If you want paid search to actually drive *revenue*.
Stop promoting whitepapers and optimizing for CPC and CPL. These are metrics agencies want you to focus on so they can justify their impact.
Every account I've audited that leverages paid search as a brand awareness top of funnel channel closes whitepaper leads at less than 1%.
It's not turning into revenue.
Here's what paid search should look like:
*Intent Keywords*
1. ) Remove all top of funnel and brand awareness keywords. These are expensive and wasting marketing spend.
2. ) Restructure your account to only focus on bottom of the funnel intent driven keywords and send them to an inbound offer. These keywords should include "software, trial, vendor, platform, etc."
3. ) Load up your account with observational audiences don't be afraid to go outside what you think might be relevant.
You now should have a consistent bottom of the funnel paid search machine. These should be customers that are ready to buy - NOW.
Here's how you can expand on it and take it further.
*Intent Audiences*
1. ) Take the observational audiences converting and start creating combined TARGETED audience(s).
2. ) Start testing broad match top of the funnel keywords with this new audience. You should have cut out 80% of the traffic you would typically pay for.
3. ) Send them to your late stage inbound offer (get a demo, free trial, pricing, etc).
You're now showing paid search ads to buyers that are showing intent to buy but still searching top of the funnel keywords.
I literally gave you the formula. Go execute on it.