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With over 400 million active users, brands are quickly recognizing the need to have a presence on Instagram.

But, as with any social network, the brands that are getting the most out of Instagram are the ones who are smart about what they post, when they post, how often they post, and whom they’re targeting.

But how do they know what’s “smart”?

That’s where the data comes in. There’s a whole lot of research out there about Instagram — everything from the demographics of its users and how often brands are posting, to how caption length affects engagement and what the most popular emoji is on Instagram. (See #32.)

For example, did you know that a brand would need about 2,325 Instagram followers to get 100 Likes & comments on a post? Or that brands posted an average of 4.9 times per week on Instagram in 2015? Read on to uncover more Instagram stats that’ll help you get ideas and improve your own Instagram posting strategy.

48 Instagram Stats

Click on a category below to jump to the stats for that category:

1. Instagram’s Growth
2. Audience & Demographics
3. Brand Adoption
4. Instagram Post Content
5. Instagram Posting Strategy

Instagram’s Growth

1) The Instagram community has grown from 90 million active users in January 2013 to more than 400 million active users in September 2015. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Statista

2) Instagram’s more than 400 million active users place it well ahead of Twitter (310 million active users) Snapchat (200 million active users), and Pinterest (100 million active users). Tweet this stat! (Source)

3) The proportion of online adults who use Instagram and Pinterest has doubled since Pew Research Center first started tracking social media platform adoption in 2012. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Pew Research Center

4) Instagram’s user base is growing far faster than social network usage in general in the U.S. Instagram will grow 15.1% this year, compared to just 3.1% growth for the social network sector as a whole. Tweet this stat! (Source)

5) Between 2016 and 2020, eMarketer predicts Instagram will add 26.9 million users — almost double the incremental users expected for Twitter, and far more than any other social platform tracked. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: eMarketer

6) In 2016, 9.5% of Facebook’s global mobile ad revenues (20.1% in the U.S.) will come from Instagram. By 2017, Instagram’s share will grow to 14.0% globally (28.0% in the U.S.). Tweet this stat! (Source)

7) Instagram and Snapchat are tied for the second-highest used messaging app (behind Facebook Messenger) for millennials at 47%. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Refuel Agency

8) Other than Instagram’s own account, the most-followed Instagram account as of March 2016 is run by American singer Selena Gomez, followed by celebrities Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Ariana Grande. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Statista

Audience & Demographics

9) 52% of teens use Instagram, and nearly as many (41%) use Snapchat. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Pew Research Center

10) 28% of adult internet users used Instagram in 2015, up from 26% in September 2014. Tweet this stat! (Source)

11) 55% of young adults (ages 18–29) used Instagram in 2015, compared with 37% who did so in 2013. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Pew Research Center

12) In 2015, 59% of Instagram users used the platform daily, including 35% who visited several times a day. This 59% figure reflects a 10-point increase from September 2014, when 49% of Instagram users reported visiting the site on a daily basis. Tweet this stat! (Source)

13) It was predicted that more than one-third of mobile phone users (roughly 89.4 million Americans) will be on Instagram at least once a month in 2016. By 2017, an estimated 51.8% of social network users will use Instagram. Tweet this stat! (Source)

14) More than 75% of Instagram’s user base consists of people living outside of the U.S. Tweet this stat! (Source)

15) In September 2015, the greatest share of traffic to Instagram (23.94%) was from the U.S. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Statista

Brand Adoption

16) In one social media study, of five industries analyzed (beauty, apparel, big box, electronics, and home goods), only 43% engaged with their consumers via Instagram, despite Instagram’s 237% average follower growth rate. Tweet this stat! (Source)

17) Despite the rise of Instagram adoption among young adults, it was the least adopted social channel in most retail categories, with adoption rates ranging from 26% to 32%. Tweet this stat! (Source)

18) The apparel industry’s Instagram adoption rate (84%) was double or triple that of other industries. Tweet this stat! (Source)

19) In one 2015 study, 31% of B2C marketers said Instagram was a “very important” social channel and 27% said it was “not important,” while only 8% of B2B marketers said Instagram was a “very important” channel and 58% said it was “not important.” Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: RivalHQ

Instagram Post Content

20) More than 80 million photos were shared on Instagram each day in September 2015. Tweet this stat! (Source)

21) On Instagram, photos showing faces get 38% more Likes than photos not showing faces. Tweet this stat! (Source)

22) In a study of 8 million Instagram images, images with a single dominant color generate 17% more Likes than images with multiple dominant colors. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Curalate

23) On Instagram, images with a high amount of negative space generate 29% more Likes than those with minimal negative space. Tweet this stat! (Source)

