For obvious reasons, we love to promote the power and value of pay per click (PPC) advertising.
No matter your industry, the size of your business, or the goals of your advertising strategy, a PPC campaign can give you the reach and reliable lead generation you need to gain momentum.
But investing exclusively in one PPC channel is inefficient.
And so is investing exclusively in PPC as a lead generation strategy.
The solution is cross channel lead generation.
But what exactly is cross channel lead generation? And how should it apply to your PPC advertising lead generation strategy?
The term “cross channel” refers to coordinating efforts across multiple different mediums or platforms, and it can apply both within the world of PPC advertising and outside of it.
Within PPC advertising, you can use cross channel lead generation to display your ads across multiple different platforms and networks, such as Google, Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can manage several different PPC ad campaigns interdependently, taking advantage of a wide range of tools and techniques to get the greatest value from each ad you place.
Outside of PPC, cross channel lead generation includes a variety of both inbound and outbound lead generation strategies. For example, in addition to your cross channel PPC ads, you can practice cold calling, cold emailing, SEO, and drip email marketing.
We’ll be exploring both sides of this equation but will primarily focus on cross channel lead generation within the PPC realm.
Why should you consider cross channel lead generation?
Now let’s dig into the details of how you can practice cross channel lead generation with PPC advertising.
Your first step is to decide on which complementary channels to include. You’ll need to do some research upfront here, studying your target demographics as well as your competitors to figure out which channels might be the most promising.
That said, try not to overthink this. None of these marketing channels require an extensive commitment, and you’ll be reshuffling your budget in the future anyway. If a channel doesn’t work, you can always cut it in the future.
Next, if you haven’t already, define your sales funnel and sales cycle.
Your sales cycle applies to individual leads in your pipeline; it’s a description of the process the average lead follows to eventually become a paying customer (or buy a new product from your business). It might go something like Prospecting > Initial Connection > Presentation > Overcoming Objections > Close.
Your sales funnel is somewhat similar, describing the average path your customers follow on their journey to become customers, but it has a higher-level, more aggregated view. A sales funnel might unfold in phases like Awareness > Research > Consideration/Comparison > Decision.
It’s important to understand both of these so you can better contextualize the behavior of your users and better allocate your budget. With proper planning, you can design and display advertisements for different types of prospects, based on where they are in the sales funnel.
We’ll take a closer look at these strategic decisions in the next section, but for now, focus on defining what the phases of your sales cycle and sales funnel are. These conceptual tools look a bit different for every business, so consider making modifications to any templates you find.
Strongly differentiate between your “high funnel” and “low funnel” promotions – and use your advertising networks accordingly.
A high funnel promotion is designed to appeal to users higher up in your sales funnel; these are people who probably aren’t aware that your brand exists and they may not even know they have a problem that needs to be solved. Messages like “Are you spending too much on HR needs?” and promotions of educational content are excellent here; the goal is to raise awareness, stimulate interest, and begin nurturing your leads.
A low funnel promotion is designed to users lower in your sales funnel; these are people who already know your brand and are getting ready to make a purchase. Special offers, discounts, and other incentives to close the deal are ideal here.
There are, of course, other stages in the middle of your sales funnel, too. But high funnel and low funnel promotions are a great place to start.
Next, distinguish between platforms and advertisements meant to push your audience toward something they haven’t heard of before and those meant to pull your audience towards something they’re already familiar with.
If a customer has never heard of your brand before, they have no reason to search for it. They may also be totally unaware of whatever problem you’re trying to solve. If you want to get their attention in your cross channel marketing campaign, you’ll need to reach out to them in some generic, mass-marketed way through multiple marketing channels, including offline channels like print ads, direct mail, or event sponsorships. This is considered a push promotion.
If a customer is already acutely aware of the problem they need to solve, and they’ve done at least some research to make a purchasing decision, you’ll need to reach out to them when they’re actively searching for your brand or a solution like yours. Using tools like Google Analytics, your marketing teams can track user behavior and refine strategies to improve engagement and conversions. This is considered a pull promotion.
