Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns perfectly complement SEO because they start driving traffic instantly while you build organic search visibility over time. Companies often run paid campaigns to coincide with professional SEO but soon find it’s a lot easier to get clicks than it is to convert them into sales.
If you’re struggling to get the most from your PPC lead generation campaign, you have come to the right place! Dig in and talk about Jedi-level PPC lead generation, we shall.
Table of Contents
Why Is It So Hard to Run a Successful PPC Lead Generation Campaign?
11 Tactics That Level Up PPC Lead Gen
- Pay Attention to Every Stage of Your B2B Sales Funnel
- Use Negative Keywords
- BCHYUA (Be Careful How You Use Acronyms)
- Use Call Ads
- Prequalify Your Leads
- Test and Rate Different Leads
- Use Remarketing/Retargeting
- Give Your Ad Group Settings a Lot of Thought
Why You Should Talk with a PPC Expert
How to Choose the Right PPC Expert
Consider Big Leap for Your PPC Campaigns
Why Is It So Hard to Run a Successful PPC Lead Generation Campaign?
Effective PPC lead generation is about learning from every single choice you make in a campaign. High-competition words are very expensive because the market determines the value of the most important keywords. It’s easy to burn through your budget quickly by targeting the exact words you want.
Here are some of the biggest hurdles people face trying to run their own PPC campaigns:
- You find that supplementing low organic traffic is expensive.
- You need quality, optimized content to send people to.
- You get clicks but not conversions.
- You don’t know how to track ad performance.
- You haven’t targeted the right demographics.
- You aren’t sure how to tweak PPC campaigns based on the data gathered.
- You haven’t figured out how to retarget ads once you get those first clicks.
The tricky part about PPC lead generation is knowing what to do with the data that comes in and how to convert those leads into sales. All the clicks in the world don’t matter if you can’t turn them into sales. It’s also about the quality of the leads much more than the quantity.
11 Tactics That Level Up PPC Lead Gen
You will need a few tricks up your sleeve to get the most from your PPC lead gen campaign. We decided to prioritize techniques that most people are either unaware of or unsure how to use correctly.
These tools and techniques will get you more value from your PPC budget and help you nurture warm PPC leads into sales. Read on, young Padawan.
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Pay Attention to Every Stage of Your B2B Sales Funnel
Make sure you plan for the long haul with B2B, giving careful thought to every stage of your sales funnel.
Use your brand in the middle of your sales funnel ad copy. Viewers will be comparing brands, so make sure you’re in the mix with what they’re looking for.
In Google Ads, use attributions to walk your prospects through the sales funnel the way you intend, using different metrics like time-decay or position-based attributions. These attributions help you make campaign decisions based on various specific metrics so that you can study the most effective audience activities in the buying journey.
Use Negative Keywords
This is one of the few times where being negative is a good thing. You already know the power of using the right keywords in your SEO and PPC campaigns. But, you may not realize how important negative keywords are.
It’s getting hard to avoid Star Wars references by this point, but pretend that keywords and negative keywords are the positive and negative sides of the Force.
You can almost hear Yoda wisely proclaim, “You must say what you are not in order to say what you are.”
Set up negative keywords to prevent your ads from triggering based on specific words or phrases. This can help you properly target the exact context of campaigns and specific ads. Ultimately, negative keywords help you control ad costs, boost relevance, and ensure you are attracting the right market.
BCHYUA (Be Careful How You Use Acronyms)
What—you’ve never heard that acronym before? Yeah, we just made it up.
Clearly, you’re not going to waste your money on a bogus acronym like this, but even the legit ones can have double meanings. It’s unlikely that “some years all cats are happy” is a real saying—it sounds vaguely Canadian to us—but you won’t know until you search.
If you’re in a highly specialized or technical field with many specific acronyms, check for alternate meanings to decide if it’s worth using the acronym in paid ads. Specifically, if it’s an essential acronym for your field, check how much traffic it has for alternate meanings. If it’s often used for another meaning, it’s best to pass on it.
Use Call Ads
At the end of 2021, mobile devices comprised 63% of organic search results.
There’s a really good chance your target audience has a phone handy if they need more information about your ad. Making a direct connection to prospects is great for conversions. Additionally, you can use Google’s call recording to help qualify and respond to leads.
Call ads and call extensions are great for converting Google PPC leads that typically require more than a simple click to drive sales. Maybe you’re in a technical field or sell expensive items that require a big commitment.
Prequalify Your Leads
When done right, prequalifying your leads is a great way to get the most from a paid campaign and build interest with more serious audiences.
For example, with B2C, using item prices in copy is rarely recommended, but in B2B, it makes for a good prequalifier. You can zoom in on potential customers who aren’t scared off by the price, and if the price is extremely competitive, you’re already at the forefront of their minds if they start researching your competition.
One of the benefits of this kind of prequalification is it provides you with a unique demographic to narrow down your target in a way that isn’t available from the ad platform.
Test and Rate Different Leads
Lead scoring aims to identify and label the highest priorities in your PPC strategy. You may want to use ads to get email sign-ups, send visitors to a landing page for a time-sensitive sales event, or ask them to fill out a form.
As you might imagine, lead scoring can be a bit of a wild goose chase if you’re not sure which attributes are the most likely to benefit your business, and even more so if you’re unsure how to examine your metrics to tell which leads are most beneficial.
Rate your leads from 0–100. As your campaign continues, you can analyze which attributes best move your lead toward a sale.
Use Remarketing/Retargeting
Some businesses believe they can launch a PPC campaign; every click will instantly lead to a sale. Hey, if it’s working that easily for you, then congrats!
