More and more companies are building large online lead generation campaigns to drive inbound leads to their growing sales forces. Delivering a high volume of leads can prove to be just as important to companies as building a very targeted campaign.

Often, those two goals are contradictory to one another. But by paying attention to the three factors below it can be possible to accomplish both goals, while building a well rounded lead generation strategy.

PPC Has Its Limits

Companies with larger budgets will see this most often – they have the money to spend, but aren’t able to spend it.

The conversion rates are good, and the CPA is right in line with what they want, but the volume just isn’t there. Sure, you can force the volume by generalizing your keywords and bidding for the number 1 spot, but then you can say goodbye to your ROI.

Many will fall into this trap; “by spending more money, I can increase the volume of leads coming in, while maintaining the same ROI”. While there may always be an exception to the rule, for the most part, this is not the case.

The wrong agency or marketer may try and increase bids, in an effort to gain more exposure and spend more of their customer’s money;  this may be great for their billings, but not for the ROI of the client.

Although clients will see their ads in higher positions on the page, it’s important to understand what positions are driving the best ROI, and more often than not, it’s not the number 1 spot.

Diversification Is A Key To Success

Google AdWords is often the first stop for advertisers, as everyone’s heard of it, it’s “easy” to sign up, and it’s “easy” to use. But the experienced marketer knows that getting past just Google and diversifying where the media is being purchased, is the only way to maintain a truly successful lead generation campaign.

By all means, I am not saying to ditch SEM altogether, but use it wisely. A quick rule of thumb would be:

1. Use Search to capture the long-tail inexpensive keywords.
2. Introduce display site retargeting to keep the conversation open with potential customers.
3. Use display search retargeting to capture the expensive “head” and competitors terms.
4. Fill in the gaps with extended media – social and email.

Introducing display advertising into the lead generation campaign will not only provide the volume that may be lacking from search, but it will also provide a way to advertise on more expensive terms without have to buy them directly from the search engines.

The More Data The Better

Successful lead generation managers live and die by the data, as do marketers. A/B testing is a must – search ads, display ads and landing pages all need to be tested. Its not uncommon to have many different variation in an A/B test, but keep the variables to a minimum so decisions can be made.

Third party conversion tracking can also be a huge data driver and prove very beneficial.

Using publisher agnostic conversion tracking gives you the opportunity to cookie customers, track conversions, and view conversion funnels  across publishers. While Google AdWords conversion tracking does a great job for your AdWords campaigns, it won’t necessarily give you the information you need from your display campaigns.

Determining how customers are interacting with your ads across all publishers is important for optimization and can provide great data for CPA attribution modeling.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Search & Display