7 Strategies to Optimize B2C Lead Generation Paid Search Accounts

Does your business use paid search for its B2C lead generation? Online lead generation using paid search options like Google Adwords can be a tricky business. Getting a website visitor interested enough to click on your ad and then fill out a form on your website requires a highly-strategized paid search campaign.

Below, you will find seven strategies to optimize B2C lead generation accounts—strategies which will help your business capture qualified, quality leads.

If you’re running search advertising to collect leads, these tips will help take you to the next level.

1. Apply RLSAs to Your Campaigns

Is your business using RSLAs? Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) is a powerful feature which uses your website’ remarketing lists to effectively drive leads to your website. Using RLSA bid adjustments allows you to tell Google you are willing to pay some percentage more for the click of a former site visitor.

Here’s how you can get started with RSLAs.

Get Started With This RSLA Strategy

Start your RSLA campaign by going broad. First, build an audience of all site visitors that have not converted. Then, apply this to some of your high-traffic ad groups with a bid adjustment of +15%. Typically, you’ll clearly see the increased conversion rate and lower cost per lead in this audience. If you’re finding success, test this out across your whole account.

If you have low site traffic, try setting the duration of your remarketing window to more than 90 days. And remember, set your ad group’s Flexible Reach setting for Interests and Audiences to “Bid Only” to still allow your ads to serve to both former visitors and new visitors.

Advanced RSLA Strategy

A more advanced strategy using RSLAs involves creating different audiences based on the type of site content those particular audiences viewed. Then apply these audiences, with bid adjustments, to the applicable ad groups or campaigns targeting those segments.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of a B2C business in a real world example.

Let’s say you are a tax preparation business looking to generate leads for individuals who need to prepare and file individual income tax returns. Here’s how you could use an advanced RSLA strategy to reach new customers:

First, you create an audience from anyone visiting your personal tax services pages and target those people in your personal tax services campaigns. Next, you follow the same steps for your business tax services pages visitors. Now, exclude or bid adjust down on those visitors of your business page from your personal page targeting so you aren’t paying for the wrong audience.

Up Your Game With Behavioral Elements

In the past, you could only use audiences built-in AdWords for RLSAs. Now, you are able to use Google Analytics lists for search retargeting as well. This feature allows you to create audiences based on behavioral elements – ones which were not available using only the Google remarketing tools.

Find the right opportunity for remarketing based on the behavior of your site visitors and the type of leads you’re looking for. You might want to create an RLSA audience from a list of visitors that spent a certain amount of time on a particular page, or build an audience from individuals that arrived on your website from a certain referrer.

Additionally, you’re probably going to want to bid adjust higher on an RLSA audience of website visitors who started to fill out a quote form but abandoned your site without submitting that form, or individuals who got to your video page but only watched the first 30 seconds.

2. Test an RLSA-Only Competitor Campaign

Now that you understand the basics of RSLAs, let’s look at an effective B2C lead generation strategy to reach website visitors who left your site to search for your competitors’ businesses. While running ads on competitor terms can ruffle a few feathers and start a nasty string of CPC hikes for everyone involved, there is a solution to regain some of those potential leads without taking it down that road.

The solution — an RLSA-Only Competitor Campaign.

Implementing Your RLSA-Only Competitor Campaign

To start, think of those businesses competing against you for the different segments of your business offerings, and then create groups or campaigns around these segments with keywords that include a variation on your competitors’ business or product names. You are going to attempt to re-capture those leads that came to your site, left, and are looking for info on your competition.

Next, create an audience of all your site visitors and think about your average sales cycle length for the audience window. Depending on your business, you may not want to bid for individuals who visited the site more than 30 days ago. Other businesses may want to consider excluding anyone who has visited in the past week while targeting everyone else. Think about the behavior of these audiences differently because they are performing a search for your competitors’ term, so you already know their intent is to find that business rather than yours.

You don’t necessarily need to create super-granular audiences around website pages they viewed, or the site content that matches the offerings of your competitor in each category. Instead, the fact that the user has been to your site at all and then is searching for one of your competitors should provide an effective filter for your campaign.

Unlike the RLSA bid modifications used in the first strategy, you want to set your flexible reach to “Target and Bid” on these audiences you’ve built. Remember, you are only going to bid on the brand terms if the searcher fits into the audiences you’ve assigned to each ad group.

Utilize Removal-Related Keywords

After implementing and testing your initial RLSA-Only Competitor campaign(s), you can expand out your keywords to include any removal-related terms (e.g., “unsubscribe” or “cancel”) paired with your competitor’s name. This strategy could deliver your next new customer – a lead who knows about your business because they’ve been to your site, but who also is ready to move on from their current product or service provided by one of your competitors.

Volume on this type of lead generation campaign may be low. It will, however, make a nice companion to your brand and generic campaigns. Your RLSA-Only Competitor campaign might also have a low CTR and a lower to middling conversion rate.

But remember, those leads are out there, and they know your  name. Perhaps, they just needed a reminder about your products or services. This lead generation strategy will deliver that reminder.

Source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-strategies-optimize-b2c-lead-generation-paid-search-accounts/142107/