Now let’s combine these ideas.
For customers high in your sales funnel, push promotions are best. You’ll begin introducing your brand, you’ll reach people who may not have heard of you, and you can begin warming up these potential leads. Social media networks are typically good for this, as long as you know who you’re targeting.
For customers low in your sales funnel, pull promotions are best. You’ll capitalize on search intent, placing your advertisements for keywords and phrases that indicate purchasing intent or at least serious research on the subject.
It’s a great strategy for using each platform/channel to its fullest potential – and it’s only going to get better once you have more data available to you.
As you begin experimenting with different channels and approaches, attempt to estimate your “baseline” costs per lead. In other words, how much would you pay for each quality lead generated by a given strategy?
If you’ve been practicing PPC advertising on a single channel for some time, you probably have a reasonable basis for this projection. How much does it cost, approximately, to generate a lead under normal circumstances?
This is going to serve as your comparative foundation when planning for lead generation across other channels. If it costs $5 to generate a typical lead on your primary platform, but it only costs $1 to generate a high funnel lead on a competing platform, you know this secondary channel/strategy is worth pursuing. If it costs $10, you know not to bother.
Your measurements don’t need to be precise at the beginning of your campaign; this cost basis is meant to loosely guide you in your early decision making. Objective analytics and precision come later, once you’ve had a chance to run more experiments and gather more data.
Across all your channels and platforms, you need to commit to measuring every significant variable. Most PPC ad platforms (and most lead generation strategies in general) make these tools free and easy to use – you just have to go through the effort of using them.
These are some of the most important KPIs to measure across your campaigns:
As you gather more data, you’ll get a better sense for the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, the power of your spending, and the behavioral patterns of your most important demographics. And with this information, you can reallocate your budget to maximize your ROI.
Are you ready to start a cross-channel PPC campaign of your own?
Are you interested in boosting the value of your existing PPC ad strategy?
We have seasoned experts who can help you from start to finish. Contact us for a free proposal today!
What is the gold standard key performance indicator (KPI) for most of your marketing and advertising campaigns?
You can measure traffic. You can analyze user behavior. You can track spending. And all of these variables are important.
But if you’re like most marketers, your attention is disproportionately fixated on conversions.
There’s some good reason for this; unlike these other variables, conversions are tied to actual value. When a user is converted, it means your company is either generating revenue or that it’s taken a meaningful step toward generating revenue.
But in the realm of pay per click (PPC) advertising, conversions aren’t everything. In addition to standard conversions, you should be tracking, measuring, and carefully considering “micro conversions.”
So, what exactly are micro conversions for PPC lead generation? And how do you use them effectively?
Let’s start by exploring why conventional conversions aren’t everything.
Imagine a conventional user behavior path. A user sees your ad, they click on it, they visit your landing page, and eventually, they convert. In a mainstream context, conversions usually refer to meaningful, revenue-generating actions like purchasing a product, signing up for a service, or filling out a form For more information.
It’s easy to see why this is meaningful to track. The higher your conversion rate is, the more valuable your landing page is; high conversion rates can support higher advertising spending and further growth free or business, while lower conversion rates can guide you to further optimizations.
But let’s imagine a less immediately understandable, but still impactful user behavior path.
A user sees your ad, they click on it, and they visit your landing page, just like in our earlier example. But they’re not truly convinced they need your product, and even if they were, they’ve never heard of your brand before. Instead of converting, they leave.
A few days later, they face a specific problem that your product is potentially capable of solving. They conduct a search for your business, remembering your brand name, and they read a bit more about your business and your core products, gathering more information as part of their due diligence. They’re still not convinced, but they’re thinking about your product seriously.
A week after that, this user revisits your website directly and eventually buys your product.
Here, we finally have a meaningful conversion, but if we only track this process conventionally, we will attribute this conversion only to a direct traffic visit. In reality, the conversion is at the end of a long chain of events – and this long chain of events started with a “micro conversion.”
