Creating online ad campaigns that generate real leads

Even If you don’t really know what pay-per-click advertising is, there’s pretty much a 100% chance that you’ve come across it at some point – perhaps without even knowing it. To the consumer it’s a helpful piece of content that is directly related to the topic you are viewing or searching. On the business end, it’s an extremely targeted advertising opportunity.

PPC advertising is an incredibly efficient way to get your message out to the right people online. Companies like Google, Youtube and Facebook all have their own programs and plans that can target demographics and personas right down to specific points that advertisers used to dream about.

Here in Atlantic Canada we’re starting to see more and more large and small businesses taking advantage of PPC advertising, but we’re also seeing that they often feel they aren’t quite getting the bang for buck they anticipated. Even though they may be getting hundreds or thousands of clicks, they just aren’t seeing an increase in leads that they had hoped.

All flash and no splash

Most business folk have always been taught that if you design a killer ad, you will no doubt get truckloads of eyeballs and the leads and sales will come gushing in like the Amazon during rain season. So what do these folks do? They spend all of their time and advertising budget tweaking ad copy and making sure the message is right or that the video is entertaining and not on delivering on the promise of the ad.

Messaging and ad content is extremely important to the success of the campaign, but after you’ve captured their attention, where are you bringing them? What is their next course of action? These are the steps that people often miss. They put all the effort into attracting a visitor only to send them to a home page or a contact page where conversion rates are extremely low.

It’s only half the equation

“80% of Ad traffic is sent to either home pages or product / shopping cart pages” -Google Adwords

What we are really after is an advertising campaign that hopefully gets people interested in your product or service. Ultimately we want to get them into your marketing and sales funnel by helping solve their issues and answer their questions. Does the landing page directly answer the question of the ad, or does it feel more like a bait and switch sales tactic than an honest helpful answer? If you’re getting plenty of clicks and no further action, then it’s a pretty good indication that your landing page just isn’t cutting it.

Make sure your ads:

Pose a question or show that you can provide an answer to a question they’ve been searching for.
Keep the sales jargon to a minimum.
Always point them to a custom landing page with information specific to the ad, rather than your home page.

Be helpful and make them an offer they can’t refuse

If your ad is doing its job by hinting at a solution to a question, then we need to follow up on that promise. The landing page for the ad needs to go into some detail about how to solve that problem. We don’t need to give away the whole secret – remember that the whole point of the campaign is to get people into the marketing funnel, so let’s give them a few quick points and ask them for a simple exchange of their name and email to receive the rest of the advice for free – perhaps via downloadable pdf or video.

The key here is to have an inbound marketing workflow in place so that as they consume your content, there is always a next step to further push them down that funnel. This could be another offer inside your pdf or video or an email that asks if their problems were solved – something that makes your visitor want to engage with you and something that builds trust.

As an added bonus, quality landing pages can also increase your ad’s Google Quality Score, leading to a reduced cost per click. A decrease of 10 cents per click multiplied over a thousand clicks per month is $100 in savings each month. Tell me that’s not a significant reason to create a better landing page…

Make sure your landing pages:

Answer the question of the ad without resorting to a direct product pitch.
Include visuals, videos etc wherever possible.
Save the real meat as a takeaway item that you exchange for some basic information.
Do it the inbound way: Always have another piece of content ready for visitors to look at as they move through the sales funnel.

Test, test, test!

We live in a time where we can get up to date information about how almost anything is performing. Online ads and landing pages are no exception. Most average landing pages are only getting around a 3% conversion rate. The reason for this is that most people aren’t testing different landing pages or ads against each other to get better results.

Think of it this way: if you are losing out on converting 97% of the ad clicks you are getting, doesn’t it make sense to spend some time on your landing pages by trying something truly useful to get yourself 3-5x conversions? The best part is you can run several ads and several landing pages simultaneously to get to the conversion sweet spot faster.

Next time I am going to tackle tips for remarketing landing pages and getting some better conversion rates out of them. In the mean time try this free downloadable offer:

Creating online ad campaigns that generate real leads

All flash and no splash

It’s only half the equation

Be helpful and make them an offer they can’t refuse

Test, test, test!

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