Ideally, you would disqualify unsuitable prospects before they click on your ad, thus saving you money. You can employ additional techniques after you have excluded sources of low-quality leads.
Using Price as a Disqualifier If you often encounter leads that generate prospects with price objections, consider including pricing details in your ad copy and on your landing pages. This approach prevents those who cannot afford your offerings from entering your funnel.
Ad Copy and Lead Qualification While striving to create the most appealing ad copy to increase click-through rates (CTR), ensure that this copy also attracts quality leads with a higher potential for conversion. We aim to purposefully deter certain users from clicking on our ads if they are likely not to convert.
Using Forms for Further Qualification If it’s impractical to display prices directly, use your online form to pose a qualifying question about the prospect’s budget or investment capacity. This allows you to direct leads towards more profitable follow-up tactics based on their responses. Additionally, consider including questions about the urgency of their need, such as the significance of the problem they are trying to solve or their time frame for resolution.
Landing Pages for Lead Qualification The copy on your landing pages is another vital tool for qualifying users. Use this space to clearly define what your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas look like. For instance, if your services are suitable for businesses of all sizes but you prefer working with companies that have over 250 employees, ensure your copy specifically mentions “Businesses with 250+ Employees” or similar parameters. You could also introduce a header that states, “Best suited for companies who…” followed by bullet points that detail your target customer characteristics. You have the flexibility to be as subtle or as bold as necessary, but ensure your landing page effectively helps to qualify users.
Evaluating Brand Appeal: How effective is your brand at attracting your ideal prospects, and are these high-calibre leads inclined to engage with your offerings? If you’re facing challenges in drawing quality leads or want to enhance your overall brand appeal, begin by examining and refining your brand strategy.
Enhancing Brand Identity: Consider revitalising your brand identity, encompassing updates to your website, advertisem*nts, logos, and colour schemes. It’s crucial that these elements resonate strongly with your target customers to maintain relevance and attract the right audience.
Aligning Messaging with Audience Needs: Revisit your target audience to ensure that your brand’s messaging aligns precisely with their preferences and requirements. Clearly articulate your value proposition, underscoring how your brand uniquely addresses the specific challenges faced by your users. This clarity and relevance in messaging are essential for striking a chord with potential customers and enhancing lead generation.
Optimising for Lead Generation: While maintaining a strong brand appeal, focus equally on optimising your landing pages for lead generation. Implement personalised landing pages that not only reflect the brand’s identity but are also optimised for conversions. Use dynamic website content that adjusts based on the visitor’s preferences and past behaviours, coupled with behaviour-based retargeting ads to sustain engagement and improve conversion rates.
Balancing Brand Appeal with Conversion Strategies: The ultimate goal is to create landing pages that not only draw visitors in through compelling brand appeal but also efficiently convert them into leads. This involves a careful blend of aesthetic elements and functional design, ensuring that each landing page serves both to enhance brand perception and to drive actionable results.
By testing and continuously refining these aspects of your landing pages, you can achieve a harmonious balance between strengthening your brand appeal and boosting your lead generation efforts, thus fostering more meaningful interactions and conversions from your target audience.
Online conversion tracking helps increase lead quantity, while offline conversion tracking helps improve lead quality.
Conversion tracking is a vital tool in Google Ads for measuring success and improving campaign performance to enhance profitability and increase customer sales. Google Ads offers both online and offline conversion tracking. .
Most advertisers use online conversion tracking to measure the number of leads generated and the cost per lead. However, more companies are now extending this approach by incorporating offline conversion tracking, as recommended by Google, to gain deeper insights into lead quality and long-term value.
Remember, not all leads have the same value; some are more likely to turn into paying customers than others. Tracking what happens after the initial lead enquiry is crucial. By tracking leads through every stage of the sales funnel and optimising ad spend based on lead quality and revenue, you ensure your advertising budget is used efficiently, driving higher ROI and attracting customers who bring long-term value to your business.
Online Conversion Tracking
Google Ads records the number of people who fill out a form on your website as an online conversion, using the Google Pixel (Conversion Tracking Script) placed on your site. Success is measured by the number of leads and the cost per lead, which only considers the first step in your sales process (the lead enquiry).
Offline Conversion Tracking
Offline conversion tracking goes beyond just capturing form submissions by tracking what happens after the initial contact.Offline conversion tracking is a powerful feature that enhances your ability to track and optimise Google Ads using the progression of leads through your sales funnel.
By syncing lifecycle changes back to Google Ads, you gain improved optimisation and reporting capabilities through machine learning AI, ensuring that your marketing investments drive tangible results.
With Google Ads offline conversion tracking, you can determine whether a lead becomes a qualified lead, progresses to a deal, and eventually becomes a customer. Without offline conversion tracking, you only know who filled out a form. However, with Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking, you gain insights into which businesses later scheduled a meeting, received a quote, and purchased your service. It also provides the machine with a quality dataset to learn from and optimise towards generating quality leads that convert into customers.