What is a micro conversion in the world of PPC advertising?
This definition is somewhat subjective, but a micro conversion is typically considered any meaningful action taken by a user that wouldn’t count as a normal, full conversion – but could still result in desired behavior from that user in the near future.
It’s easiest to understand this through example. Here are some common examples of micro conversions that most brands experience.
Obviously, securing a micro conversion isn’t a guarantee that you’re going to secure a full conversion in the future. Accordingly, we can’t consider micro conversions to be as valuable or as meaningful as traditional conversion rate optimization services.
However, if we better understand and analyze micro conversions in the proper context, we can optimize our campaigns to win more of them and incorporate them into our other calculations more accurately.
For example, let’s say that we discover, through analysis, that a micro conversion results in a purchase approximately 35 percent of the time. If the average value of a conversion is $1,000, we can assume the average value of a micro conversion is $350.
With this information, we can optimize our ads, landing pages, and other materials to maximize micro conversions similarly to how we would maximize traditional conversions. If we can get a sufficiently high percentage of our visitors to micro convert, in addition to fully converting, our campaigns can become much more valuable.
So, how do you measure and analyze micro conversions in the context of your PPC campaign?
Here’s some good news. You can set up and track micro conversion data in your Google Ads campaign the same way you would set up and track regular conversions. You’ll just have to create new metrics for each micro conversion idea you want to track.
If you want the micro conversion to apply to all of your campaigns, treat it as a primary conversion action. If you want the micro conversion to only apply to selected campaigns, create it as a secondary action.
From that point, you can group all your micro conversions together so they’re all tracked in the same column in your reports, or you can look at each individual goal specifically. Using Google Analytics, you can gain deeper insights into how these micro conversions contribute to your key performance indicators (KPIs).
One unfortunate downside of incorporating micro conversions into your campaign is that they could disrupt your ability to track and compare historical data; you won’t be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison if you start defining your conversions in a different way.
What steps can you take to improve your PPC lead generation with micro conversions?
These are some of the most important strategies:
The true value of tracking and analyzing your micro conversions is feeding you information that you can use to make your campaign more valuable over time. If you better understand the user behavior of “micro converted” users, you can make your landing page significantly more valuable.
Depending on your business, your niche, and your goals, that could mean creating separate landing pages for different target audiences, complete with different keyword groups, and with different goals; one could focus almost exclusively on full conversions, while the other focuses on micro conversions and audiences who aren’t ready to fully convert. It could also mean optimizing individual landing pages to offer conversion opportunities to all demographic groups simultaneously, though this is admittedly trickier to pull off.
It’s going to take time for you to understand the full context of each micro conversion you analyze. There’s almost no way to tell exactly how valuable a micro conversion is until you’ve spent a few weeks gathering data on converted users. But once you have this information, you’ll be in a much better position to optimize your landing pages effectively.
With this information, you can optimize your ads, your landing pages, and your other materials for appropriate users. You can create entire campaigns of ads for people in the earliest research phases of their decision-making process and create landing pages that are optimized to maximize micro conversions – and tweak those micro conversions to maximize their likelihood of leading to a full conversion.
Spend a few weeks gathering data on users early in your sales funnel and those willing to engage with your brand on a temporary or limited basis. You can do this while simultaneously pursuing your traditional conversion optimization goals. Once you gather enough information, you can start making more meaningful tweaks to your campaign.
If you swap out a piece of premium content with another, does that increase or decrease your micro conversion rate? What effect does it have on eventual conversions? What happens if you split your landing page into two different versions with two different goals? Does this landing page work better for a different keyword or group?
While not as financially impactful or behaviorally meaningful as traditional conversions, micro conversions are an important consideration for your Google PPC ad campaigns – and they’re definitely worth tracking and optimizing for.
After a few adjustments in the back end of your PPC campaign, you’ll be able to get more transparency into the subtler, yet measurably valuable little interactions taken by your users. And with that data, you can make your campaigns more effective in countless different ways.
