How contact method influences lead quality

I recently wrote about using broad match keywords in lead generation campaigns. I mentioned that leads who contact you directly from an ad - usually via a click-to-call button - tend to be lower quality. This is often because broad (or phrase) match keywords show your ads to people searching for other businesses by name.

But, this isn’t always the case, so it’s worth checking periodically. I thought you might find some data on the subject interesting.

I pulled some numbers from a Google Ads account I manage for an immigration law firm. Here’s what the data shows for the last few months:

• 10% of leads from the click-to-call button on the ad booked an appointment.
• 22% of leads from a call button on the landing page booked an appointment.

Calls that happen after a user has visited the landing page convert to booked appointments at double the rate of direct calls from the ad. This supports the idea that click-to-call leads tend to be lower quality.

Looking at the search terms report, I can see why: Google shows ads on competitor name searches. We add competitor names as negative keywords, but it’s a never-ending job. (It’d be great if there were a setting like, “Don’t show my ads on searches for other businesses.”)

That said, we still use call assets because they're our they're our cheapest source of booked appointments. Let’s look at the data.

Here’s what the key metrics mean:

• Leads – Total number of incoming calls.
• Handled – Calls answered by the call center. Right now, this number is lower than we’d like because we scaled up advertising faster than we scaled up the call center.
• Contacted – Leads where the call center operator successfully spoke with the caller. Some leads hang up before we answer and don’t pick up when we call back. Again, this is lower than it should be due to capacity issues.
• Booked Appointment - We’ve found that all leads who book an appointment convert into paying clients at roughly the same rate, regardless of how they first contacted us. So, this serves as a solid proxy for relative lead value.

Cost Per Booked Appointment.

Let’s break down the cost per booked appointment:

• Our landing page conversion rate for this period was 12.6%. We got 1 phone call for every 8 clicks.
• A call from a click-to-call button costs us 1 click.

So, while click-to-call leads book at a lower rate than landing page calls, the cost per booked appointment is much lower. (About a quarter of the cost if my math is right.)

Hope you found this interesting. More on this here: Contact method as a lead quality signal

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