For every business, it is necessary to attract and engage new customers and boost profits. The most effective way to generate leads is to drive them towards your website using paid advertisements.
That’s where the role of PPC comes into play. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is an effective advertising methodology in digital marketing linked with search engines and social media platforms. Search engine platforms like Bing and Google offer this pay-per-click model by charging your company a particular fee if a prospect clicks on your ads. It means you will not be charged for just putting an advertisement unless you get a click o your ad. It makes PPC lead generation a most cost-effective approach to drive leads to your site’s landing page or the product page.
PPC campaigns are commonly known as Google Ads due to the significance of Google as an absolute search engine platform. But it also involves Facebook ads lead generation, which we discuss in the following article.
This blog post will discuss everything that comes under the umbrella of pay-per-click lead generation. Let’s dive deep into details.
Advantages of PPC leads
There is a multitude of perks attached with the lead generation pay-per-click approach as it offers the following benefits:
- Creating an effective lead magnet for your website
- Attain instant improvement in keyword rankings & traffic
- Bid according to the stage of the sales funnel
- Manipulate the content of the Ad for each stage
- See what people are searching for and craft your message to their needs
1. Creating an effective lead magnet for your website
PPC Leads involves the most authentic and high-intent audience visiting your website. Therefore, you need to make the right choice while opting for a site to show your ads. That’s why decision-making is vital for the long-term success of your campaign.
When you deploy your ads on a site with a similar niche as your brand, it attracts the most relevant customers from the host’s site. They have a high potential of becoming your customer and diverting to your website. You just need to make sure your ad showcases enough information to get them on board.
2. Attain instant improvement in keyword rankings & traffic
Using PPC ads, you can improve your keyword rankings and traffic up to a significant extent. If you are putting your ads on sites receiving higher traffic than yours, it will engage more prospects and boost your traffic.
The higher your ad click frequency is, the higher your targeted keyword improves in rank. It’s a strategic approach, so make sure to always put your ad on a site that boosts your rankings.
3. Bid according to the stage of the sales funnel
PPC gives you the opportunity of bidding on different stages of your lead generation funnel. You’ll be able to launch campaigns independently for each stage of your marketing funnel. Because it depends on the intent of the keyword, you choose to bid for.
Intent-based bidding offers customized advertisements and enables you to address each prospect according to its buyer’s journey. You’ll be able to consistently revise and personalize your ads for each stage, improving conversion rate.
4. Manipulate the content of the Ad for each stage
When it comes to the awareness stage, your prospect would compare and look for suitable options. It means they’re not considered as sales-ready leads. So, you can create an engaging ad that concisely reveals your product features. You need to target the keywords with informational intent instead of commercial intent.
At the bottom of the funnel, your prospects have already narrowed down their choices, and they are more likely to finalize their purchase decision. The keywords you target here must involve transactional or navigational intent to strengthen your brand awareness campaign.
At the bottom of the funnel, prospects qualified as sales-ready leads as they will likely become a sale. The prospects have now invested their trust in your brand, so it’s the right time to target the high-intent keywords.
That’s the flexibility of PPC lead generation – it allows you to strategically bid according to the stage of your marketing funnel effectively.
5. See what people are searching for and craft your message to their needs
PPC lead generation lets you fetch the details about your prospects interacting with your ads. By doing so, you’ll undoubtedly determine what they’re looking for and the relevant keywords. Later, you can design and place your ads with the right content accordingly.
By monitoring the changes in keyword trends over time, you get informed of the minor changes and optimize your PPC lead generation campaign to align it with the market trends.
Best PPC Lead Generation Ad Networks
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
1- Google Ads
Google Ad Campaign is the primary driver of this segment. Undoubtedly, Google Ads has an overwhelming global recognition with around 80% of the market share.
Since Google is the most used search engine platform, it is one of the most effective routes to reach most prospects on the internet. Irrespective of your industry, your prospects are most likely using Google.
But it comes amidst a downside. Since Google is a renowned search engine, your rival brands also use it to generate PPC leads. It means the CPC (Cost Per Click) can be much more expensive when you opt for bidding on high-intent keywords.
A bright side of using Google ads for lead generation is it offers some valuable utilities like Keyword Planner and Google Analytics to enable you to fetch the best out of all your marketing strategies.
2- Bing Ads
Bing is the second-biggest platform for PPC lead generation. Bing Ads (AKA Microsoft Ads) can offer you many benefits.
If you’re exploring a remarkable as well as a budget-friendly alternative to Google Ads, you need to consider Bing Ads. Just like Google, it also offers paid search engine results and a vast array of famous websites to display your Ads’ content.
A collection of Bing’s associate websites is not as significant as what Google offers, but it still allows ad placement on Yahoo! and MSN with notable benefits.
One of the USPs of Bing for B2B businesses is its users are usually businesses and high-intent visitors.