Of course, tracking KPIs and optimizing PPC campaigns is a lot of work, especially if you don’t have much direct experience with managing PPC ads in the past. That’s why agencies like PPC.co – exist; we’re here to make things easier for you. Contact us for a free consultation today!
When you visit a website for the first time, you usually see a message like this:
“This website uses cookies on your computer to collect information about…”,
followed by a paragraph of jargony explanatory text and a link to a privacy policy. At the end, you’ll have the option of accepting or rejecting cookies.
To the average user, cookies are an inconsequential annoyance – some dumb little thing they have to click whenever visiting a new website.
But for marketers and advertisers, cookies are a very important source of information. Now, the potential death of third party cookies has caused some ripples in the industry.
So why are third party cookies on the chopping block? And what can you do as a marketer to prepare for this massive sea change?
In case you’re uninitiated, let’s go over the fundamentals. What exactly is a cookie?
Yes, we’ve all heard the jokes about the popular dessert, so don’t bother. In the context of digital interactions, a cookie is a type of data file that stores a tiny amount of information about a user. Collectively, cookies can tell you much about how a user interacts with a website – and sometimes, information about the users themselves.
Third party cookies are only one of three main types of cookie.
We have:
As PPC advertising experts, we usually consider cookies in the context of collecting user information we can then use for marketing purposes – but there are many other applications for cookies. For example, cookies are responsible for allowing you to use financial apps like PayPal on external sites. Cookies can also be used by cybercriminals and opportunists looking to exploit you or steal your identity – though these tend to be rare.
We’ve established that third party cookies are important for gathering information on users, which can then be used to optimize powerful marketing and advertising campaigns. We’ve also alluded to the deprecation, or death, of third party cookies.
Why are we predicting this?
We can already see some signs of a collective shift in how we view online privacy and tracking user activity. Web browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari already block third-party cookies by default; if users like the idea of sharing their data with advertisers, they can enable them (though this isn’t a frequent choice).
Google Chrome, as of the time of this article’s writing, still enables third-party cookies by default, but this is set to change later in 2023. And with this change will come another important feature, or rather, a missing feature: users will not be able to turn on third-party cookies. Once third-party cookies disappear from Google Chrome, they’re never coming back – and it’s likely that all the other little web browsers will follow suit. Instead, Google is introducing Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative, a new framework designed to balance personalized advertising with stronger first-party data protections.
That’s on top of increasing online privacy concerns putting pressure on cookie-related strategies. Consumers are increasingly concerned about processing personal data, regulatory organizations and governments around the world are introducing new data regulations, and brands all over the world are exercising more prudence and caution when collecting or using user data. The Privacy Sandbox is expected to play a major role in shaping the future of digital marketing, offering alternative ways to deliver relevant ads while limiting invasive tracking.
What does this mean for marketers?
Before we can fully answer that question, we need to talk about cookie matching. According to Google, “Cookie Matching is a feature that enables you to match your cookie—for example, an ID for a user that browsed your website—with a corresponding bidder-specific Google User ID, and construct user lists that can help you make more effective bidding choices.”
By some estimates, third party cookies match rates account for roughly 40 to 60 percent of the total user profile – meaning about half your user data depends on third party cookies. If users are actively blocking third party cookies, or if you don’t have any third party cookie data to draw from, you’re going to end up with half the user data you’d have otherwise.
This can have cascading consequences, ultimately costing you more money and reducing the potential effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaign. If you can’t target users accurately, your click and conversion rates will go down. You’ll have a harder time finding the right people to target. And according to some experts, this could end up driving up the average cost of advertising.
On top of that, your data analytics will no longer be reliable. You’ll find it much harder to accurately measure the results of your campaign – and you might end up forming misleading conclusions that make you optimize your campaign in the wrong direction.
Keep in mind that this shift is already unfolding. As of late 2022, 26 percent of people around the world have third party cookies disabled in their browser of choice.
So, what can you do to prepare for this major shift in user data and advertising?
