A recent study by Marketing Sherpa highlights the difference between taking a ‘qualitative’ vs ‘quantitative’ approach to Search Engine Marketing.
The study clearly displays the fundamental difference(s) between lead generation through PPC (Paid Search Marketing) and that of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Is your business seeing a similar pattern between the quality and quantity of your Adwords generated leads?
Whilst any business with enough suitable budget set aside can drive a similar level of leads through Paid Search advertising (i.e. Adwords) the side effect to a poorly planned campaign is the lower level of quality leads generated.
Why would Paid Search deliver less quality leads than Organic Search?
No matter what approach to SEO your business takes, one thing is for certain, Google is the decision maker when it comes to your business’ ranking against your key terms or phrases. The information Google uses to decide upon your ranking? … your content. Therefore, a successful SEO campaign will deliver your content to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) when matched against a prospect’s search criteria. To summarise, Google delivers your site to your potential prospect when page content is deemed highly relevant to the search request.
This qualitative approach to SEO requires your business to develop highly targeted, relevant content which matches the potential search terms used by your business prospects.
Conversely, through Paid Search advertising, Google leaves you to be the initial judge when deciding upon the relevancy of your Campaign Advertisement and the choosing of your key words/phrases. Whilst Google implements the ‘Quality Score‘ in order to aid the positioning of advertising based on relevancy, a proportion of the element of positioning is left to you via your Maximum CPC (i.e. the amount of money your business is prepared to pay in order to generate a clickthru).
Inexperienced marketeers have a natural tendency to bid upon the most obvious terms. As an example, the owner of a Courier business may decide to bid 80p on the broad phrase “parcel delivery”. Whilst this term does have a certain element of relevancy;
- it doesn’t remove the possibility of consumer search
- there’s no geo-targeting, therefore if the business is based in Devon it has little use to a business based in Yorkshire (don’t forget the importance of locale in business to business relationships
- the business may only offer domestic delivery, therefore those searching for “parcel delivery to India” will see…and click the ad
There are an array of variables required to build a successful Paid Search campaign including;
- Bid management down to the last penny
- Ad relevancy
- Keyword research
- A/B landing page testing
- Landing page relevancy
- Your business’ necessary ROI
- Mastering longtail search phrases
- Broad/Exact/Phrase matching
- Negative keyword implementation
Each of these elements requires a significant level of experience to manage, and therefore a proportion of budget leakage and poorer ROI is highly likely. Whilst overbidding can produce a series of ad clicks and potential leads for your business the variance between the intentions of the Google search term and your business’ offering can lead to a poorer, less quality, generation of leads.
Your sales team are screaming out for quality leads, the more time they spend chasing weak leads, the greater the frustrations will grow and also the likelihood of budget reviews for your online marketing budget.
A successful Paid Search campaign will see little fluctuation between the quality of leads generated compared with SEO. Paid Search allows your presence to be “bought” on certain terms you feel are of relevance to your potential prospects. It can provide instant results compared with the longer-term approach of SEO. However, a correctly managed Adwords campaign requires;
- Time. Time to research and estimate the response rates of your particular bought keyphrases
- Time. Time to analyse the response rates of those keyphrases
- Time. Time to amend the bidding of those individual keyphrases to generate the necessary ROI
- Time. Time to report back the success of your campaigns
- Time. Time to work alongside your sales team to ensure the correct information flow between the two departments
Your sales team relies upon quality inbound leads. Not only are you wasting valuable budget on under-performing keyphrases, you’re wasting the time of your sales team as they pursue those leads.
Impressions, Clicks, Lead conversions are all important elements of the online sales channel, but if they’re not delivering quality leads, they’re simply not delivering in accordance with your business goals.
..I'm the one on the left.
About The Author;
Ian’s career within the Search Marketing industry spans longer than Google’s! Since 1996 Ian Rhodes has worked with a wide range of UK and International businesses developing strategic online marketing campaigns that deliver winning results.
Prior to his consulting career, Ian worked for one of the UK’s first online retail businesses delivering cost-effective online campaigns centred around SEO and Affiliate Marketing. His success led to him being recruited as the European Marketing Director for the world’s largest online travel company. In 2004 he practiced what he preached setting up, from scratch, his own highly successful online retail business turning over £2mill in the first 4 years of trading…purely through a mixture of SEO and Paid Search Advertising.
If you’re looking to build your online revenue or lead generation techniques simply click Contact Ian and see how you can work together to start building your online business today.
Ian, great article once again!
Your point about 'weak leads' is well made! I've seen far too many marketing managers stand up and claim that the people in the sales team aren't doing their job properly, as there are plenty of 'leads' being given to them – when there has been little targetting or qualifiaction of those leads!
Therefore they're pretty semilar to cold calls and shouldn't be put in the 'warm leads' category – the conversion rates will be vastly differerent!
Then when you add to this the costs to aquire those leads via PPC in the first place, suddenly if you're not managing your capmaigns well, you can be wasting an awful lot of money and effort!
Great article once again…..
Great article Ian, and great comment Andy!
Companies searching for a firm to outsource their lead generation to are at risk of choosing a firm that looks great on paper-but doesn't deliver.
We recently had a prospect call inquiring about our B2B lead generation services. He was very apprehensive to invest more of his money with a lead gen firm because the last company he outsourced through promised they'd get his company at the top of google search results- little did he know, they weren't posting his information on relevant blogs, they were spamming his company info on every blog and his company ended up appearing on adult websites. It's imperative that firms deliver what they promise in an ethical and efficient way.
Take a look at our blog on outsourcing http://www.gatewaybizdev.com/blog/2010/02/3-tips-…