I still use a phone book. I’ve torn one in half to raise the
back legs of my bed slightly off of the ground. My doctor recommended it to
treat heartburn, and it works.
But a sustained power outage is the only thing that would
send me away from Google back to the phone book when searching for products and
services. Even then, with the lights out, there’s a decent chance I won’t be
able to read it. For marketers, promoting one’s brand through search engine
visibility reaches consumers at the right time – the exact moment they’re
looking for your services – better than any other medium.
Paid search is the quickest, most versatile way to leverage
search engines to generate leads for building products and services.
Unfortunately, Google makes it easy for precious marketing dollars to evaporate
with little results. Extremely easy.
Luckily, with a little logical analysis and installation of
some free tools, it’s easy to spot and patch leaks in your lead generation
ship, ensuring smooth sailing to the land of new business.
Most building products companies practicing paid search have
a dedicated landing page. After hopefully being enticed by compelling body
text, the visitor completes an automated form. Thus, a lead is born.
The act of a visitor completing a desired action upon
arrival to a webpage is known as a conversion. Are you tracking your
conversions? Most Web analytics programs, including the free Google Analytics
(which easily integrates with Google Adwords) can track what percentage of
users who arrive via paid search convert into leads.
Now do a little math. If each click costs you two dollars,
and it takes forty clicks to generate a lead (2.5% conversion rate) then you
can figure that each lead generated via paid search costs $80. Compare this to
your other marketing channels. Is this significantly more, less, or about the
same as trade shows, event marketing, direct mail or other sources?
What percentage of your leads convert into sales? If 20
percent of leads convert into sales, you’re going to need five leads to get one
sale. At $80 a lead, you’re looking at $400 cost per sale via paid search. For
some companies this is great and for others it’s catastrophe.
Even that might not give you the complete view. Is each
converted lead traced back to its original source? Not all marketing channels
produce leads of equal quality. In our previous example, leads in general
convert into sales 20 percent of the time. Assume though that paid search leads
only convert 10 percent of the time. Now you’re looking at $800 cost per sale.
Again, this may merit high fives or disconsolate weeping depending on your
business, but at least now you know.
Paid search is an effective, versatile and affordable means
of generating building products leads. That said, a thorough understanding of
how it contributes to your sales funnel is the first step in optimizing your
search marketing campaign for greater efficiency.
@NeilandrewjamesImage Source - Get Entreprenurial