24) On Instagram, images featuring blue as the dominant color generate 24% more Likes than images that are predominantly red. Tweet this stat! (Source)

25) There’s little correlation between caption text length and engagement rate on Instagram. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Simply Measured

26) When Instagram first introduced video in June 2013, more than 5 million were shared in the first 24 hours. Tweet this stat! (Source)

27) Despite more brands posting videos than ever before (13.2% of all posts), photos still see higher average engagement. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Simply Measured

28) In a study of 100 top brands, the brands’ Instagram captions averaged 2.5 hashtags per post. Tweet this stat! (Source)

29) In one study, posts with 11 or more hashtags received nearly 80% interaction, compared to just 22% when using ten and 41% when using two. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: QuickSprout

30) Instagram posts that include both a hashtag and a location tag see higher engagement. Posts with multiple hashtags also perform better than average. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Simply Measured

31) Posts tagged with a location see 79% higher engagement than posts not tagged with a location. Tweet this stat! (Source)

32) The red heart is the most frequently shared emoji on Instagram, which is shared 79% more than the next most popular symbol, a smiling face with heart eyes. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Curalate

33) Four of the top five most popular emojis are positive smiley faces (including the laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying icon). If you look at the top 20 emojis, smileys comprise half. Tweet this stat! (Source)

34) The American flag is the only flag emoji to break the top 100, ranking #59. The next most popular flag comes from Italy, ranked #125, followed by the French flag at #160 and the Japanese flag at #166. Tweet this stat! (Source)

35) Pizza is the most popular Instagrammed food, behind sushi and steak. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Instagram Posting Strategy

36) In a study of 55 brands, the brands posted an average of 1.5 times per day. Tweet this stat! (Source)

37) By late 2014, 73% of brands were posting at least one photo or video per week, a 35% increase from 2012. Tweet this stat! (Source)

38) The best times to post on Instagram are Mondays and Thursdays at any time except between 3:00–4:00 p.m. in your target audience’s time zone. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Elle & Co.

39) The most common posting frequency for brands on Instagram is 11–20 times per month, with almost one-third of companies measured falling into that bucket. Tweet this stat! (Source)

40) 90% of the Interbrand 100 companies now have Instagram accounts. Of all 100 companies, 80% post at least one Instagram photo or video per week. Tweet this stat! (Source)

41) Of the Interbrand 100 companies, the number of brands that post on Instagram more than 50 times per month has doubled from 7 in 2014 to 14 in 2015. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Simply Measured

42) Many posts by top brands take more than 19 hours to hit 50% of their total comments, and another 10% of comments coming after 19 days. Tweet this stat! (Source)

43) Many posts continue to receive low-level engagement for days and weeks after posting. Most brand posts continue to receive Likes and comments 18–24 hours after posting, just at a slower clip than the initial fast pace. Tweet this stat! (Source)

44) People miss, on average, 70% of their Instagram feeds. Tweet this stat! (Source)

45) While Instagram is still by far the best social network for organic engagement, its per-follower interaction rate of 2.3% is barely half what it was in 2014. Tweet this stat! (Source)

Image Credit: Forrester Research

46) In a study of 100 top brands, engagement per post has grown at a rate of 53% year-over-year. Tweet this stat! (Source) 

47) In a study of several thousand brand posts, the average engagement rate is 4.3% and the median is 3.5%. That means that the average post in this sample saw 4.3 activities (a Like or a comment) per 100 followers. Phrased another way, to get 100 Likes and comments on a post, a brand would need approximately 2,325 followers. Tweet this stat! (Source)

48) One brand added 36X its typical number of new followers each day during the 4 days it ran a set of sponsored posts on Instagram, increasing its follower count by 18.15%. Tweet this stat! (Source) 

What other Instagram statistics can you add to the list? Share them with us in the comments. 

Inbound marketing has fundamentally changed the way most companies think about customer acquisition. By building a relationship with prospects before they’re ready to purchase, companies can acquire customers in a far more cost effective (and efficient) way. 

With inbound, companies earn consumer attention through great content, and as a result, it’s easier for them to move leads through the customer lifecycle towards a purchase.

Consistent readers of this blog will be pretty familiar with the value of inbound marketing, but you may be unaware of the full potential of the inbound methodology.

At Beamery, we’ve started thinking about how to apply the inbound framework beyond our marketing efforts. In doing so, we’ve come to realize just how valuable it is to think about hiring in the same way that we think about our marketing efforts.

We’ve seen fire hand exactly how effective this formula is for improving recruiting, which is why we’re sharing our process with you below. 

Recruitment vs. Marketing: How Do the Two Compare?

