You're getting leads, but are your leads quality?

When running PPC campaigns to generate more leads for your business on Google Ads, Microsoft Bing Advertising, or even paid social platforms like Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, and etc., one of the challenges can be making sure as many of the leads are as quality as possible.

Typically, digital marketing agencies will run campaigns to generate what are called "conversions" which is just an all encompassing word that means they're trying to drive action once people get to your site (phone calls, form submissions, live chats, etc). Typically those are grouped into conversions, and campaigns are run to generate the most conversions at the best cost per conversion (CPA or CPL - cost per acquisition or cost per lead). 

Take an example of a typical PPC agency report you might review:

Conversions (leads) are great, but if you're not getting quality leads, then you're probably not turning those leads into clients or customers. And if you're PPC agency is not tracking the quality of your leads, then they could be sending you hundreds of "conversions" that don't really mean much to your bottom line. 

Tracking Quality Leads in PPC

So how can you not only drive leads to your site through digital marketing platforms, but drive QUALITY leads as well? The answer is that you need to track the leads that are being delivered and have a system for rating the leads as well as tracking revenue from those leads. 

When Two Wheels Marketing is tracking leads for clients, we set them up with a system where their sales intake person(s) receive automated emails when leads come in from our digital marketing efforts. Since they engaged with these new prospects, they will have the best feel for whether this lead is a good one or not. And they can simply mark these leads as such with a simple yes/no designation. Yes = Good leads, No = Bad Lead

Additional PPC Lead Gen Intelligence

In addition to marking leads quality or not, your system for tracking leads should have important campaign information assigned to each lead, so you know where these leads came from.

• Did they come from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Organic traffic?
• What page on your site did they come from?
• What campaigns did they come from?
• What keywords did they search for?
• What journey did they take on your site before contacting you?
• Where geographically did they come from?
• And ideally you would already have lead information like email/phone. 

All of this information is very valuable data to continue to help improve and maximize your campaign performance. If you know that Google Ads is sending 90% of your "quality" leads and you are only spending 50% of your digital budget there, you now know you can reallocate more funds there. This type of analysis and management helps to make your campaigns more efficient and profitable and saves valuable ad budgets. 

Tracking ROI from PPC Lead Gen Campaigns

To take it one step further, you should also be tracking the actual revenue that these leads generate for your business. By tracking revenue, you are able to better analyze the most profitable digital marketing channels to acquire leads for your business.

This takes some assistance from your sales team to be vigilant by going back into the leads and assigning the actual "value" (or sales) that those leads eventually generated for your business. By tracking these numbers over a period of time, you'll have much more valuable information for making digital marketing decisions.

If you want to get even more granular, your team can track "quote value" or the quotes that your sales people provided to customers, and then the final "sales value" to get a feel for how many of these digital leads are converting (conversion rate) from quotes to actual final sales. Over time, you can track this to see how your team is converting them into final sales...

Quality Leads vs. Conversions

At the end of the month, would you rather have a report like this that reports on the actual "good" (quotable) leads you got from your PPC campaigns:

Or the report below, which only shows you how many people contacted you from your PPC campaigns, without taking into consideration the "quality" of those leads?

I think you can see the advantages of the former and why we drill home the importance of tracking the quality of leads from any of our paid digital campaigns. You'd much rather pay for more quality PPC leads than a higher quantity of "conversions" without knowing how many of them are actually good leads. 

Lead Quality + Smart Bidding = Better PPC Leads

Another advantage to having more quality lead data, is that you can now attract more quality leads with your PPC lead gen campaigns, by providing Google and Facebook Ads with more accurate data. On Google you can import your leads into the platform and then optimize for those leads to attract more leads like those. But you need to give Google (and Facebook for that matter) the best quality of leads in order to attract more of those leads in your campaigns.

For example, if you are using "Maximize Conversions" (where Google optimizes your campaigns to generate more conversions (leads) with your spend, would you rather have 100 low quality leads to give them or 50 quality leads? The latter is obviously preferred as it will help them to attract and convert more leads that are quality.

And you can do the same thing with Facebook Ads, provide them with information from your quality leads, which then can be used to create "lookalike" audiences for Facebook to find similar audiences to target.

The value of tracking your lead quality is immensely powerful both for your own internal purposes, but also for your outgoing digital marketing campaigns.

May the quality leads be with you!