’t really blame them as each search networks really promotes cost per lead as the easiest way to determine PPC success. In some cases this is the best way to determine success but all clicks are not the same and the leads generated from these channels are not worth the same amount.
What many lead gen business owners forget is that a lead is not a lead. You can control the quality of a lead by controlling some of the PPC variables by optimization. Let’s take a look at a few of these:
Search vs Content Network – By default your account will be advertising in both search and content networks. Sometimes content network can help you show great results in the lead-gen arena but it takes a lot of mining to find the gold.
Channel Source – Every network you advertise on will show a difference in lead quality and they can be like night and day.
Time of Day – Remember the differences in time zones as 11pm EST might be a dog but 1am EST might be really great.
Day of the Week – Use this with time of day for maximum optimization. Weekends can be a deal maker and heart breaker especially if your leads need to be followed up ASAP.
Demographics – I love to do research on competitors with Quantcast to find what the demographics are and use this information to promote my clients products. Bing and Google allow you options to formulate campaigns on these demographics.
Technology Based – Type of browser and operating systems can make a big difference.
Mobile vs. Desktop – Yes, all websites work well in mobile but do you have an optimized landing page for mobile?
Something you can also optimize outside the networks is expectation and mindset. Are you expecting that every lead you generate to be a sale? I hope not but just because they are not a sale do not mean it is not a good lead. You can still build the lead to a sale using a drip marketing campaign or offering an incentive. Your mindset needs to be centered on quality. 25 non closing leads are not better than 5 closing leads. Optimize your lead gen around higher quality leads only makes the business grow faster and saves you money in the long run.
