PPC Lead Gen Fails

If you’re spending money on PPC (or paid social), you could be making common mistakes that are costing you thousands of dollars each year.

Most of our clients come to us to help them generate more leads or more sales for their business, and one of the most effective ways to do that is through PPC campaigns - particularly Google Ads and Microsoft Bing Ads. A person "actively" searching for your product or service has already prequalified themselves as a potential client/customer and having an engaging ad directing them to your website is an effective and quick way to generate more leads.

Our team are experts at developing the strategies and campaigns to deliver that targeted and quality traffic to your website, but just driving traffic from our Google Ads to your website is not enough to convert a lead into a qualified lead and into a new client/customer.

PPC Led Gen Campaigns Need to Have:

1. A good website experience that helps convey their unique selling proposition and how they can help their customers
2. Clear actionable steps for someone to take once they get to their website.
3. An internal sales process designed to capture and close leads

Even if you can convert someone into a lead from your website, your sales team or sales intake process has to also be very good to help close those leads.

Having run many PPC Lead Generation (Lead Gen) campaigns over the years, we've learned what works well and what doesn't work well in converting those website visitors into leads, and then converting those leads into new clients/customers.

Here are a few PPC Lead Gen fails and things your company should NOT do during the lead gen process.

Landing Page Lead Gen Fails

Your website or landing page (where you send the paid traffic to when they click you ad) should be very clean, concise, and provide the prospective visitor with a clear understanding of what you do, how you can help them, and then a clear actionable next step they need to take in order for you to help them.

All too often we take over PPC accounts or consult with clients on poor landing page experiences, which then results in lower conversion rates (less people will call/contact you after clicking on your ads).

Cluttered Page

Sending traffic to a homepage that is cluttered with an overload of information (News articles, blog posts, social media links, etc.) will distract a user from what you want them to do (contact you). If someone is searching for a service you offer, provide them a clean and concise page that quickly shows them your expertise, how you can help them, and a way for them to contact you. Having them surf a page with social media links or links to top blog posts just distracts them from the main goal - for them to contact you.

No Clear Call to Action (CTA)

Make it easy for someone to contact you when they get to your website. Don't have them hunt for your contact information or where to contact you. Instead, have an easy to find phone number or contact button on EVERY page of the website, so no matter what they are reading, they can easily find your contact information. On the example below, the "contact us" buttons are hard to find and the Facebook "follow" button is the button sticking out. There isn't even a phone number to call the business from this homepage.

• 💡 Helpful Tip - Look at your website on mobile. Most people now are searching on mobile devices, but all too often client's websites aren't optimized well for the mobile experience when it comes to lead gen. Have a mobile click to call friendly phone number and/or a contact form that is easy to find and optimized for a mobile device. Nobody wants to pinch and scroll to contact you - make it easy!
• 💡 Helpful Tip 2 - Consider a "sticky nav" at the top or bottom of the mobile browser, so when your prospective visitor is scrolling, they'll always have the CTA's available for them.

We could go on and on with additional landing page fails that hurt your chances of converting more of those visitors, but let's take it to the next step in the lead generation process - once someone actually contacts you.

Phone Call Lead Gen Fails

Not Answering the Phone

I know this sounds silly, but we've had clients we've audited during the lead generation process who do not have someone answering the phone at all times (at least during business hours) - thus missing out on potential immediate leads.

Someone calling your business after searching for what you do - wants to talk to someone RIGHT AWAY. They don't want to leave a message - they want to get answers to their questions and learn more about your business. We all know that resources can be limited, but all things equal - a business answering their phones during business hours will have a much better chance at closing a lead.

Phone Prompts

We have heard from clients that having prompts (you know, dial 1 for sales, 2 for existing customers, 3 for billing) helps their internal processes and saves them time. You know what else it can do? Lose leads for your business!

Imagine a person with a dental emergency that calls the dentist after Googling "emergency dentist open near me" and gets a 1-2 minute phone prompt system. Most people are not going to have the patience to wait and they'll hit the back button and go to the next dentist in the search results. This can go for any business though. Think of the last time you called a business for a service and needed to walk through prompts to get to where you wanted to go - would you stick around?

Have the Wrong Person(s) Answering the Call

Real Life Story: We had heard from a client that the leads we were sending through PPC advertising were not converting into actual sales. Having gone through our usual checks and balances, we started listening to recordings of sales calls of the leads we had sent through PPC using our call tracking software. In a couple of the calls, the wrong person was answering the phone!

We heard something to the effect of "Um, our sales team is out to lunch, do you want to try to call back in about an hour?" Call back? Do you think that potential new customer called back after that? No, never. If your sales team needs to eat, have them stagger their lunch! Needless to say, we could see why our leads weren't closing. (face palm).

