June 29, 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.
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.
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 as I mentioned, everything in your pipeline can be optimized. Let’s take a look at where you are sending these people who click on ads. Do you have a contact form or just an email address? Is your phone number visible or in your footer? Are you offering an incentive for people to take action? There’s a lot to tweak and test.
Optimizing your site’s landing pages reduces the dollars you spend on each lead. You might be surprised, but even tiny changes can cut your costs per lead in half. We’ve seen it. So put in the effort or invest more funds in these mission critical spots.
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.
So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.
Topics: Marketing |
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