Generating Qualified Leads via Pay Per Click Advertising

Posted by Kristian on Jun-8-2008 under Lead Generation

A qualified lead, or a potential consumer with the power to buy that has voiced a desire to purchase a service or product, can be quite valuable to companies of all kinds. Generating qualified leads through keyword marketing can be done with five simple steps: identifying your goals, building a relevant and targeted keyword list, organizing your campaign, optimizing landing pages, and finally tracking your campaigns. Following these five steps will help you capture a large amount of qualified leads.

Generating Qualified Leads Step One: Identifying Your goals

Knowing how to operationalize success is a crucial as you initiate a campaign to generate qualified leads. After arriving at your definition of success, pick several business metrics that best express the qualitative or quantitative indicators of success. Get creative and start to envision how you will construct the various landing pages, messages, and ad creatives to achieve the campaign’s objectives. For example, if you are simply interested in capturing as many qualified leads as possible, use your landing pages and messages as squeeze pages; and keep it simple.

Generating Qualified Leads Step Two: Building Relevant Targeted Keyword Lists

As any search engine marketer knows, focusing on broad keywords or phrases is simply a waste of time. For example, using the keyword “cars” or the keyword phrase “buying cars” will generate little traffic from search engines. The cost per click for pay per click ad creatives will also be quite high due to steep competition for these dramatically popular keywords. Rather, focus on niche-specific keywords with little or no competition. Balance is required as only relevant keywords or keyword phrases with enough traffic to justify developing a campaign should be undertaken.

Using brand names in your ad creatives is another way to solicit target traffic that can be quickly converted into qualified leads. If you are using broad matches on your ad, Google will automatically show your ad on plural, misspellings, synonyms keyword matches. Make sure you track each broad match keyword separately and include them in your list of keywords. For example, “baseball glove” and “baseball gloves” are two separate phrases that should be tracked individually.

Generating Qualified Leads Step Three: Organize Your Campaign

Group all your keywords into ad groups with common themes. A unique ad creative should be developed for each ad group to solicit more clicks. For example, you should put all your “baseball glove” keywords into a one ad group and your “baseball cap” keywords into another ad group. Create as many specific ad groups as logically necessary.
Once you have created your ad groups, test the success of multiple creatives on each group. Be concise in your ad text and avoid redundancy while emphasizing the aspects of your product or service that differentiate it from competitors. And always include a bold call to action, leaving potential qualified leads no question as to what they are required to do.

Generating Qualified Leads Step Four: Develop Useful Landing Pages

Google and other search engines use the landing pages of the various ad creatives to determine the rank of your ads. Developing separate landing pages for each ad group will help boost your ad creative’s rank and increase click-thru rate and your conversions. Make sure your landing pages offer the potential qualified lead exactly what your ad creative promised them. Keep your landing pages clear and concise, and make sure your visitors are not confused by multiple offerings or excess information.

Generating Qualified Leads Step Five: Track Results Frequently And Modify Campaigns

Track your conversions by assigning customized tracking URLs or URL variables to each ad group or ad keywords to help you determine which ads are most effective. You can also track your conversions by using Google’s free conversion tracking software. Google ad tracking tool can show you how many clicks your ad creative received and tell you the amount of qualified leads your landing page converted from the clicks.

If you have determined a keyword or ad group is not achieving your definition of success according to your previously developed business metrics, change it. Use exact matching instead of broad matching, or try adding keywords to the ad. If neither of these methods show results, try developing a new list of keywords or simply delete the ad or ad group altogether.

Lastly, track the performance of each ad group and begin to invest more time and money into the best performing ad groups and eliminate the unsuccessful ad groups.

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