Hoo Boy Online

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why is this important? Because it doubles or triples your traffic — and in turn doubles or triples your leads.

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.

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 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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 4:44 am and is filed under Advertising.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.