If you are spending dollars on PPC advertising, ensuring the quality of the leads you generate from your ad is key to getting a good return on your investment. Generating leads with PPC campaigns can be challenging. Generating high-quality leads is even far more complex.
There are different ways to measure lead quality, but one proven effective metric is your conversion rate from lead to customer. Lead quality refers to the probability of your target customers becoming your paying consumers. The higher quality of these leads, the more likely you can convert them into consumers. A low lead-to-customer conversion rate suggests that you’re not getting the right leads, even if you’re getting many.
Note that lead quality is not the same as lead volume. Most marketers say that generating high-quality leads is one of their biggest challenges. If you are experiencing the same difficulty, it is essential to determine how you can improve the quality of your PPC leads to avoid ludicrous ad spending and generate profitable revenue.
There is no one-size-fits-all method to improve PPC lead quality. But, to help you understand where you are going wrong and where you could stand to make improvements, we curated some helpful tips to consider when looking to increase your lead to customer conversion rate.
Be Certain Who Your Target Market Is
One of the most common mistakes in running PPC ads is having the most exciting campaigns, but the targeting is improper. And this causes poor quality leads or a low lead to customer conversion.
The main thing you need to be sure of is identifying who your end customer is. You must understand who, exactly, you’re trying to turn into a customer. If you fail to do this from the start, your targeting mistakes will affect your campaign’s other downstream aspects.
To generate quality leads through PPC, you only want specific and targeted audiences to see your ads. If more of the right people see your ads, they will naturally engage because the ads are more relevant to them. It is best to weed out irrelevant clicks and bad traffic, which cost money. Doing all this will help improve the quality of your PPC leads.
Cultivate Your Ad Copy Regularly
Ad copy is an essential part of your PPC campaigns. It can make or break your PPC lead quality, so reviewing, testing, and streamlining it is crucial.
Typically, marketers are always trying to find the most appealing ad copy and are always looking for which headline or call to action will get the most clicks and potentially increase the lead-to-customer conversion rate. But when your focus is to have quality PPC leads, the case is not entirely just about getting lead volume. Putting qualifiers in your PPC ad copy needs to be done tactfully. You need to purposely daunt some people to click on your ads and ensure that you only attract the suitable targets to whom you want your ad to be served.
Once you become very confident of your target market, you can draft a better ad copy to magnetize more of the right customers. It is advisable to keep some extra monthly budget for testing your ad copy. Testing means analyzing and optimizing keywords in your ad copy and possibly creating new ad copies based on gathered data and insights on your campaign performance. Remember, just because some people aren’t in the right place to click and convert now doesn’t mean they never will be. And this is why monitoring the performance of your ad copy and applying necessary updates on your ad to target a more specific audience is essential to improve the quality of your PPC leads.
Also, remember that you are likely to be competing with many other businesses, so you need to make sure your ad stands out. If you have ads running all month long, change your ad copy at least two times to keep it fresh and relevant.
Target More Specific Keywords
Keywords serve as the backbone of your PPC campaign. They determine several success factors like how to get in front of your target market, how your ad copy needs to be written and updated, or even how to optimize your landing page to magnetize quality PCC leads.
When working to improve lead quality, one of the first things you should do is review or revisit your keywords. The game’s name for lead quality is finding people who know what they want, and using long-tail keywords is a better way to target them. If most of your keywords are one or two words long, you lengthen them by adding a modifier to make them more specific.
For example, a person who types and searches for “sugar-free chocolates” is arguably more targeted and qualified than someone who types in “chocolates.” In this case, the leads already clarified what type of chocolates they are looking for, making them more likely to buy.
Constant keywords review and optimization are crucial in improving your PPC lead quality. Be more vigilant with search term reviews and negative keyword additions and evaluate the potential of each keyword you are using. If the focus is on lead quality, we need to determine how many sales a keyword generates, attributing to a higher lead-to-customer conversion rate. Once you understand which keywords are performing better, you can turn off the others that are not resulting in sales.
Build Informative Landing Pages With Improved Form
Now that your target market has gotten through your first two quality filters with keywords and ad copy, the next thing we can do to improve PPC lead quality is to optimize your landing page.
Your PPC ads direct the customers to a landing page where their data are collected with specific forms. Just as crucial as your ad copy, your landing page should echo the presentation of your ad so your target market will continue to engage and convert.
You might be thinking that the simpler the form fields are, the better. While you are probably right, it is also worth considering that the increase in form submissions might not necessarily equate to more sales. If your focus is improving your PPC lead quality, keep in mind that interested customers will fill out the form and give their information, regardless of how long the form fields are. The time and effort they have spent filling out all of these fields invariably signal that they are higher-quality leads.
Therefore, using an adequate number of form fields can help you filter out ultra-high quality leads from low-value ones. This strategy will most likely reduce your lead form submissions total, but it will guarantee improved lead quality and sales conversion.
Your landing page is yet another tool to qualify your leads better. Letting your target market know the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind what you are offering can help them understand and be more aware of the benefits of buying from you or getting your services. This method, of course, helps to generate more leads, as well as improve lead quality. If you focus more on further educating those who click on your ads once they are on your landing page, it may also increase the chances of lead to customer conversion.
Constantly Track And Nurture Your Leads
Data is king! Depending on the platform you use to run your PPC ads, tracking can be tricky to set up, but it’s worth the hassle for the data you get. Tracking your conversions ensures that you identify where a purchase or form submission or other data came from. Once you have a constant stream of data coming in, you can use that information to learn from, optimize your ads further, and improve the quality of your leads. You may take advantage of several tutorials online on how to set up tracking correctly.
Use the advanced features afforded to you by the platform you are using to run your PPC campaigns. For example, Google Ads has remarketing; Facebook has retargeting. Both are good ways to encourage potential customers to buy or get something they didn’t grab the first time around. By tracking, you can also monitor and nurture the leads.
It is also an excellent way to move people further into your sales funnel. You can create a new PPC ad campaign designed to remarket and convert these people from leads to paying customers.
Another feature in your PPC platforms is the audience matching feature or the so-called “cousin of remarketing or retargeting.” Audience matching works similarly, but instead of retargeting your existing leads, audience matching services look for new targets that match your current customers’ demographic and geographic profile. Some good examples of this would be Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences and Google Ads’ Similar Audiences. These forms of lead nurturing ensure that your ads are shown to people who are more likely to convert. As long as you identify your correct target market, your PPC platforms will have solid audience references it can use as a basis to give you higher quality leads.
Final Thoughts
Improving your PPC lead quality would need you to give credence to some things that can happen to your campaign performance:
- Click-through rate and overall lead volume will typically go down.
- High-quality lead volume should increase.
- The cost per lead usually goes up.
- The cost per high-quality lead should go down.
Understanding how to improve the quality of your PPC leads isn’t always apparent, but it doesn’t have to be complex as well. The tips discussed above are just some simple steps that you can take to figure out what needs to be done to turn things around.
Try these tips and let us know how they work for you. You may also reach out to us here at Lauer Media should you need to consult with any of your digital marketing needs.