Pay per Click Success 5 Easy Ways to Grow Sales and Lower Costs Go Long! The Benefits of Using Long Tail Keywords clogged sewage line, I ll see a higher conversion How many keywords are in your pay-per-click campaign? 5 or 10? 50 or 100? More? If you re not in the thousands, then you re not even trying! Seriously, by focusing on a short list of primary keywords, you re missing the most qualified buyers and paying top dollar for the most competitive keywords. Here s what you need to know: 70% of search traffic is what is called long tail. That means longer keyword phrases. In addition, longer search terms convert better! Search Engine Watch research shows that 80% of conversions come from search terms between 11 and 25 characters long. One explanation for this is that longer terms are more specific. When I know what I want and type it into rate and more serious buyers. The more varied the phrases you add to your campaign, the more likely it is you ll find terms with less competition, therefore lower costs per click. The good news is you don t have to make all this up on your own! You may notice lots of ideas when you type in terms in the Google search bar. But to get a comprehensive list of keywords to consider try out Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends and ispionage. These and many others offer powerful keyword research tools. Get your sales and service teams involved too. They ll know words and phrases that customers use when talking about your service, and more importantly, their problems, that you haven t thought of. Google to find it, I m more likely to take action! So, if I m a plumber, advertising on terms like quality plumber or Chicago plumber are obvious. And those are the terms most of us start out with and focus most of our budget on. So, the cost per click and the cost per conversion will be highest on these terms. Make the list as long as you can. Big brands will often have over 10,000 phrases in their campaigns! Both Google and Bing allow you to import your list from an excel file straight into the system. In fact, you can organize your keywords into groups in your spreadsheet and import those groups right into individual Ad Groups in Adwords. That s important because you can then easily right ads specific to those groups and direct the clicks to specific landing pages. More on that next! By multiplying the number of phrases in your campaign, your cost per click should drop and conversation rate and sales should increase! But, if I add in phrases like fix broken pipes or repair
Raise Your Quality Score, Lower Your Click Costs Just as with keyword phrases, the more the merrier with Landing Pages. Take a look at the graphic from a recent Hubspot study. There are two main reasons for this: Relevance & Quality Score. Your rank and your cost per click are a direct function of your Quality Score. Google looks for a correlation between the search phrase, the words used in the ad and the words used on the landing page, among other things, to compute the Quality Score and uses that in computing your rank and cost per click. Improving your quality score can drop your cost per click by more than 50% in some cases! What Google is trying to do with the quality score is to measure the relevance of your ad and landing page to the visitor. So, in many ways, the things you can do to improve your quality score also make your landing page more relevant to the visitor. If they land on your page and it makes them feel like they ve found what they re searching for, then they re likely to hang around for a while. So, at a minimum, you should group together keyword phrases logically in Ad Groups, write unique ads and create unique landing pages for each Ad Group. Ideally, you may have specific ads and landing pages for specific keywords.
Avoid the Fluff, Write Meaningful Landing Pages What your Landing Page says to the visitor is the first impression you ll make on that potential future customer. Make sure it s the right impression! The first step is to be sure you put yourself in the mindset of the typical web visitor I have limited time. Tell me what I need to know. Tell me right away. Don t get cute about it. Don t make me hunt for it. I m here because I have a need. Tell me how you ll fill it or I ll leave. In fact, for pay per click visitors, if they don t like what they see, in a second or two, they can hit the back button and be on your competitor s site. Don t make them do that! The above quote was taken from a great article on landing page writing from Unbounce.com. Another great tip in the same article is to Sell the page. Meaning, tell the visitor right up front and quickly, why they should stick around and read the rest of your page. So, if the keyword was fix broken pipe and you re a plumber, then maybe the headline should be We fix broken pipes. For a lot of businesses, especially those with complex solutions that many new leads don t fully understand, it can be very difficult to write about yourself. We all have a tendency to see the world from our own perspective and we all like to talk about ourselves. That won t work on your landing page! It s essential to speak to the visitor about what s going through their minds. Thankfully, we already know what they re searching for! Use that information. For a given keyword group, make a list of problems or challenges a customer might have that would cause them to type those terms into Google or Bing. Your landing page should talk about those problems or what sales people would call pains. If you re struggling with identifying those pains, SalesScripter.com offers a cool tool to identify your customer s pains and more. In general, you have to identify what s going wrong in the customer s world that made them stop their busy day to do a search and end up on your site. Speak to that need. What s keeping them up at night? What will help them rest easier? The Smart Marketer put together a great break down of several landing pages that points out the good and the bad about several pages that should give you a good feel for what works and what doesn t.