Not Getting Name/Number/Email Immediately

When you're paying to drive people to your website, you don't want to waste money, and once you do get someone that calls, you want to take full advantage of that opportunity. All too often sales folks will wait to grab the prospective customer's name and contact information later in the call and then lose a chance if they drop off.

It's imperative that sales intake teams record name, number and emails as soon as possible to ensure that they have the ability to follow up with those prospective customers later in case there's a dropped call or the client has to get off the phone.

Real Life Story: In one instance, we had a client who's salesperson told the prospective customer that they were booking out their remodeling services 5-6 months down the line and didn't get the customers name/contact information before they hung up. This prospective customer might still be a great lead, but they failed to grab the information, thus losing the potential customer to the wind (and another company!).

Internal PPC Lead Gen Fails

Not Getting Back to Leads ASAP

Often, clients get leads and don't respond to them within a reasonable amount of time. Think about if you were doing research for a local landscaping company and you contacted 3 companies - the first one got back to you within 15 minutes with an overview of their company, how they can help you, common landscaping services with pricing and an offer to come out to your house the next day and provide a free estimate.

One of the other companies followed up with you later that day after work, and the other had someone call you the day after. Those last 2 probably lost out on a new customer simply because they were slow to respond. If you are spending money on generating leads, make sure you are responding to leads quickly.

Not Using Multiple Platforms to Follow-Up with Leads

Think about the ways you communicate on a daily basis and which methods of communication you prefer. It can differ by person - some people just like to talk to someone on the phone, it can differ by time of day (if you're at work, you likely don't want to jump on a sales call at 9am in the morning at the start of the company-wide meeting. There are multiple ways to follow up with leads and you should take advantage of each one of them. (Phone, Email & Text)

Don't Forget About Texting! Phone and Email are the most common ways to follow up with leads, but if you're not texting to follow up - you could be wasting a great opportunity to engage with your prospective customers. 90% of people open a text within 3 minutes and response rate on text is 8 times higher than email. (source).

Not Training Your Team On How to Respond to Common Objections

A lead could come in from your PPC campaign and call your sales team directly, but if your client intake specialist or sales team is not armed with GREAT answers to the most common objections customers typically have, they could lose them. Make sure whomever is answering the phones or replying to emails with questions and concerns, has a list of the most common objections along with resourceful and honest answers. If your team is not prepared, they may not do a great job of closing the lead.

Not Scheduling Time to Monitor Your Team

Your sales team or sales intake person(s) are some of the most important people on your team. You can't actually provide your services or do your work if you don't have actual customers to service. But too often companies are not reviewing their team to critique and improve the intake process to better close leads into customers. Make sure your team is continually monitoring the sales intake process to refine and optimize the process to improve close rates. The littlest things could be turning away customers from working with you - and that may likely be on the front lines during the sales intake process.

PPC Lead Generation Conclusion

Successful lead generation campaigns consist of:

1. Driving targeted traffic to your website
2. Converting those visitors into leads
3. Having a sales process to close those leads into new clients/customers

It's not enough to just do 1 or 2 of the 3 well - each step of the lead generation process must be optimized and testing must be done on each step in order to improve and grow your business.

Let us become an extension of your team as we work together to increase traffic to your site and, ultimately, grow your business. Contact us today to start discussing your goals.

So, you’ve finally seen the PPC light, done your research, talked to a few PPC agencies (hopefully us, too!), and your PPC firm is ready to push your campaigns live. But now, you likely have more questions than before you started the process! You’re probably wondering:

• What's next?
• What can I expect to see?
• How do PPC campaigns work?
• Will leads or sales just start rolling in?
• How long does it take for Google Adwords to work?

In this article, we’ll answer these great questions by walking you through the beginning of your new PPC campaign, and share what you can expect to see and learn from after the campaigns go live.

Your Ads Showing Up for Keywords You Bid On

Hopefully your PPC firm has set up campaigns to show your ads for keywords related to your business, and ideally ones that will drive results (typically leads or sales). Conduct a few searches that you have agreed upon, see if your ad is showing up and with the correct ad copy and extension information (phone numbers, sitelinks and callouts to help drive people to your site).

If you are in the geo-targeted area for your ads, and during the times you have your ads running, you should see your ads show up on a search results page. When you first start out however, many times your ads will not be at the very top of the results. It takes some time for Google to approve the ads, and “learn” your new campaign – from the ads you are running, to the website or landing page you are sending your traffic to. Plus, the PPC account manager is trying to understand how competitive the landscape is. He is likely adjusting bids more regularly during the first several weeks of the account to ensure that your ads are in a location that makes the most sense for your business.