For everybody else, campaigns are about familiarity. They’re about taking a cold lead, nurturing it into a warm one, and taking that person through the sales funnel until they’re ready to purchase. The more significant the purchase, the more likely you’ll need to maintain that person’s attention multiple times—maybe over days, weeks, or months.
Remarketing and retargeting are often used interchangeably, but generally speaking, the distinction is that remarketing deals with continuing the buyer’s journey through a follow-up email marketing campaign. In contrast, retargeting tends to engage with visitors throughout their online journey. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll focus on retargeting.
Retargeting lets you continue to serve ads to people who have visited your website, separate landing pages, or even previous ads. Retargeting can be highly personalized. When done right, the ads prod the individual through the various stages of the sales funnel, walking them toward a sale with each step.
Setting up retargeting is slightly different depending on which platforms you’re using to place ads. Speaking of which, we get a lot of questions about whether you can do retargeting on LinkedIn, and the answer is “Yes!”
In fact, it doesn’t cost you anything to build a list of visitors to your content, and there are many options when you’re ready to start a campaign.
One extra hint for your retargeting campaign: Mix it up. You can use text ads, banners, or videos—the choice is yours.
Give Your Ad Group Settings a Lot of Thought
A Jedi knows the right time to take out their lightsaber. Likewise, a PPC expert knows how to use ad groups to gather valuable data that increase a campaign’s effectiveness.
The following tips for Facebook Ads come from our paid media manager, Stephen Peterson. He uses them for testing countless variables for learning more about your personas as a PPC campaign matures.
The 1-5-5 Approach
One of our many strategies is to start with one campaign comprising five ad sets, with five areas of targeting under each. This technique lets you learn a ton about what customers like without blowing through your budget.
Dynamic Copy
You can set up a campaign to test five headlines and up to ten unique images or videos. As your campaign progresses, you’ll learn a lot about which combinations perform the best.
Use Lead Forms
Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn all offer lead forms, and we think they’re pretty awesome.
Lead forms let you use ad campaigns to capture valuable data from prospects without forcing the user to click away from the platform.
In the past, you might use ads to send people to fill out a form to receive gated content. Now, you can do that right on the social media site.
These platforms let you customize the forms to your taste. This great feature removes one more hurdle in marketing, where users simply don’t want to travel to a separate site when filling out a form in trade for a unique asset.
Create Unique Landing Pages
Create content with very specific personas in mind. Not only do you want to imagine the right target audience, you want to create your landing pages to address where that persona is in the buyer journey.
For instance, you may begin your sales funnel with an easy-to-follow “awareness stage” landing page to capture everyone who is generally interested in your products. From there, perhaps you want to retarget those visitors with more direct, fact-based content. Whatever that buyer journey looks like, the important thing is to be intentional with your landing pages.
Consistency is key.
Take Advantage of AI
One of artificial intelligence’s best features is its ability to use it for deep analytic insights. The process is quick and very accurate if you feed it the right data. You can use AI to analyze different copy for multiple personas, and it can handle a lot of variables to look for hidden gems in your metrics.
Oh yeah, it can also screw things up pretty easily! So, if you want to customize data analytics using AI, getting a human to help you create a few lines of code is a good idea.
Why You Should Talk with a PPC Expert
It was inevitable, right? Big Leap loves helping our clients get amazing results from their paid campaigns, so of course, we’re going to pitch our services!
PPC is easy enough for most people to do on their own. Doing it well? That’s an entirely different story. Here are a few good reasons to enlist the help of a PPC expert to get the most from your ad campaigns:
A PPC expert will consider the nuances of your industry, your brand’s unique offerings, your target audience’s pain points, and alignment for keywords both in ads and across all your website pages.
You need a team completely tuned in to your SEO strategy and landing pages. Great content for SEO and PPC is exponentially more fruitful when working in unison.
The experts pay attention to what is happening in the industry. Changes are happening all the time, and you want to be sure someone’s keeping an eye on anything that impacts how your campaigns are running.
For example, when Google makes an update to its engine, that can either help or hurt campaigns; either way, Google updates usually mean fine-tuning PPC and SEO alike. You need experts who know when to let things run and when to make changes based on deep metrics.
We could go on, but you get the point.
How to Choose the Right PPC Expert
Look for the following when deciding on the PPC team that’s right for you.
Experience
Choose a team with a proven track record of successful campaigns. For instance (shameless plug incoming), here’s just one of our recent campaigns we’re pretty proud of:
We secured as much as $7 for every dollar spent in our Truvy campaign. That’s more impressive than the $2 per dollar spent seen as a high industry standard since Google’s 2009 Economic Impact estimate.
See results we’ve achieved in other campaigns here!
Communication
An effective PPC guru has to be a great listener. They’ll be able to get a real sense of your business, your strengths, your target personas, and their pain points.
It’s their job to reflect these attributes and effectively communicate them. Every ad campaign is unique and calls for care and attention—and that starts with great communication.
Transparency
PPC lead generation campaigns are built on clear, informed data. You can’t direct the path of a successful campaign if you don’t have the data or the understanding to analyze it. If your PPC strategist isn’t sharing continuous progress, they probably have something to hide.
Adaptability
Change truly is the only constant. Ad campaigns are no exception. PPC not only relies on making the proper campaign adjustments at the right time—based on the right data—but Google and other ad platforms regularly change algorithms, rules, and tools. A PPC expert stays current with the tech trends daily.
Customer Reviews
The internet is good for more than memes and cat videos. Reviews and star ratings are a great way to determine if your PPC expert is consistent and effective with their campaigns.
Consider Big Leap for Your PPC Campaigns
Ready to give your revenue a big boost? Call us to connect with one of our PPC specialists today! They may not be Jedi Masters—but that doesn’t mean they can’t bring your PPC campaigns to the light side.
That’s Enough
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