Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click
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.
Many lead gen firms use pay per click (PPC) search to attract their leads. Once they have a lead, they will ship it out to a variety of vendors, charging each the same fee. If you are seeing your leads get more saturated, it might be time for you to go right to the source instead of letting the middle men do that for you.
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.
Begin with your paid search ad copy. Today’s PPC search engines place high importance on your click through rates. The more an ad is clicked, the more money they can make. So, they have worked into their algorithms things like “Quality Scores” which take these rates into consideration. Fine tuning your ad copy will increase your click through rates. Conducting daily split tests is vital. By testing your ads continually, you will find what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t have the time to do that, then hire a PPC management company. An expert can double or triple the number of people clicking on your 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 don’t stop there, look at your landing pages (the pages where you send your pay per click traffic). Are the contact forms too busy or too buried? Is your phone number buried? There are ton of things you can do to convert leads at a higher rate.
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.
If jumping into the paid search engines sounds like a lot of work, it is. You can roll up your sleeves and make it pay off over time, or you can hire a turnkey PPC management company. A good PPC expert will develop expansive keyword lists, mine keywords from your competitors, conduct daily split tests on your ads, and advise you on your landing pages.
So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.
screen completely but in practice this rarely happens. Because the marketing with pay per click is targeted, there is less money lost on advertising in the wrong areas. Your ad will only show up on sites where people are already interested in something related to what you are offering.









