Although I primarily focus on content marketing, on-site optimization and linkbuilding for my clients. There are excellent cost-effective opportunities in generating leads on your sites by using paid ads on the main pay per click platforms online. Used in conjunction with organic search techniques, the one-two punch ensures that your business will see fast and steady gains in customer acquisition.
Here are some very important tips to keep in mind when managing costs in your lead gen efforts.
First, some general ideas about your landing pages.
Tips to increasing your click-through rate for paid campaign funnels
- This might be obvious but I have seen many times where the text on the landing page with the copy in the ad did not match! Any ad network which is cost-effective cares about this and spends a considerable amount of AI resources in ensuring that they are complementing what users are searching for.
- HEADLINES ARE IMPORTANT. Make them memorable and informative.
- Put the contact form as high on the landing page as possible. Making users scroll and scroll is kinda old hat and doesn’t give most educated consumers a feeling of integrity. Scarcity is important but not for gathering leads. That comes later when it’s time to convert them.
- Minimize the number of lines of info required in the contact form. Less is more.
- Just like in Organic search, page load speed is important in getting the lead to stay on the page. Don’t sabotage yourself with a free landing page server which doesn’t load fast enough to keep their interest.
- If you are using a custom landing page make sure it’s responsive to mobile devices. If you are using a template service like Click Funnels, it will already have this functionality embedded so it won’t be anything you need to worry about.
- As with your ads themselves, A/B test colors, text and layouts for your landing pages too. There are many theories about what works and what doesn’t but it’s just that, a bunch of theories. If everyone had the same results there would only be 1 website for each search. Think about it, people are complex creatures, especially when it comes to making purchases! Do you really know what makes buyers tick? Test and find out!
Ads should be cost effective and increase your click through rate
via GIPHY
Specific tips for managing costs on Google Adwords and Bing
- Set up your campaigns with a flexible structure but be sure of the target keywords before you begin.
- Spend a considerable amount of time developing a negative keyword list to avoid irrelevant clicks. Junk search is probably the main problem with CPC and something you want to attack with total vigilance.
- Create single keyword adgroups. This is an important part of making a flexible structure. You’ll discover more relevant keywords as your lead gen funnel and customer base develops.
- Ad groups should be further refined to include different operators allowed such as: broad match, exact match, modified broad. Observe which ones perform best and ad additional budgets to those which outperform.
- Bid modifiers should be adjusted according to time period, week and devices. You’ll find some ads work better at different times and days as well as mobile vs desktop.
- Don’t ever start with the default bids in any ad network. Remember, these are automated auction systems, they are not designed to save you money but quite the opposite!
- Adjust your network settings by trying display network, search, partners, etc. Although this requires a larger budget it is very instructive to know where you generate the best ROI for your CPC budget.
- Optimizing ad copy to match your keyword list is perhaps the most important tip I can give you. You’ll receive a better quality ad score and the ad will be featured more prominently compared to competitors even if you bid less. So spend some time to work on the quality score until it’s above 90%.
facebook ads should be matched to their target demographic via GIPHY
Tips for managing CPC costs on the Facebook Ad Network
- Ad image relevant to text copy is probably the most important element in increasing click-through rate. Facebook uses this as their primary way of measuring the quality of your ad for users on the social network.
- Target as specific an audience as you can. In some cases, you’ll want to make multiple audiences.
- Don’t use the audience network option as it will attract too many bots and click happy users who have no buying intent.
- Explore retargeting options through Facebook pixel. Although a little time consuming to pay off, once you have a pixel which has a sufficient amount of traffic supporting it, you can create laser targeted audiences in your Facebook ads. Worth.the.time.
- Update ad content as often as you can and test its effectiveness by making new ad sets to compare their performance.
- Even though it probably costs a great deal more in terms of budget and time resources, video ads actually have lower CPC rates than graphics so try to leverage this aspect of the Facebook ad network if you can manage it.
Have any questions about the tips discussed in the article? Contact me by leaving a comment below or on social anytime. I love solving marketing problems with business owners online. I also have an excellent CPC calculator that I would love to share with you. Just message me and I’ll send it over.