3- Facebook Ads
Unlike Google and Microsoft, the Facebook ads lead generation strategy aims at the demographic engagement of the audiences.
It means your target audience doesn’t necessarily use keywords or actively search for your ad to pop up. On the contrary, you can showcase your ads in the feeds of two of Meta’s most prominent social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram.
The ads can also appear on Facebook’s main application and Facebook Messenger. FB Ads are aimed towards ads within apps. So if your targeted market is social media users, Facebook ads lead generation can be a great win for your business.
The most significant USP of using Facebook ads lead generation is that you can channelize both Instagram and Facebook’s feed for your Ads.
Keep in mind that your content in Face ads lead generation must be visual as it doesn’t allow text-only Ads. Your ads should be click-worthy, engaging, well-designed, and aesthetic.
4- LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn has witnessed a sudden growth in popularity for being an effective PPC lead generation platform for B2B businesses. It allows you to target a well-informed and educated client base.
The audience you get on LinkedIn primarily has commercial intent as it mainly involves a B2B audience.
It functions just like Facebook ads lead generation as it also targets prospects based on their demographics. The only difference is most of the audience here are business owners, procurement managers, or marketing individuals.
If you’re a B2B business, it is recommended to opt for LinkedIn ads lead generation for better and relevant engagement.
How to Generate Leads Using PPC?
To obtain hot leads from PPC lead generation, you need to ensure the following best PPC lead generation practices:
1- Follow your audience
The best thing about PPC lead generation is that it offers businesses to boost their reach more than any other lead generation strategy. However, it doesn’t mean you have to engage every individual with your ads, as you will be charged for every click, even from the prospects who don’t intend to buy from you or belong to a different niche.
You must ensure that you’re revealing your ads in front of the prospects who are most likely to do convert after making a click on your ad.
You can achieve this goal by acknowledging your targeted market and knowing where your potential customers usually spend their time online.
Most businesses extract the most out of Google ads as there are over 4.4 billion internet users, out of which around four billion use Google.
Facebook accounts for over 10% of digital advertising and 18.4% of global mobile digital advertising. Therefore, you can also place your ads on social media platforms like Facebook (preferable for B2C) or LinkedIn (preferable for B2B).
You can also choose which social media platforms to prioritize based on the percentage of your audience using different media. As Facebook entertains billions of users every day, most B2C and B2B businesses place their ads on Facebook.
Similarly, specifically for B2B businesses, LinkedIn is a save heaven. In 2021, LinkedIn’s users in the World reached over 775 million, and this number is expected to cross the 1 billion mark by 2025.
2- Leverage data & valuable insights
Data has become a new commodity with the world’s increasing dependence on data. That’s why a gateway to mark a victory in PPC is data. Every time you launch a campaign, you start getting valuable data based on prospects’ demographics, intent, and behavior. You can use this data to make your next campaign more impactful and precise.
Apart from the analytics and insights that every PPC platform offers, you can get more information by ensuring a comprehensive and effective tracking of your PPC leads.
Some of the ways to perform PPC leads tracking involves you:
3- Conversion tracking
Conversion tracking is performed by simply aggregating how many ad clicks lead to website events such as orders, sign-ups, inquiry calls, or CRM form submissions.
4- Dynamic number insertion (DNI)
If one of your PPC ads has a primary objective is a phone call, you have to create a way of connecting the calls you receive back to your ad.
It helps you generate random numbers as unique Call IDs for different lead gen campaigns, and you can quickly determine which ad campaign triggered a particular phone call.
5- UTM tracking
UTM ( Universal Transverse Mercator) Tracking allows you to add UTM codes to your URLs to determine the potential and outcomes of your campaigns. Every time you launch a PPC campaign, you should also attach a unique URL with the correct UTM codes.
Using UTM tracking, you can monitor the number of click ads campaigns, the site they come from, the type of content it came with, the targeted keyword.
6- Select who views your Ads
As discussed earlier, PPC lead generation allows you to target your ad reach towards a specific audience who belongs to your niche or market segment. Many businesses have a different set of audiences with varying priorities.
To make your PPC campaign more effective, you need to segment your Ad campaigns as per the right audience and run your drives at the right time to ensure relevant outreach. For instance, B2B eCommerce businesses are recommended to show their Ads to procurement managers, business owners, and supply chain managers during working hours.
You can categorize your PPC campaigns based on:
- Targeted Niche
- Demographics Information
- Products or service
- Time zones, etc.
- Prospect’s search intent
7- Engaging Ad content and landing pages
Creating engaging ads is vital if you want better click frequency. Refrain from making click baits, as it only wastes your budget on irrelevant clicks. The content your prospects find after clicking your ad is more important than just the Ad itself, and it must contain the information, product, service, or story your audience is looking for.
That’s why you must set up an interactive and easy-to-navigate landing page for all your ads. Make sure that the pages possess content and information relevant to the keywords. You can also design the landing page that contributes to the particular stage of your sale funnel.
