Google’s new Digital Services Tax came into practical effect on November 1st. That means the overall cost of advertising in the digital sphere has increased marginally. And with that increase will come closer scrutiny of spend and return from advertisers.
Our teams have written many times about the best ways to improve optimisation for eCommerce campaigns - utilising Google Ads Smarting Shopping and the importance of multi-channel coherence to name just a couple.
Instead, our focus here is on how to improve optimisation and deliver greater success for your lead generation-based campaigns. Below, you’ll find five best-practice tips about how to achieve just that.
5 Tips for Successful Lead Generation Campaigns
Use the Right Data
Accurate data is the cornerstone of any successful digital marketing campaign. The decisions you make are based on the data available. If the data is incorrect, you will not be able to accurately assess performance or make informed decisions.
Ensure your website tracking is set up correctly and test it periodically. We recommend tracking through Google Analytics and have previously covered the most common Google Analytics mistakes seen by our consultants.
You want accurate data. But you also want to get the most valuable data you can. The more information about the users that convert that you can provide your campaigns, the more likely it is you will be able to improve the quantity and the quality of leads. You can get more information into your campaigns by importing first-party data from your website.
Data such as demographic, visited websites and interactions, purchase history, interests, time spent on site, and revenue can all be used to help improve your campaigns. With this sort of data, you may be able to identify users that are more likely to become high-value customers and specifically target them.
Track Multiple Conversion Touchpoints
Focus on the full journey of a potential customer and make sure you track all the necessary touchpoints that they have to complete before they convert whether that’s a tick box, a download, or a form submission.
Once you have set up tracking for every step of the customer journey, you will be able to import the data back into your campaigns for even more insights. This can be very useful when troubleshooting why some people do not convert.
For example, if you find that a high volume of users drops out at a certain point in the customer journey, you can review whether this can be adjusted to improve results in the future.
Embrace Automation
Automated bidding strategies can get the right message to the right user, at the right moment. In addition, they save you time for other marketing tasks. Automated bidding strategies work even better with first-party data because they have so much more in-depth relevant data to work with.
Choosing the right automated bidding solution for your campaign is vital for good results. Although automation helps a lot, you need to make sure you are picking the right bidding strategy for your campaigns.
In basic lead generation campaigns, strategies such as maximise conversions or even target CPA may be satisfactory. But, with first-party data, more sophisticated value-based strategies are recommended like maximise conversion value or target ROAS (which focus more on getting the best return on investment).
You can read more about automated bidding strategies and whether you should use them (probably) by clicking here >>>
Diversify Your Exposure
In the past, some advertisers may have felt like they could get away with looking at lead generation in isolation. However, today a move towards a more holistic approach is required to improve the volume and quality of lead generation.
Diversify your advertising exposure by using more channels - display and video, for instance. Google recently reemphasized that only 4% of internet users’ time is spent proactively searching. This means for the majority of the time people spend on the internet, they are on websites such as youtube, Gmail and other social networks.
The nature of display and video advertising means you are able to reach these users, even when they are not actively looking for you. Google has seen an increase in purchase intent by up to 67% when companies with a clear strategy in place use a combination of:
- Smart Display
- Discovery
- True View For Action
- Form Extension Ads
Find Your Personal Peak
Unlike eCommerce campaigns where it’s possible to plan around seasonality certainties like Black Friday or Christmas, with lead generation you have to dig a little deeper.
Instead of obvious seasonality, you need to identify personal peaks to ascertain when the best time of the year is for your specific lead generation.
You may be able to find this by looking over past data or noting certain points in the calendar. For example, if you are running an ISA campaign, then it is likely that your personal peak is late March/early April, just before the end of the tax year.
The purpose of finding your personal peak is to make sure your campaigns are ready to perform as well as they possibly can. So, once you have found your personal peak, you need to strategise accordingly. Whatever your strategy may be, make sure you test it with enough time to obtain the data required to make it work.
Final Thoughts
Improving your lead generation campaigns may seem like a daunting task and it may take some time. But with accurate, rich data to funnel through to sophisticated automation bidding strategies with a number of different channels and a plan to capitalise on your personal peaks, you will see an improvement in the quality and quantity of leads.