Many people think that PPC ads are best utilised by those with products to directly pitch to a customer rather than a service that requires the personal touch to sell, but PPC lead generation is a lucrative if you know key tips and tricks.
As a Google Ads pay-per-click (PPC) agency, we’ve run PPC campaigns for all kinds of clients, but our key specialism has always been the legal industry. Law firms utilise their Google Ads to direct clients toward their services across many fields in the legal profession. Many services end up going through paid search advertising.
So when we say lead generation, what do we mean? In this case, lead generation refers to the acquisition of contact information from prospects who have provided the data voluntarily. In this strategy, the PPC agency functions not as a direct salesperson, but as an intermediary between the lead and the sales team.
A criticism often levelled at this approach is that the PPC agency is really only providing the meaningful sales work to the designated team in the company, but that wouldn’t be farther from the truth.
Lead generation services with PPC provides a space in a competitive environment you didn’t have, and allows for you to drastically increase the number of potential customers you have all at once.
But why should you pursue PPC for lead generation?
How Lead Gen PPC Works For you
We strongly recommend lead generation PPC for your marketing strategy if you’ve noticed a sudden drop in volume in your business, if you’re looking to aggressively expand in your industry, or even if you have some marketing budget to spare.
This strategy works best for businesses who have the spare resources and are looking to remedy problems relating to the volume of enquiries. Whilst nominally every business is always looking to grow, in this case that growth will be limited by your team’s capacity to handle it.
Always remember: generating leads through Google Ads guarantees results. It’s one of the more expensive avenues for digital marketing, but that’s for a good reason. Marketing can be targeted down to individual keywords and search results that are relevant to the topic, and there are literally billions of searches a day.
It’s filtering out the noise and ensuring quality leads that you’ll need to worry about.
What A Typical PPC Lead Generation Campaign Looks Like
Every PPC campaign starts on Google Ads, where you input a number of headlines and descriptions outlining your offer, allocate it to keywords you think are relevant to people looking for your services, group these into ad groups, and set it live.
But there’s an additional layer to pay per click lead generation, and that all begins once the initial click is secured. Usually most companies will simply have the ad direct to the page on their site which they feel represents their offer best to a new customer, and that’s all fine, right?
Wrong!
This can actually decrease the likelihood of a click converting – which can sound absurd, on the offset. The page you’re using was literally created to pitch! Everything’s all spelt out explicitly!
But it contains a navigation bar that dominates the top of the page, or an image that takes a little too long to load, or a montage that establishes absolutely nothing beyond the fact that your site is aesthetically pleasing.
All of this is why you need a good landing page.
Landing pages are absolutely critical to understanding how good PPC lead generation works. They’re explicitly designed not to optimise your SEO, but exclusively for the kind of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and calls to action that Google Ads clickers respond to.
A simple but well laid-out page with a clear offer and a form is more likely to generate enquiries than a beautiful website page that’s light on information but good to look at. This is the primary advantage of Google Ads over organic search results: you already know your page is at the top of the page, so write like it!
When you’re doing PPC, less is more.
Setting up a landing page that aligns with the messaging in your ads and ensures your tone is consistent with them means that you’re reinforcing your offer and what really distinguishes you from your competitors in the mind of the reader.
Want to know some good tips for landing page set up? Check out our guide we wrote on this blog here!
Set It Up And Let It Run?
It can be tempting, once you’ve set up your campaign with its landing page and its ads, to let it run and forget about it. Maybe you set a day a month when you check in to make sure nothing drastic has happened.
That’s a huge risk! Google Ads is spending your money – you ought to be looking to cut out easy optimisations and take it seriously.
A crucial part of PPC campaign management – especially for campaigns that are doing lead generation – is the day to day management of it. You should be looking at least once a day, particularly at key factors like:
- Spend. This is obviously one of the most important metrics. Is your campaign spending more or less than usual? In comparison, are you beating last week, last month?
- Click through rate (CTR). CTR is crucial for understanding the level of engagement your ads are inspiring. If your CTR has had a sharp and sudden drop, it may be time to start looking at doing things like changing ad copy or doing split tests against your ads.
- Impression share. A simple percentage that tells you what amount of the people searching for keywords you targeted your ads showed to. If this is below 50 and your budget is high, something’s very wrong.
- Conversion rate. The rate at which your clicks are translating into conversions. More than any other conversion statistic, this is the most important for lead generation campaigns: making sure this stays efficient is crucial.
There are other mitigating factors with lead generation PPC campaigns that can make things like conversion tracking more difficult. The most obvious is that a lead in and of itself has no set financial value: you might get a call, but they might decide to go elsewhere.
Therefore metrics like conversion value stop mattering so much: reporting on which leads end up actually translating into conversions remains on you to calculate and report on. A good call tracking service – like Ruler Analytics – could be just what you need to start being able to discern which calls are sourced from ads.
Google Ads’ click-to-call conversion actions have, in our experience, been unreliable at best. If you feel you’re comfortable simply noticing an uptick in calls, however, there’s no need to splash extra marketing budget where it isn’t needed.
If you take anything else from this article, let it be this: PPC management isn’t something you should put off!
Preparing Your Sales Team For PPC Leads
There’s a large degree of difference between the average PPC lead and the types of leads that your sales team are probably used to. A typical lead has taken the time to research your business, and has likely already reached a conclusion based on your site or a personal recommendation.
They’re less likely to need convincing, in other words. A lead generated through a PPC page is a little more insecure: they’re calling you as the next stage of a sales process rather than a confirmation.
Your team should be prepared to patiently answer frequently asked questions and help to orient the people that end up talking to them via the landing page. A positive service experience and an upbeat attitude at this point of the sales process could be the thing that puts them over the line and gives them the push to convert.
Equally important to bear in mind is that the sales team should expect a sharp increase in the volume and frequency of calls. Alerting them to this before a campaign is set up can give them critical time to adjust, a period in which they can make sure they’re ready to start converting day 1.
With all of this in mind, you’re ready to start on a good PPC lead gen campaign.
Does this sound intimidating, or like a lot of management when you have a business to run? Well, there is an alternative.
Get Better PPC Leads With A PPC Agency
By hiring a PPC management agency to conduct a lead generation campaign, you can recoup on that investment considerably with that reliable stream of enquiries optimised to suit your budget. Google Ads may seem simple, but automation is deceptive: Google has every incentive to make sure you’re spending as much money with them as possible.
Always remember that PPC stands for pay-per-click: it’s very easy to go the other way with Google Ads and end up with an overspending, overperforming campaign. With specialist management, you can make sure your campaign stays in the sweet spot for minimal investment and effort.
We’ve managed hundreds of PPC campaigns centred around lead generation: growing them from 1 or 2 converted leads to over 20 a month for clients with budgets ranging from £500 to £500,000. More than that, we’re up to date with all the latest PPC lead generation strategies.
Interested in learning more about how we can help? Fill in the form on the sidebar, or click here to read more.