Important Lead Management Tips Everyone Should Follow Important Lead Management Tips Everyone Should Follow The vast majority of pay per click advertisers don t manage the leads that come from their campaigns at all. I don t mean they don t respond to the leads. I mean that s all they do. In fact, most leads come in the form of an email to the owner who then doles them out to sales people randomly. There are a lot of problems with this approach, such as: Inconsistent response Untimely response No measurement of results In fact many B2B marketers struggle to get pay per click efforts adopted by their business because the sales people don t feel the leads are any good. But, the lack of consistent and timely response is exactly what under cuts the value of the leads in the first place. In fact, only about 27% of leads get contacted at all and less than 50% even get called by a sales rep. This from a recent Forbes study on lead response. In addition, see the graph on the right. Leads that are called in less than 10 minutes are most likely to be contacted, meaning they spoke with the sales person. After only 10 minutes, the odds of even speaking with the lead are slim and none. Your situation may be different and the window of time might be a bit longer but, fact is that sooner is better. A more practical explanation of this is that many leads will complete forms on multiple sites resulting from the same search. So, if your competitor is faster at responding, they win. Game over. All of this is why lead management is so important. If you re managing leads with email, what happens if the boss is out on vacation? Do the leads sit in his inbox until he s back? Even if all your reps get the emails, you have to have some method for determining which sales person will respond to the lead at any given time. What if the sales person who is supposed to respond to a lead is in a meeting with a client? Lead Management systems can automate distribution to the right person at the right time. Most can even find the next available sales person and get the lead to them, automatically! This is huge! If you re calling new conversions within 30 minutes now, you may think you re doing pretty good. But, if you can get it down below 15 minutes, you re sure to see a significant improvement in results!
Important Lead Management Tips Everyone Should Follow In addition, for B2B marketers or any business where there is a human based sales process involved in getting the order, tracking what happens with the leads after the conversion is just as important in measuring and optimizing the overall performance of your pay per click campaign as cost per click and landing pages. For ecommerce businesses or retailers, these things probably seem obvious because it s so much easier to get the data. You need to know not just how many conversions you got and what each conversion costs on average but, how much did each conversion spend. You want to be sure you can track these things: Cost per Conversion per Ad Group/Landing Page and even by Keyword Conversion Quality based on sales call, visit duration, repeat visits, initial order, etc. Calls required to reach Conversions never reached Also, if your ads make the phone ring, then tracking which ads are generating calls and which of those are the best customers is crucial. There have been 3rd party tools for this in the past but, Google recently added built in call tracking in Adwords. See the graphic for an overview of how it works. Clearly, if your sales and service teams aren t logging this information in a Lead Management or CRM system, you re going to have trouble seeing what s working and what s not.
It s All About the Follow Up: Nurture the Lead, Close the Deal! Most online leads (conversions) are not ready to buy yet. They may be starting to think about it but, they re probably just kicking tires, researching, looking for answers to questions going through their head. Only 22% of leads are contacted 3 or more times and 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact! So, if your sales people are calling new leads once or twice and then giving up, you re leaving lots of money on the table. A simple 3 to 5 email campaign that goes out every 2 or 3 days to new conversions from your pay per click campaign can greatly increase both the contacts (# of people you actually speak to) and the sales. Many people really don t want to talk to a sales person. In fact, in many businesses you could argue that one of the main reasons they initiated contact with your business via your website is that they don t want to talk to anyone. So, rather than making it your sales team s job to try and force these prospects to talk to someone, why not let technology get them what they need, the way they want it? A Lead Nurturing campaign can present the lead with the information they are likely to want, in a way they are comfortable with and offer them the opportunity to talk to you when they re ready. This doesn t mean you can t call them too. But, a campaign that says email and call them on the first day, then email them, then call again, then email, etc. just increases your odds of connection. But, of course, it does make sense to stop calling at some point. And that s where Lead Nurturing really pays off. A very simple lead nurturing campaign can double sales to your inbound leads without an increase in ad spend within 6 to 12 months. Really! Here are some example numbers: 100 leads per month from Pay per Click 20 leads closed or 20 sales 80 leads not closed 2% of those will click on any given email you send out After 6 months, you have 480 dead leads that didn t buy in your Lead Nurturing campaign so, that s about 10 old leads coming back to life per email. So, if you send an email a week, that s 50 additional leads and these are more informed, sales ready buyers! Your numbers may vary but, there is no disputing that even a very basic lead nurturing campaign will significantly increase sales within a few months. If you re spending thousands on pay per click and other ads, the cost of a Lead Nurturing system is a drop in the bucket. There are lots of options out there and many are less than $100 per month for all the bells and whistles. If you re concerned about creating the emails, don t be. It shouldn t be hard. In fact, a great way to get the email concepts started is to sit down with your sales team and write down the top 10 questions that new leads ask. Each one of those questions becomes an email where the subject line is the question and the email provides the answer. For more on writing these emails, see the video here.
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