As I sit here pondering why I live in the sub-zero temperatures of Minneapolis, I’m comforted by my January stats from my PPC lead generation program. Hey, when the temperature is this cold you’ll take comfort from just about anything.

I was frustrated with my PPC lead quality towards the end of last year. I was seeing more responses from our sales team saying the leads were dead-ends rather than successes. At the same time, other lead sources were doing much better. To backtrack, one campaign I run through PPC, using Google AdWords, is for lead generation. My ads each have a specific landing page intended to either drive the prospect farther into the site or encourage them to fill out a form and have a company representative call them. Small businesses can’t afford to dump endless money into paid search without the payoff of orders or new clients. It was time to make it better or stop pay-per-click advertising.

I started my revamp last November. I raised my click-through rates by breaking down my keyword list into even smaller groupings with more focused ads and redesigning my landing pages. The work was worth it – my click-throughs were up considerably, my page views per visit went up, and my landing page bounce rate went down. Everything was perfect, right? Wrong, my lead quality was not where I wanted it.

Then, after some deliberation, I switched off the Google content network. I had tried this previously about a year ago, but my leads went way down. I thought it was worth a try again since I had just re-energized my campaign and was seeing great click-throughs on the search network.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll ever switch it back on. This January, I’m seeing an influx of quality leads from my AdWords PPC campaign. Our sales people are making good contacts, quoting good quantities of product, and closing deals from these leads. That’s what lead gen is supposed to do!

Has anyone had good experiences with the content network? If I do decide to try it again, I’ll probably do it under a separate campaign where I’ll try targeting only certain sites while keeping my bids very low.

PPC programs can go stale very quickly. Small businesses can’t afford that so if you haven’t reviewed your results lately, the beginning of 2007 is the time. Review the checklist below and see how you’re doing:

• Run a 3-month report of your campaigns. For starters, review each keyword for click-through-rate, cost-per-click, and rank. Kick-out under-performing keywords – they’re dragging down your campaign and causing you to spend more.
• Review your ads in each of your ad groups. If you’re not running more than one ad per group, you need to start. I think two is the optimal number because you can test a list of keywords with two messeges.
• Consider your ad groups. Are your keywords broken down into the smallest groupings possible? The smaller the list and the more focused the ads, the better the results.
• Is your ad text current? Read some industry trade rags. Are your ads hitting on key issues being discussed and written about?
• Make sure your landing pages are relevant. Remember, landing pages are now part of your quality score. Keyword – to ad – to landing page should give the user an A to Z search experience. Walk the prospect to a conversion!
• Review your goals. Are your goals still in line with your other marketing objectives?

Part 2 of this two-part series will discuss what happens after the click. I’ll review some of the changes I made to my landing pages as well as how I prep the sales people for follow-up calls on leads generated. I’ll also provide some good resources from our marketing blog community.