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Four Proven Guidelines For Optimizing Your Lead-Generation AdWords Campaigns

Pay-per-Click search marketing is a surefire way to attract and generate quality and sales-ready leads for your small business. When executed right, of course. If you’re already generating leads using Pay-per-Click but are forced to reduce your marketing budget due to the current climate in global economy, your PPC campaigns might be the first place to look at.

Here are 4 proven tips you can use right now to optimize both your Pay-per-Click spending and Return on Investment in these challenging economic times without reducing the flow of leads by the same percentage that it decreases your ad spend.

1) Get Rid Of Low Performing Keywords That Poison Your Budget
The simplest way to optimize your ad spending is to pause keywords that get clicks but convert poorly.

When you run a keyword performance report in your PPC account, you’ll quickly notice that the majority of your campaigns are loosing some percentage of their spending on clicks that convert poorly or don’t covnert at all.

Note: Keyword Performance reports give you excellent insights into stats on how well your keywords are performing across your campaigns.

So, to make sure that you spend your money only for keywords that convert and generate results, pause or even completely delete poorly-performing keywords.

2) Use Negative Keywords
If you’re using Broad match in your PPC campaigns, good chances are that your ads are being triggered by completely irrelevant keywords that have little to do with the nature of your services.

When this happens, you’re wasting your money – one way or another. You either waste budget directly by paying for irrelevant clicks that don’t convert, or indirectly when you get irrelevant ad impressions that decrease your CTR and actual cost-per-click.

Run Search Query Performance report in your PPC account to find out what actual search phrases are triggering your ads, getting clicks and costing you money. Look for irrelevant search phrases that trigger your ads, generate clicks, but are not converting well. Add these irrelevant keywords as negative keywords.

Quick note: A Search Query Performance report gives you complete insights into data for the actual search terms that triggered your PPC ads.

3) Split test your ads against conversions
If you’re running PPC ads to generate leads, you’re in the business of generating leads, not clicks. Thus, it makes perfect sense to optimize your PPC ads strictly against conversions.

The core aim of your ad copy should not be to generate as many clicks as possible, but to generate as many leads as possible. You don’t want just anyone to click your ads. You want only qualified people to click.

Ensure your ad copy actively pre-qualifies your prospects before they even click your ad. For example, if in your hunt for prospects you are looking only for companies with over 60 employees, consider saying so in your ad copy.

4) Optimize Conversion Rate Of Your

Lead Capture Page
Optimizing the conversion rate of your landing page usually turns out to be one of the most powerful ways to decrease your lead acquisition costs and your

ROI. Here’s an example.
Let’s suppose your landing page converts visitors into leads at 4% and your monthly Pay-per-Clicks budget generates 15,000 clicks per month. This results in 600 leads per month. Now let’s say you optimize and increase your conversion rate by 20% (which is usually very doable) so your lead capture page now converts at 4.8%.

With the exact same number of clicks (15,000 per month), you’re now suddenly generating 720 leads per month. You would probably be satisfied to get those extra 120 free leads each month. Now consider how such improvement would contribute to your bottom line.

As almost everyone knows, Google is the most popular Internet search engine ever created. Besides being the world’s best search engine, Google is also a calculator, an interactive mapping tool, and, in recent years, the most popular place for small to mid-sized businesses to advertise online. Why? Because they have devised an ingenious method of making online advertising extremely affordable and easily accessible to the small business community (defined here as businesses with 500 employees or less).

Google’s unique advertising tool, Google Adwords, has taken the Internet by storm. It may be particularly useful if your firm is in a traditional business where your closest competitors are not early adopters of Internet technology. Consider the following set of questions to determine if Google Adwords could help your business get more qualified sales leads:

Is your firm in a traditional industry where you have the opportunity to be an “early adopter” of new Internet technologies? Many traditional industries, like manufacturing and food services, for instance, are notoriously late adopters of Internet technologies. There is still a significant percentage of firms in traditional sectors that barely have a Web presence at all. Depending on your industry and your geographic reach (in terms of sales) you may still have a window of opportunity where you can get the jump on your competitors.

