by samWhen carrying out a PPC campaign as part of your online marketing strategy, it’s important to look at the quality of your leads. Are the people visiting your site via a pay-per-click ad actually turning their click into a conversion? Sometimes, you might find that the leads just aren’t quality enough – there’s not a high enough number of people clicking and converting, so you might be paying for poor-quality leads, which is obviously affecting ROI. As with encountering any problem, whether it’s related to online marketing or not, you will have to assess each individual aspect and pay special attention to the recent changes.
Keyword Bids
It’s possible you’ve been bidding on keywords that encourage poor leads, and neglecting keywords because they’re a bit more expensive, but have high-quality lead associations. It’s better to pay more for higher quality than to pay the same amount in a large number of low quality keywords.
New Copy?
If your copy’s changed, and you’ve noticed a drop in lead quality – your ad message might not be targeting the right kind of person. Have a look at your message, and adjust it.
Added Keywords?
Your choice of added keywords might not be encouraging the sale – perhaps you’re using words that aren’t optimised for selling and attracting researching visitors rather than quality leads.
Location-Targeting
If you’ve begun targeting another country – it might be beneficial to see whether that’s affecting lead quality.
Display Traffic
If you’re experiencing high numbers of traffic from display (banners, flash ads etc.), this may explain the drop in lead quality. These leads are of lower quality as, statistically, banner-clickers are generally researching rather than finalising their choice of sale.
Search Partners
Google’s search partners might be providing bad leads – so check to see your traffic from search partners by using AdWord’s segment button.
Quality Scores
Download a keyword report every month, and if your Quality Score in other areas such as impressions, clicks, and costs, seem pretty consistent, then it’s probably not a quality score issue.
Recent News/Trends
Increased traffic can happen as a result of users searching for news rather than sales. So keep an eye out for recent news stories occurring that might be related to your campaign, or use some of your keywords.
Christmas!
As you can expect, e-Commerce sites have a much larger sales rate around Christmas, and this obviously falls during the following months. So, the fall in quality might be related to the urgency of oncoming Christmas!
If you look into these areas, you might be able to find the problem with your lead quality. It’s much easier to assess if you perform quality checks regularly, giving you the ability to relate changes in your campaign to changes in types of lead.
To make sure your PPC campaign is running at optimum efficiency, it’s best to conduct lead-quality checks every week to nip any problems in the bud. It might also be beneficial to categorise your campaigns by theme, location, or device, so you can see where problems lie and if they relate to that particular campaign medium or message. Using a program like Sales Force will let you track a conversion back to the keyword, so you’ll be able to see which keywords are working for conversion, and which aren’t.