- Optimised Ad Spend: Allocate more budget to ads that attract leads similar to those who have previously purchased your service. Avoid wasting money on ads that only attract form fillers without further engagement. Knowing which leads convert into high-quality customers allows for more strategic budgeting.
- Improve Lead Value Measurement: CRM integration with offline conversion tracking helps Google Ads identify the most valuable leads. Whether you set bids manually or use automatic bidding, this integration ensures your money is spent wisely. Google Ads will prioritise leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers.
- Revenue-Based Customer Scoring: CRM integration can send sales revenue data back to the ad platforms, allowing you to score customers based on the revenue they generate and their purchase frequency. This information helps optimise your advertising to achieve better results.
By focusing on acquiring high-quality leads, you can optimise your advertising budget more effectively to achieve a better return on investment. Your CRM syncs lead lifecycle stage changes to Google Ads as offline conversions, allowing leads to be scored by the ad platform.
Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition):
When an online lead is generated through an advertising campaign on platforms like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, this lead is recorded as a conversion using the platform’s conversion tracking scripts placed on your website. As the lead progresses through your sales process, an offline conversion is created each time a sales stage is completed.
The ad platform uses these conversions to assess the quality of the leads. Leads that progress further through the sales stages, such as becoming qualified or converting into customers, receive higher scores. For instance:
- An online conversion might score 1 point.
- A qualified lead might score an additional point.
- A converted lead (customer) might score another point.
In this example, a lead that becomes a customer scores a total of 3 points, while a lead that doesn’t progress beyond the initial stage only scores 1 point. Google Ads requests that leads be marked as “qualified” and “converted” to align with its lead stages, enabling the system to use a basic lead scoring method, such as:
- Lead (poor)
- Qualified Lead (average)
- Converted Lead (customer)
The Target CPA bidding strategy is then used to optimise for the maximum number of conversions, considering both online and offline data. Depending on the volume and quality of your conversion data, you can also test optimising for specific ad events, such as focusing solely on qualified leads instead of initial online leads.
Being able to see the cost for each of the completed steps in your sales process in both your CRM and within the online ad platforms takes your advertising light years ahead.
Target ROAS: (Return On Ad Spend):
Target ROAS is optimising solely for the highest customer sales revenue. It will optimise to get the most customers, but more importantly, the most high-value customers. So instead of optimising for lead quality using lead stage scoring, you optimise for customer value. This is similar to how e-commerce companies bid when they have products with different prices – making cost-per-sale optimisation insufficient.
Target ROAS bidding focuses on optimising for the highest possible revenue from customer sales, rather than just the number of leads or conversions. This strategy aims to attract not only the most customers but, more importantly, the highest-value customers.
Instead of optimising based on lead quality, as in Target CPA, the system optimises based on customer value. Similar to lead scoring, customer scoring is applied in future auctions, where the system bids more aggressively for ad placements likely to result in high-value customers.
This approach is particularly useful for e-commerce businesses with a wide range of product prices. When the cost per sale isn’t a sufficient metric for success, Target ROAS ensures that the bidding strategy focuses on maximising the overall revenue by prioritising higher-value transactions.
Target ROAS & Target CPA:
In a Google Ads campaign, you can optimise for either maximum leads (Target CPA) or maximum revenue (Target ROAS), but not both simultaneously. For companies with a mix of online and offline sales, this presents a challenging scenario.
Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): If you choose to optimise for maximum leads using the Target CPA strategy, you risk overpaying for lower-priced products or services. This occurs because the system focuses solely on generating as many conversions as possible, without considering the varying values of those conversions. This approach can result in a loss of high-value sales while generating more low-value sales.
Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Alternatively, if you opt for Target ROAS, the system optimises based on the revenue generated from sales. However, without tracking offline conversions, this strategy can be flawed. Since offline sales aren’t recorded in Google Ads, the system lacks critical revenue data from offline sales, particularly the highest-value transactions that occur offline. As a result, the ROAS bid strategy will underperform, reducing spending on leads that significantly contribute to revenue but aren’t visible to Google Ads..
Companies can overcome this limitation and effectively utilise Target ROAS bidding by integrating offline sales data into Google Ads. By sending offline sales data back to Google Ads, the platform can account for both online and offline sales, including high-value offline transactions. This comprehensive approach enables more accurate optimisation to increase revenue and profit. (More profitable low-value sales, and more high-value sales)
Using Target ROAS with offline conversion tracking can also help avoid overspending on low-value products since the return on ad spend has a minimum threshold. The cost of implementing offline conversion tracking is minimal compared to the significant improvements it can bring to your ad campaign’s performance and overall revenue.