Are your closest competitors fully explioting their Internet marketing potential? If you’re curious about the number of incoming links you or your competitors have (links to your site from other sites), simply type “link.yourwebaddress.com” into Google. Don’t use the quotes, and type in your actual Web address. If you want to do a little corporate spying you can do the same for your competitors’ sites. The link information Google provides is part of the public domain and is available to anyone who knows how to access it. Also, visit your competitors’ Web sites. Compare theirs to yours. Are they better, worse, similar? Is their content relevant and current? Is the site easy to navigate? Is there some interactive feature/online client service you could offer that would help to set you apart?

If you think of something interactive you’d like to offer email us at info@nurelm.com and we’ll give you a ballpark figure of what you can expect to pay. You may be surprised at the low cost of some interactive features, and they could make all the difference in your Web traffic/sales leads generated.

Do you offer a specialized product or service? The more specialized it is, the better you will do advertising with Google Adwords, or with any other form of online advertising, since there are already less competitors out there. The Web is perfect for highly specialized products/services because you may not have enough clients in one geographic region, but if you sell nationally or internationally, you may find that you have hit upon a very lucrative niche, since your target market will grow exponentially as your geographic service region is expanded.

Do you have an established relationship with nationally/internationally known firms that have a large, well respected position on the Internet? If you do and you can get them to place a link to your company Web site from their Web site(s) this will significantly increase your general Google rankings, and place you in a better position to take advantage of Google Adwords. The Google search engine algorithm now ranks you based on QUALITY of incoming links, rather than quantity. A “quality” link is defined by Google as a large, popular, high -traffic Web site.

Is your current Web site consumer-driven or does it simply tout how great you are? Many smaller businesses make this mistake. They build Web sites based on what they want them to say/do, rather than on what their consumers want. Hire a professional Web design firm whose core focus is designing effective, high-traffic, consumer-driven Web sites. If you have done that, you’ve won half the battle.

If you’re not sure if your Web site is a “consumer-driven” site, fill out NuRelm’s online Web assessment form and one of our online marketing experts will give you free advice on how to make your site more consumer-driven. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing the wording or adding more text. Small intiiatives that sometimes cost little or nothing to implement can make a significant difference in your Web site’s popularity/sales leads generated.

Is your Web site information -intensive? The day of barking dogs, waving flags, and animated intro pages is over. Now Internet savvy consumers are interested in one thing; up-to-date, useful, free information. If you give them the content they want they will reward you with sales leads and referrals.

Does your site offer the right kind of information (information your clients and prospects are most interested in)? Note: The right kind of information is not necessarily detailed information about your specific industry or what you are trying to sell. Example: Even though NuRelm is primarily a Web site software and services firm our clients and prospects are extremely interested in not just how to launch an attractive interactive Web site,,but in how to market it once it is out there. Once we understood what most interested our clients/prospects we began offering a monthly online newsletter with detailed, timely information on online marketing. We also launched our online marketing workshops.

NuRelm’s newsletters and workshops are designed to better address our clients’ online marketing questions and to help them get the most bang for the buck for their Internet dollar. Even though online marketing is not NuRelm’s core profit center we have extensive knowldege in this area. In order to build effective, high-traffic Web sites, NuRelm staff members must keep up-to-date on the latest Internet marketing trends and technologies. You must KNOW YOUR CLIENTS and prospects and understand what is it they want want, even if it means offering information in a complimentary area that is not your core profit center.

Focus in on the area that most interests your target market. Do a telephone survey if you’re not sure, or ask your clients when you go out on service calls, or send a mass email (although email blasts may get low response rates if they’re not done right – like offering to be entered in to some sort of drawing if they fill out the survey).

To summarize, your small traditional business will thrive on the Web if you take the right steps. Bottom line: Know your target market well, give them the information they want, and present it in a friendly, nonthreatening, easy-to find manner. Learning to market online in the most effective way is always a challenge, but one well worth researching. If you consider the above points and you had positive answers to most or all of the above questions, then you should go to Google and learn more about Google Adwords. NuRelm will also be conducting in-depth workshops on how to win with Google Adwords (coming this Fall). Call (877)268-7356, ext.204 if you’re interested in finding out more about NuRelm’s popular online marketing workshop series.