Generating leads is something most businesses want. Generally, not too difficult to do if you have the resources at your disposal. Generating quality leads, however, is not always easy.

In short, PPC or  pay-per-click, is a hugely popular, and, when done well, effective form of online advertising used to direct traffic to websites. With PPC, the advertisers pay a publisher, usually Google via the Adwords platform, a fee each time their advert is clicked on. By paying for every click, you buy visits to your site, rather than via organic search results. One of the benefits being that you are targeting people who are actively searching for your product or service.  Another is that it can be a hugely successful way to generate leads.

In order for a PPC campaign to be successful, research and time needs to go into make sure you have the right strategy, keywords, ad copy and landing pages optimised for conversions. For B2B lead generation we need get our campaign to work even harder and smarter and remove the risk of unqualified visitors filling in your data capture form.

Improving lead quality means inevitably getting less volume, but what leads you do get through should be stronger.

Now we have set your expectations, let’s delve a little deeper…

Target niche keyword phrases

When you have a keyword list that only uses short tail keywords you are automatically opening things up to targeting your campaign at people who are not being specific in what they want, therefore naturally this means less relevant viewers of your ad. To improve on your lead quality means you need to seek out those users are looking for what you are specifically offering. Long tail keywords or phrases, that also limit broad phrases, are one way to do this.

Use copy that qualifies in your PPC advert

Crafting strong calls to action and compelling copy are all in a day’s work for a Disruptor Media copywriter, however when it comes to really driving those quality leads you want to make sure that you get those qualified clicks and conversions. This means subtly deterring anyone who doesn’t fit the bill. For instance if you want to get show on the paid search engine results page (SERPS) for employee training you want to show up for this phrase, but if you want to get sign up a particular course itself you want to make sure your advert only calls out this course.

A landing page that matches search intent

Your landing page must also serve to qualify users. Even if your product or service speaks to many different demographics, be sure to add copy and imagery that narrows down your audience as best as you can. When it comes to your data capture form, one way to ensure those people entering their details are going to be quality prospects is to add a few more fields. This goes against other schools of thought to say that less fields are better. Yes this is true in many instances when it comes to best practice landing pages, but if you want to put off those who are not serious buyers then adding a few more fields will go some way to help.

Review your bidding strategy

This one is less about improving the quality, more about the effectiveness of your PPC to attract conversions.

Google PPC has 12 different search strategies. There are two basic conversion strategies in Google Adwords that can help with lead generation campaigns;  CPA Targeting and enhanced CPC targeting. These strategies provide a more meaningful goal than just maximising your cost per click.

With CPA, you pay for a specified acquisition – for example a sale, click, or form submit. The idea is for Google to automate the exact bids that your campaigns place in the auctions, based on how likely a keyword is to lead to a conversion.

A CPA strategy is useful when you have specific goals you want your landing page to achieve, such as submitting names and emails to a lead form. Since Target CPA (the average amount you would like to pay for a conversion) runs off historical data, it is recommended you need at least 15 conversions in past 30 days on your ad groups or campaigns, for this bid strategy to run and that of course tracking is set up correctly.

According to Google “Target CPA bidding automatically finds an optimal CPC bid for your ad each time that it’s eligible to appear. Google Ads sets these bids to achieve an average CPA equal to your target across all campaigns using this strategy.”

“For example, if you choose a target CPA of £10, Google Ads will automatically set your CPC bids to try to get you as many conversions at £10 on average.”

Enhanced CPC is a strategy that lets you adjust your bids only on queries that are most likely to lead to conversions. Essentially it raises your max CPC threshold to capture clicks that the data shows to be more valuable. It does this by analysising the probability of a conversion occurring based on previous visitors to your ads.

Want to sky-rocket your PPC? Give us a call we think you will like what we have to say. Oh and we don’t ‘do’ jargon either. We are a friendly, straight- talking bunch who love what we do. We can’t wait to work with you and bring your brand to life!