For years, all online advertising was designed to lead potential customers to your website. Lead ads were no exception, often favoring a unique addition to your website for each campaign: a landing page. These landing pages were designed specifically to fit the messaging, targeting and creative of each campaign. And they worked! Search engines were happy, potential customers were converting, and websites were booming. But nothing lasts forever, and the cost of web traffic has slowly climbed higher, diminishing returns in a crowded marketplace when it comes to lead generation.
A 2013 article touted 300% mobile data traffic growth by 2017, driven largely by online video viewing and web browsing. Smartphones have put the internet in everyone’s hand. Cisco projects a 7x increase in data usage by 2021. And while we’re talking about data, not web traffic specifically, a large portion of that data is spent browsing the web. So is all that extra online time a good thing? Not always.
Many marketers have found that the estimated 1 million new web users per day are creating unqualified traffic and extreme keyword competition, especially for lead generation. And while the staggering number of people available to reach online could be considered good thing, it’s actually making ads less effective and harder to target to the right people. Without an unlimited budget, you’ve got to weed through more unqualified users to find the right fit. There are more people and more websites than ever before, making it harder and harder to target lead generation campaigns effectively. The rising cost of online advertising is evident everywhere you look.
Impression-based advertising hasn’t fared quite as poorly, since those advertisers are looking for eyeballs to gain general awareness. There is no second step expected for the viewer; they simply see the ad and move on. But a lead generation campaign featuring click-based ads that are designed for a user to complete an action on a secondary site, such as complete a lead form on a landing page, is in trouble. That click off of the web content they’re viewing is a hard sell, even to qualified prospects, especially on mobile devices where it’s not as easy to go back or open a new tab.
Because of the rising expense of clicks to site, particularly on mobile, gathering leads without landing pages can be a huge cost saver. The lead generation campaign setup is similar to any other: you choose the sites to target users on, and display a lead ad. But this is no ordinary click-to-your-landing-page lead ad. This ad unite can gather all the information you need right within the ad itself. So the user can go back to viewing their content easily and seamlessly. And you gain a qualified lead at a low cost, without building a new landing page or paying the expense of driving traffic to your site.