Understanding why your campaigns may be underperforming can stem from many different avenues. Today, we are going to cover how lead quality is affected by both keyword strategy and on-site content.

For many marketing professionals who deal solely within e-commerce, tracking sales and attribution from your paid search campaigns tend to be more concise as the sale is attributed by the last click to purchase. However, not all business function and acquire conversions based on last-click sales during an online checkout.

For many agencies, having to generate leads for a particular business with a longer sales cycle requires a higher level of qualifications for leads. Therefore, it becomes more important to drive relevant traffic that will not only convert but be qualified for your partner's business.

Generating leads outside of e-commerce related businesses will likely require a strategy in place to acquire higher quality leads and suppress unqualified users from entering your funnel.

How to measure lead quality in PPC

First, it is important to understand what are the current drivers of poor lead quality. Some of them can include:

1. More volume may be the cause of poor lead quality
2. Poor user experience and difficult user paths on-site may lead to breakage and lack of conversions
3. Identify and measure with tools outside of Adwords that will allow you to conduct research on the type of leads being captured

Second, we must start to consider what could happen when we make changes to improve lead quality within PPC. This may include:

1. A decline in overall lead volume (due to suppressing leads that are low quality)
2. Potential for an increase in CPCs and CPAs. However, the cost per qualified lead may decrease
3. CTR may increase or decrease depending on the relevancy of the keywords and ad copy.

Keyword Targeting For Lead Quality

Every search campaign pivots off of a list of keywords that you bid on and allow your ads to be eligible to receive an impression in Google's search results.

In order to improve lead quality we will want to understand the mechanics of search behavior and identifying what type of keywords we are bidding on.

Long Tail and Short Tail keywords

What are Long Tail and Short Tail keywords?

Long tail keywords: Are defined as keywords that are longer than 1-2 keywords and tend to be closer to a full query. The search volume may be lower however, this traffic tends to have higher-intent and engagement.

Short tail keywords: Tend to be 1 or 2 keywords that tend to be defined more broadly and could be contained within multiple queries. Short tail keywords have much higher search volume.

Examples of short tail keywords would be "Used Cars" and long tail would be "Used Nissan Cars In Charlotte"

Begin to take a long at your existing keywords and evaluate the total impressions over a course of a weeks timeline. Notice that keywords that are more broad and short tail will tend to have more impressions than long tail keywords.

Once you get an idea of the difference between the two. Pick a particular category of keywords that are important to you business or client's objective and begin to conduct keyword research .

The list of keywords you research within Google Ad's keyword planner will give you an idea if there is any relevant search volume. Many long tail keyword ideas tend to not have any relevant search volume.

Does The Website's Landing Page Have Relevant Content?

This is usually an easily overlooked component to increasing lead quality within your paid media campaigns.

What is the point of sending traffic to a website that does not provide the information a user is looking for?

You can avoid this pain point by doing the following:

1. Identify the intent of the page.
2. Are their CTA (Call to Actions) that need to be in place for the user to submit their lead information
3. Make sure the headings and paragraphs contain content that is consistent with the keyword and search intent

Once you have identified what is missing from the content you can begin to implement the relevant changes.

Lastly, do not forget to direct the traffic to the URLs that are most likely to provide the user with the content they are looking for.

If this paid search strategy is of interest to you, I encourage you to also read about measuring the right conversions.