Not Getting Enough Industrial Sales-Qualified Leads from AdWords?

Industrial marketing requires specialized expertise to generate interest in your product and deliver industrial sales-qualified leads.  Every day your potential customers are researching new companies that can provide solutions to their problems. AdWords is the perfect way to get in front of them. But how do you ensure that you are attracting qualified leads and not wasting your sales teams time with tire kickers? This article will explain the reasons your AdWords campaign or agency may be delivering unqualified leads, as well as the steps you can take to improve your lead quality.

Match Type

If you are attracting unqualified leads, the first place you want to look is your keyword match type. This is where your campaign build begins, and it can set the standard for how your campaign will perform. Many people select broad match in hope that it will attract more of their buyers. This gives Google a great deal of latitude to determine which queries are relevant, often resulting in paying for many unqualified clicks.  For example, if you are bidding on spark plugs and have selected broad match, it is likely that your ad will appear in searchers for all sorts of plug and outlet related searches that are not related to your business.

To resolve this issue, look at your search term report. Go to the Keywords tab of a campaign or ad group and look for the "Details" drop down. You can see exactly what someone searched before clicking your ad. It might be frustrating to see that someone clicked your ad when you obviously aren't an appropriate solution. Just tick the box next to those terms that aren't relevant and add them as negative keywords. Alternatively, it will also reveal keyword phrases that ARE relevant to your business and these are keywords that you will want to add to your campaign, or build new ad groups around.

Ad Scheduling

Think about your potential customer. When are they most likely searching for your product or service? If you're an industrial B2B company, it's probably while they're at work. However, some industrial service providers, could have people searching for them any time of day, especially in emergencies.

AdWords has reports in the Dimensions tab that can show you performance by time of day or day of week. Once you spot a trend, AdWords can schedule your ads. You set the days of the week that your ad shows, and you set the hours of each day. You can even modify bids so that you're paying less during certain hours or more during your best hours. You may notice that sales-qualified leads are acquired at certain hours of the day, targeting specific keywords. They may even cost more than your average CPA.  These are performance elements that you need to consider, ensuring that your ads are scheduled for the times that they are most likely to convert.

Geotargeting

The same logic applies to geotargeting as the timing of ads, but instead of "when" you want to look at "where" the lead came from. Again, the best place to look is your CRM or database because it contains the information about the quality of lead. You can see which leads close at a higher percentage or for a higher dollar amount. Look for trends and then proceed to add bid modifiers or exclude certain geographies to improve your lead quality. You may notice that in certain regions it costs more to acquire industrial sales-qualified leads, but in others it is less.  If you are able to convert more leads for less money in specific regions then you may want to focus your budget on the more lucrative regions until you exhaust the opportunity there.

Ad Copy

First off, keep in mind that most advertisers are not purposely misleading. However, many advertisers are inadvertently misleading because they don't put themselves in the customers' shoes. You need to ensure that your ad copy is addressing what is important to your target audience and aligns with the keywords in the campaign.  Knowing what stage of the buying cycle you are targeting and who your audience is for that cycle is important.  Are you targeting an audience that is ready to make a decision that is interested in pricing? Or are you targeting an audience that is in the awareness stage that is looking for brand and product information? Some technical considerations include: whether the keyword found in the ad copy and the landing page; whether they line up on intent; and whether the ad copy promise a solution and then your landing page delivers.

Landing Pages

If your ad makes a promise, your landing page needs to deliver on that promise. If your ad promised a free whitepaper or instructional video, then it needs to be easily visible on the landing, and easy to acquire. The problem may not be that the lead is unqualified, it may be that they are disappointed in the landing page experience and exiting the page before converting.  Understanding your audience, their expectations and the types of content they respond to is key to successful conversion.

There are lots of ways you could be causing your own lead quality issues, but the good news is that you can fix it. You can use better keyword match types and more negative keywords. You can target better times of day, days of week and geographies. You can write better ad copy, create better landing pages and deliver a better experience to your leads. Or you can get an industrial marketing agency like Search Engine People to do it for you.

Ready To Increase Your Industrial Sales-Qualified Leads

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