Don’t forget to eliminate any plausible roadblocks from your landing page to let your prospect reach the CTA without any hassle.
Luckily, Google prioritizes landing pages with comprehensive and optimized content. Therefore, your PPC landing pages must have:
- Authenticity
- Terms & Conditions or About Us Pages
- Keywords in the H1 and throughout the content body
- Word count up to 600
Make your landing pages as much relevant and informative as they appear attractive. Apart from an appearance that ensures attention-gaging landing pages, it is necessary to retain prospects’ interest. You can also check out these landing page examples which produced the best results.
8- Integrate form in the Ad
In LinkedIn and Facebook, you can integrate a subscription form directly to the ad body. By doing so, you give your prospect an option to covert without leaving their current page.
Social Media sites can autofill most of the form’s attributes using their primary information from the database like name, country, gender, email address, etc.
This approach can boost conversions as your prospects will find it hassle-free to put their information.
9- Introduce attractive offers
Introduce attractive and convincing offers that will push your prospects to think that your ad is worthy of their attention and click. It can be a highly impactful approach, especially for high bid placements and keywords where people have to decide which ad to click on.
You can offer a persuasive discount offer, free trial, or limited-time offer to create a sense of urgency for your niche.
10 – Exclude Negative Keywords
Another vital step in any PPC lead generation campaign is to find the right keywords to target with your ads. At the same time, it’s equally important to decide which keywords to exclude. Doing this allows you to refrain from wasting your money on clicks that aren’t intended to convert.
For instance, if your main objective is to find buyers, you need to avoid free and cheap keywords. A prospect looking for a free product or service will only cost you with click and leave your landing page without buying.
To find out such negative keywords, you need to do brainstorming. You can also determine the missing keywords by analyzing your campaign’s insights with time. One significant way to identify negative keywords is to identify the irrelevant prospects making clicks to your ads.
11 Use Ad extensions
Using ad extensions, you can integrate valuable information into your Google PPC lead generation campaign.
These ad extensions appear as a standout section or link on your ad. It allows you to easily showcase specific ad parts that your prospects are more likely interested in, such as the links to your business’s phone number, a promo offer, or a freemium link.
Ad extensions also make your ad outstand the crowd of your competitor’s ads on SERP and instantly divert your prospect’s attention to the CTA you want them to engage with.
12- Test and analyze
Every business has to engage PPC leads using different PPC strategies. There is no common sigma strategy here that serves everyone equally. Since every business and industry is different, you can not base your approach on what worked for other companies. The reality is what’s works for the others is not likely to produce the same results for your business.
That’s why it’s crucial to figure out which strategy serves your interests best. You can do that by continuously monitoring and evaluating your PPC lead generation campaigns, analyzing the outcomes, and applying your new learnings to your upcoming campaigns.
13- Images
Using PPC campaigns, you can easily showcase different variations of your ads simultaneously and start comparing the effectiveness of each variation.
It lets you figure out which segment of your lead generation strategy needs improvement.
The headline produces overwhelming results by generating more PPC leads that can work better when used as a subject line in your emails. Similarly, high-volume and high-intent keywords in your PPC campaigns can get aligned with your SEO strategy.
In a nutshell, PPC lead generation is a gradual process that improves over time. The continuous testing and evaluation of your pay-per-click lead generation campaign allow you to better enhance your marketing approach and strategy over time.
Is PPC Marketing an Effective Tactic for Any Industry?
A common misperception among the masses is that PPC lead generation is only for e-commerce businesses, but that’s not true. PPC is everywhere where there is a need for lead generation. To get this idea right, let’s discuss how lead generation works for all businesses.
Lead generation serves businesses that fail to deliver their services to a significant audience. For instance, banking services (loan offers), insurance companies, and B2B businesses can leverage lead generation. Even if you are reading this blog post is, or at any stage can become a lead for a company. After becoming a high-potential lead, you can be categorized as a qualified lead and then outreached until you convert into a sale regularly.
Hence, the primary objective of lead generation is to push prospects into the lead-generation funnel system to begin a lead nurturing process. In the lead nurture process, lead gen marketers evaluate your needs, intent, and potential to covert throughout your journey in the sales funnel.
The final goal is for a sales team to lock the deal to have a new customer. It starts with acquiring the necessary information about the demographics and behavior of a prospect, then advances to get more insights about the prospect.
Conclusion
PPC lead generation is an effective and efficient way to engage more leads at all sales funnel stages. But still, it depends upon the marketing and sales team to nurture MQLs and SQLs to convert them into sales.
You need to perceive lead generation pay-per-click as one segment of your overall marketing strategy, including social media marketing, email marketing, and content marketing. A chain reaction of engagements that you trigger with your Google Ads Lead Generation or Social Media Ads should be kept fueling until your leads reach the bottom of your sales funnel.
