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Tired of Lead Generation Services? Turn to Pay Per Click

by Josh Prizer

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.

Unfortunately, PPC search isn’t quite as easy as it used to be. These days you have a lot of competition and it’s getting increasingly sophisticated. Sure, you can set up a simple web site with contact info and point some ads at it. You’ll probably get a trickle of leads. But if you want to really increase your business and lower your cost per lead or cost per acquisition, you will most likely need to dedicate some resources to it.

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.

Maybe that doesn’t sound important, but it is. Doubling and tripling your quality traffic can do the same for your number of leads. And, it can lower your costs per click in the process.

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.

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.

Making the jump to PPC search may not be in your company’s core competency. If not, then outsource to a PPC management company. Their experts can mine massive keyword lists, pull keywords from your competitors, conduct the necessary and vital daily split tests, and give you insight into better landing pages.

Once you dump those watered down leads and go straight to the source…the results can be phenomenal.

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