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.

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.

One thing we continually preach to clients is the importance of fine tuning every aspect of your online lead pipeline.

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.

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

But this is just one place to focus your efforts. Take a look at the destination urls — the landing pages where you send visitors. Are you using a contact form? How simple is your contact form? Is your phone number too small? There are always a variety of items you can optimize and test to increase conversions.

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 you don’t know where to start when it comes to Pay Per Click search, hire a PPC management company. They will develop keyword lists, find keywords from your competition, advise you on some ideas for your landing pages and conduct those daily split tests.

So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.