If there’s one important take away from all of this, it’s that the worlds of PPC advertising, consumer data collection, and even online privacy are going to change forever by the end of the year – and the transition has already begun. As is the case with all major marketing and advertising transitions, the companies that are capable of adapting and evolving are the ones that are going to thrive.
You only have two options, since you’re not going to convince Google Chrome to give third party cookies another shot. You can either adapt or you can suffer the consequences of remaining stagnant. It’s hard to say exactly what the short-term or long-term effects of missing third party cookies will be, but we can be confident that we’re in store for the biggest PPC ad disruption we’ve seen in years.
Whatever your goals and motivations are, it’s on you to take a close, analytical look at your PPC advertising strategy, increase your focus on first party tracking, and allow your advertising approach to evolve.
All this is much easier when you have the help of a competent, experienced PPC advertising agency (like ours!). If you’re ready for a free proposal, or if you’d like some more information before getting started – contact us today!
When your goal is a long-term, successful PPC campaign that brings you a steady stream of qualified leads, you need to run A/B continuously.
Also known as split testing in digital marketing, this is the only reliable way to determine which variables contribute to higher conversions and profits.
Once you pinpoint the profitable ad variations, you can implement them across all of your campaigns for the best results.
In general, the idea is to run two or more simultaneous Google Ads campaigns that differ in small ways, both in your ad and your landing pages. You start with a main campaign as your control, and then create additional ads and landing pages with slight differences to see how well they perform against each other.
After a period of time, you’ll know which ads and landing pages perform the best. From there, you can analyze which variables are present on your high-performing ads and pages, apply them to all of your campaigns, and then start testing other elements to get even better results.
For example, you might run five campaigns with the same ad, but users are redirected to five different landing pages, each with a unique heading. Or, your landing pages might have a different format, colors, or typography. You can test any element, no matter how small, and sometimes it’s the small things that count most.
If you’re curious about split testing your PPC ads, this article will help you understand how this process works and how to apply it in your campaigns.
You can run an A/B test for just about any element you can alter in your Google Ads campaign. For example, it’s common for people to test the following:
There are two main elements that power A/B testing: time and structure. Let’s look at each of these in-depth.
Running digital marketing A/B tests is easy, but you need to set it up to extract actionable insights, and that’s where things can get a little challenging. If you follow these tips, you’ll have an easier time.
Your control campaign is the original, unaltered version. Always keep your control running alongside additional campaigns with changes. After your tests, when you find your highest performing campaign, that should become your new control to replace the old. From there, you’ll aim to beat your control once more by testing new elements.
Repeat this process indefinitely, and always remember to maintain your control so you can see what elements are performing better against your existing standard.
The first thing to remember is not to attempt to test too many variables at once. Testing multiple things at once will make it hard to know which change is responsible for an increase or decrease in conversions. Stick to testing a single variable until you’re satisfied with those results and then start testing the next element.
When running a test, you’ll need ample time to generate enough traffic, clicks, and sales to see what’s working between each version being tested. You won’t get results overnight or even in a week. Your A/B tests need to run long enough to create statistical significance in the results.
The suggested time period is however long it takes to reach 10,000 sessions, also known as the “10,000 experiments rule.” This is an alternative version of the concept that it takes 10,000 hours to become proficient in a given skill. The idea behind this is that deliberate experimentation is more valuable than deliberate practice. It’s true – if you don’t experiment deliberately, you won’t get the data you need to see what’s working in your PPC campaigns. However, 10,000 experiments (or 10,000 interactions) can seem like a bit much for smaller businesses.
Reaching this goal could take months for many organizations that don’t have a massive PPC budget. However, if this applies to you, set a goal to reach 1,000 sessions or put a cap on your tests at the 60-day mark. Either way, just wait until you have a decent amount of data to work with even if you don’t reach that 10,000 mark.
Running split tests without specified goals isn’t going to help you. It’s crucial to know exactly what you want to get out of your tests. For example, everyone wants more leads, but what does that look like beyond the surface? Would you feel like you achieved your goal if you got 500 new leads that never make a purchase? Or do you only consider it a success if you generate targeted leads that at least have the potential to buy in the future?
