If you feel like you are spinning your wheels with the same poor quality leads from your lead generation service, you're not alone. In the past few years we've heard from more and more of our clients that the quality leads they used to get from their lead gen services are becoming worse and worse. More people are shifting their budgets to pay per click search where the quality remains strong.



Many lead gen firms use pay per click (PPC) search to attract their leads. Once they have a lead, they will ship it out to a variety of vendors, charging each the same fee. If you are seeing your leads get more saturated, it might be time for you to go right to the source instead of letting the middle men do that for you.

Unfortunately, PPC search isn't quite as easy as it used to be. These days you have a lot of competition and it's getting increasingly sophisticated. Sure, you can set up a simple web site with contact info and point some ads at it. You'll probably get a trickle of leads. But if you want to really increase your business and lower your cost per lead or cost per acquisition, you will most likely need to dedicate some resources to it.

When you launch a paid search campaign, you need to realize that everything in your pipeline, from what keywords to appear on, what ads to run, where to send them, how to get them to take action, etc. -- all of that can be managed and optimized. Let's examine two of these areas.

The first place to begin is with your pay per click ad copy. It's fairly easy to place an ad and launch it. However, the pay per click engines is putting more emphasis than ever on "Quality" algorithms. If you are unable to make the daily effort to test your ad copy, you are going to fall behind those that do. A good PPC management company will run daily split tests for their clients. This is who you are up against more and more these days -- experts who double and triple the click through rates of their clients' ads.

Why is this important? Because it doubles or triples your traffic -- and in turn doubles or triples your leads.

But as I mentioned, everything in your pipeline can be optimized. Let's take a look at where you are sending these people who click on ads. Do you have a contact form or just an email address? Is your phone number visible or in your footer? Are you offering an incentive for people to take action? There's a lot to tweak and test.

If you can optimize your landing pages over time, you can now take that traffic and double or triple your lead conversions. We've seen it time and time again. So, put in the effort, it is worth the time.

Making the jump to PPC search may not be in your company's core competency. If not, then outsource to a PPC management company. Their experts can mine massive keyword lists, pull keywords from your competitors, conduct the necessary and vital daily split tests, and give you insight into better landing pages.

So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.