Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click

Published July 31st, 2008

by Josh Prizer

Tired of watered down, poor quality leads from your lead generation company? The last several years, we have been noticing a trend being discussed by our clients. They are telling us that the quality of leads that used to come in from their lead generation services have dropped off the map. At the same time, they’ve noticed that the quality of leads coming from pay per click has remained superb and even gotten better.

A lot of lead generation companies are using pay per click search to gather their leads. They will then mark up the cost it took to acquire them, or they will send them to multiple vendors and the quality to you is often poor. If this is your problem, maybe it’s time you skip the middle man and go straight to the source.

Jumping into Pay Per Click isn’t just a matter of setting up a website and contact information. You can certainly get results doing that — we see it all the time. But to truly compete and drive your cost per lead down, you need some sophistication.

One thing we continually preach to clients is the importance of fine tuning every aspect of your online lead pipeline.

The first place to begin is with your pay per click ad copy. It’s fairly easy to place an ad and launch it. However, the pay per click engines are putting more emphasis than ever on “Quality” algorithms. If you are unable to make the daily effort to test your ad copy, you are going to fall behind those that do. A good PPC management company will run daily split tests for their clients. This is who you are up against more and more these days — experts who double and triple the click through rates of their clients’ ads.

Maybe that doesn’t sound important, but it is. Doubling and tripling your quality traffic can do the same for your number of leads. And, it can lower your costs per click in the process.

But don’t stop there, look at your landing pages (the pages where you send your pay per click traffic). Are the contact forms too busy or too buried? Is your phone number buried? There are ton of things you can do to convert leads at a higher rate.

Optimizing your site’s landing pages reduces the dollars you spend on each lead. You might be surprised, but even tiny changes can cut your costs per lead in half. We’ve seen it. So put in the effort or invest more funds in these mission critical spots.

If jumping into the paid search engines sounds like a lot of work, it is. You can roll up your sleeves and make it pay off over time, or you can hire a turnkey PPC management company. A good PPC expert will develop expansive keyword lists, mine keywords from your competitors, conduct daily split tests on your ads, and advise you on your landing pages.

Ditching those weak, watered-down leads and going right to the source can help your business boost its results dramatically.

About the Author:

Josh Prizer is a Senior Account Executive and AdWords Expert for Zero Company Performance Marketing, a ppc management company. Check out his site to discover more details on improving your PPC advertising campaigns and performance.