Our firm likes to try to start out by bidding quite high to start so that our client’s ads are in the top couple positions on average. This helps us to learn the account much quicker, and allows for Google to learn your campaigns faster, as well. If your ads are not on the first page or not in the first four positions, it may take some time to get enough clicks to understand how well the campaign is doing initially.

Traffic to Your Site from PPC Campaigns (Adwords – Bing)

Ok, you’ve conducted some searches and you see your ads running – great! But is anyone clicking on them? Within the first couple days (even hours) you should see traffic coming to your site from these new campaigns. If the PPC firm has synced your account with Google Analytics (GA), you should start to see “sessions” show up in GA. Similarly, within a platform like Google Adwords you will start to see things like “impressions” (how many people viewed the ad) and “clicks” (how many people clicked through to your site or clicked your phone number).

 

 

You should be tracking or having your PPC firm report on a number of metrics, but the most important to a business are typically “conversions” (which are basically your business goals). Conversions are typically leads from contact form submissions or phone calls and/or sales from eCommerce purchases.

If your business relies on leads or sales, you need to ensure that you or your PPC firm is tracking these metrics and reporting on them. In addition to impressions and clicks, you may start seeing “conversions” coming in shortly after the start of the campaigns.

Search Terms You Didn't Want to Show Up For and Others You Never Knew About

Say whaaa? – You’re telling me that I might get traffic from searches that I might not want? Yes, I’m telling you that, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you or your PPC firm does something about it. Let me explain.

When we bid on keywords, say for instance, “custom bicycle” for a bicycle retailer, Custom Bicycle is the “root” keyword that Google uses as a basis, if you are using a phrase match or broad match modified keyword. They may find other related keywords (or what we call search terms) based off of that root like “buy a custom bicycle” or “custom bicycle builder online” or “ok google what is the best custom bicycle shop online” (cough cough – voice searches!), and any number of combinations that may be great keywords that you didn’t have in your campaign in the first place, or could have even surmised. This strategy helps us to identify other areas of search demand and doesn’t restrict our bidding to very specific terms that may or may not convert.

 

A PPC manager’s job is to look at this “search query” data on an ongoing basis and “negative out” or get rid of any keywords that do not fit the core business and that they don’t want traffic for. They will also identify new opportunities that they may not have known about in initial keyword research.

Note: Our firm typically doesn’t utilize straight broad match for many campaigns, but have utilized it in some accounts to identify new areas of opportunities.

Talking about keyword match types and strategies is an entirely separate conversation, but what you should know is that a exceptional PPC firm will utilize a good mix of phrase, broad, broad match modified and exact keyword variations to target your core keywords. Doing so helps to discover new opportunities you may not have thought of or discovered in your initial keyword research.

In summary, at the beginning of most of our campaigns, we may see a number of search terms driving clicks to your site that aren’t as targeted as we would like. This is normal, and not something that typically encompasses a large percentage of your overall spend. It is the cost of exploring new opportunities for keywords that ARE great and effective in driving leads or sales for your business. And over time, we “negative out” those non-targeted keywords and reduce the number of unwanted search terms over time. And subsequently, we find new, additional search queries that do convert well and add those to existing campaigns to drive more conversions at lower costs. So, it’s wise to start off a bit more broad and work to tighten up keyword targeting over time. It’s an ongoing process that NEVER ends!

How Long Does it Take PPC to Work?

By “work”, I assume you mean start to drive leads or sales. This actually varies by client and other factors like budget, competition, seasonality, and the way you or your PPC firm have set up the campaigns and even landing pages. We have had campaigns start working in the very first day, and we have had others that take several days or even weeks to start generating the types of metrics clients want to see.

The most important thing is to define your goals from the start or work with your PPC firm to identify PPC campaign goals. They should be working on achieving those goals and delivering reports and feedback about how their work is attaining or not attaining those goals and what can be done to improve. While PPC Campaigns can be turned on instantly to start driving targeted traffic, the campaigns will not work if they aren’t actively managed or managed with someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. We have seen so many clients waste money by just trying to do it on their own without much knowledge about how these campaigns work, or working with a PPC firm who doesn’t actively manage their accounts or pay attention to detail.

So, when you begin your first PPC Campaign, keep an eye out for some of the items we mentioned in this article. Need additional help on your next PPC campaign? Contact us to discuss your project.

Use These 7 Tips to Help Maximize Your Investment

At the time of this writing, we are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping across the country, with many states on lockdown. With the current uncertainty into the future, it's more important than ever for businesses to invest wisely in all areas of their business and to eliminate any unnecessary waste.

In this article, we want to help businesses running Google Ads campaigns to understand several areas where they may be wasting money, so they can ensure their money is being spent wisely.