Getting targeted leads is just one example of a specific goal. You may want leads who will sign up for your email list and then watch a video or follow you on Instagram. For long-term success, you’ll want to align your A/B tests with your goals, otherwise you could spend years testing the wrong elements – the ones that don’t directly influence the actions you’re trying to elicit.
To get actionable insight from your tests, you’ll want to identify the metrics that denote success or failure other than just the number of leads you collect. These might include:
To make improvements, you have to know how your experiments are performing.
Figuring out if your tests are successful requires some serious data analytics. You’ll need to analyze a handful of key metrics to see how people are reacting to the changes you’ve made, and you can accomplish this with a visual form of behavioral analytics. According to Investopedia, behavioral analytics can support a number of different hypotheses at once and makes it easier to evaluate your experiments.
When you have a visual data report of your tests, it’s easier to understand which elements are supporting your goals and if a certain version of your ad copy is good enough to apply to all of your PPC campaigns and/or become your new control. Additionally, tracking key performance indicators will help determine whether your adjustments are driving meaningful engagement and conversions.
Also called session replays, this is where a user’s actions are recorded as they interact with your website. Mouse movements, clicks and taps, and scrolling are the most common actions recorded.
Implementing session recordings into your split tests can help you improve your PPC ad campaigns immensely. Not only will you have data, but you’ll have a real-time account of how users interacted with your page, which will give you some specifics you can’t get any other way. For instance, a user might start to fill out a contact form and then stop at a certain question. Or, they might abandon the checkout process at a certain stage and their mouse clicks might tell you why.
Session replays are an excellent way to improve your conversion rate, and when paired with A/B testing, they’re even more powerful.
Heatmaps can provide you with valuable insight into which parts of your web pages are performing well (or not). These maps will show you where your visitors are focusing most of their attention, where they’re clicking, if and how long they’re scrolling, and what might be distracting them from taking the desired action.
For example, a scrolling heatmap can tell you if users even saw your CTA. Perhaps many don’t scroll down far enough, and you’ll need to move the CTA higher up on the page. If you don’t use a heatmap, you won’t know that many of your visitors never even saw your CTA. All you’ll know is that you didn’t get clicks. This could lead in circles, causing you to test different CTAs, when your original one might be just fine when made more visible.
Sometimes, it’s your traffic source that supports a more successful Google Ads PPC campaign. Make sure you’re tracking where your visitors come from so you can determine which traffic sources lead to higher conversion rates. You might find some sources to be complete duds, and that means you’re either targeting the wrong audience within that PPC platform or the platform itself isn’t where your market spends time.
Many businesses run PPC ads on every platform they can find, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Ads. However, some markets rarely (or never) spend time on certain platforms. For example, if you’re trying to reach a highly technical and scientific-minded market, you probably won’t reach many people on Instagram. Sure, there are plenty of science-related accounts, but they’re not usually scholarly. It just doesn’t attract that type of market. Instagram is more for entertainment and visual appeal than sharing scientific research, discoveries, and theories.
If you discover that some of your traffic sources aren’t producing conversions, reconsider if you’re on the right platform. If you think you are, then start adjusting your target audience. If that doesn’t generate more leads, consider abandoning the platform because it’s not worth wasting ad spend where you aren’t getting results.
A/B testing is a crucial component in your Google Ads PPC lead generating campaign. The key is to define your paid search goals before setting up your experiments, and only test one change at a time.
Be willing to wait for statistically significant results so that you can know for sure that you’re making the right changes. Keep your control clean and consistent but replace it when you find a new ad or landing page that consistently achieves a higher conversion rate.
Last, don’t stop split testing when you get your first taste of success because there’s always room for improvement and you can always do better. You’ll need to adjust your goals and hypotheses over time, but that’s just part of the process. Split testing should be a continuous endeavor and if you get stuck, you can always reach out to a professional PPC marketing company.
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