Many times businesses will have someone internally take over the task of running Google Ads campaigns to save money by not hiring an employee, agency or consultant. But often times, they are wasting more money by not doing so.

Having either audited or taken over a number of Google Ads accounts in the past, we come across some of the same mistakes that end up wasting you money on your Google Ads campaigns.

Here are 7 of the most common: (more…)

One question we receive quite a bit from clients is which digital marketing platforms they should be using to attract new clients or customers to their business. Inevitably clients ask us: Should I use Google Ads or Facebook Ads or both? Or none?

In this video and article, we will review the main differences between promoting your company on Google Ads or Facebook Ads and some things to consider before deciding what direction you should go. (more…)

Updated August 2020

PPC landing page company Unbounce has released an updated PPC conversion rate by industry report for 2020.

PPC and Paid Social marketing software provider, Wordstream, has released average PPC conversion rates based on its most up-to-date report published in August 2019. Wordstream breaks down a variety of standard PPC metrics by industry including: CTR (click-through rate), Average Cost per Click (CPC), Conversion Rate, and Cost Per Action or Acquisition (CPA).

If you're not familiar with Wordstream, this company provides software and tools to help agencies and companies more effectively and efficiently manage their search engine marketing and paid social campaigns like Facebook Ads. Having been around for over 10 years now, Wordstream is one of the leaders in the search marketing space and has thousands and thousands of data points they can analyze from the PPC accounts that run through their software.

As such, take this, and any report like this, with a grain of salt. We are looking at average PPC conversion rates from just one company's data and not all PPC accounts currently running right now. We would anticipate that individuals using the software are likely on the average to more advanced-end of the PPC marketing spectrum, so these conversion rates may even be a bit higher than all accounts taken in aggregate around the world.

Note: Leading landing page company Unbounce also released their own PPC Conversion Rates by Industry report specifically for "Lead Gen" campaigns. That report is here. And digital marketing platform Acquisio released an Adwords PPC benchmark report here.

Interesting fact: In recent years, the gambling niche has surged in popularity, particularly among Polish players, resulting in some of the most intriguing PPC reports emerging from this sector. The rise of online casinos has been a significant contributor to this trend, with more players engaging in digital gambling activities. Legal online casinos (read more here www.sportostrowiecki.pl/prawo-hazardowe-w-polsce), in particular, play a pivotal role in this landscape, as they are licensed and regulated by relevant authorities. These licenses ensure that the casinos adhere to strict guidelines, promoting fair play and responsible gambling practices. As a result, the PPC reports generated from these platforms offer valuable insights into consumer behavior, trends, and preferences within the gambling industry.

PPC Conversion Rates by Industry

The data is broken down by industry, since we know that PPC conversion rates vary by industry:

Average PPC Conversion Rates by Network

In addition to breaking out average PPC conversion rates by industry, the report also outlines conversion rates by network on the Adwords platform. Most are familiar with the search network which includes Google search conversion rates and affiliated search engines (otherwise known as "search partners"). The report also breaks down conversion rates for the Google Display network, (GDN) which includes Google's vast network of websites, apps, videos and other placements where your ads can be shown via image or text format.

The average CVR (PPC Conversion Rate) in AdWords across all industries is 3.75% on the search network and 0.77% on the Google Display Network (source). Since the report was last updated, CVR on the search network has increased, while CVR for display has decreased. What could this mean? One sign points to the need for advertisers to pay closer attention to placements and audience optimization.

Summary on PPC Conversion Rates

• The industry with the highest average PPC conversion rates was the dating & personals industry with 9.64% on the search network and 3.34% on the display network.
• The industry with the lowest average PPC conversion rates was the “advocacy” industry at just 1.96% on the search network and 1.00% on the display network.
• Those selling products online and classified as an eCommerce business saw conversion rates of 2.81% (so just under 3%) on the search network. That means about 97% of visitors to eCommerce sites are NOT purchasing something. Remarketing campaigns, anyone?
• The legal space saw average PPC rates of around 7% on the search network.
• The industry with the lowest PPC conversion rates on the display network is home goods with 0.43%.

Are your PPC campaigns converting at these rates? Every industry and client are different, so again take these with a grain of salt. It's interesting to see what the "industry" is seeing in terms of average PPC conversion rates, but what's good for one business isn't always good for another or even relevant for that business. If your PPC campaigns are suffering from low conversion rates, read our article on "Why Don't My PPC Ads Convert?" for some initial areas where you may be able to improve.

As a PPC and SEO Company in Columbus, Ohio, we routinely see higher conversion rate numbers with most of our clients. There are always exceptions, and it definitely varies by industry and client because there are just so many conversion rate variables to consider. In summary, these benchmark PPC conversion rates are a good barometer, but appear lower than what they probably should be.