It’s easy to hire with a short-term mindset. In fact, many people reduce it to this simple transaction: Send out a job advert, screen applicants, and make a decision.

You’re probably starting to think that this process sounds a lot like the way companies used to compete for potential customers. Traditional marketing relied on ‘interrupting’ your flow of activity to grab your attention. But these tactics don’t work too well anymore.

As a result, many marketers have changed tack. They’re reaping the rewards of an inbound strategy — one that focuses on building relationships over making a quick buck. And forward-thinking companies are using this framework to build relationships with candidates well before the application.

At a time when getting the very best people through the door is becoming harder and harder, engaging the candidates that don’t apply might be the best way to win the hiring game.

Here’s how to put inbound recruiting into action …

How to Get Started With Inbound Recruiting

1) Create candidate personas.

Creating buyer personas is crucial to every targeted marketing strategy. You need to have a clear picture of who your ideal customer is if you want to craft an effective plan to reach them.

The same applies to recruiting. You need to know who you are really looking for when you have an open role. Forget the job title and the company name, what does your ideal new hire really look like?

Once you’ve established this, you can start thinking about the ways that you can attract this ideal candidate, as well as the kinds of content that they would find valuable.

So how do you go about this? Fortunately, there’s a simple formula to creating your own candidate personas:

• Review your current process. Are you currently attracting quality applicants? How are you currently trying to connect with relevant candidates? Are you using LinkedIn? Is this working?
• Define your company culture. What helps employees succeed at your company? What skills are valuable? What traits do you hold dear? An easy way to gather this information is to survey employees or other stakeholders in the hiring process.
• Create your persona narrative. Use your new definition of company culture –and the traits that you know help people flourish — to put together a persona of your ideal candidate. This persona should be different for each new role that you’re hiring for, but will share some underlying traits.
• Create relevant content. Brainstorm the type of content that your persona would find valuable based on their unique wants, needs, values, and challenges.
• Share your content. Find the best forums to connect with your persona and share your new content. Depending on who you’re looking for, the right forum could be anything from Twitter to online gardening forums.

Ultimately, this candidate-specific content will bring relevant people to your site and introduce them to your brand — the first step towards getting them to apply.

2) Start prospecting to fill the funnel.  

Modern sales and marketing is a symbiotic relationship. Sales teams are fed by a steady stream of leads from marketing. It’s the foundation of how online businesses generate customers and revenue.

For sales teams to be successful they need that influx of leads. They need marketers to constantly fill the top of the funnel with interested prospects. However, pipeline isn’t just a revenue requirement — it’s also central to effective recruiting.

In modern talent acquisition, candidates care about where they’re applying. It’s your job to attract them to your brand and make them interested in learning more. Companies need to do more to start relationships with candidates that haven’t applied if they want to build a recruiting pipeline that gives hiring the same predictability as sales.

Case Study: Spotify

Spotify’s recent sponsorship of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Tech is a great example of how to use event marketing to attract qualified candidates. 

One of the music service’s key hiring pain points is the ability to attract technical talent, specifically female tech talent. By sponsoring this event, they not only got access to a pool of talented engineers, but also had the chance to make a positive statement in the ongoing debate over women in tech.

But you don’t need the resources of Spotify to get this kind of effect, in fact, you don’t even need to sponsor an event. Instead, try inviting candidates to schedule a Google Hangout with members of your team.

This worked particularly well with one of our customers: They set up a monthly Google Hangout between their head of engineering and all the engineering candidates that they’d encountered that month.

It’s a small time commitment (30 minutes), but the candidates get to ask questions, feel like they’ve been given special treatment, and get insights into what life as an engineer at the company is really like. Needless to say, their application rates (and quality of applicants) have gone through the roof.

3) Create opportunities for micro-conversions. 

Many of the people that come to your website are not ready to make a buying decision. This is why calls-to-action and content such as ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars are such widely adopted marketing tactics.

Instead of asking a prospect to make a full conversion (e.g., signup or demo request), you can entice them to make a ‘micro-conversion’ where they exchange their email address for valuable content.

Recruiting is no different. Many people that come to your careers page aren’t ready to apply (yet). After all, applying for a job is a pretty big investment. Sometimes they just want to find out more about your company or learn about relevant opportunities — so make sure you’re making that information readily available and provide them. 

Whether you present them with related blog content, point them towards other company resources, or provide them with an opportunity to stay up-to-date with future job openings, providing these alternative options helps to keep them engaged with your brand.

Case Study: Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin — a global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technologies company — offers candidates the option to join their ‘Talent Community’ if they’re not ready to apply. As a result, they’re left with a huge pool of talent to tap into over time.

To join the community, potential applicants must specify their areas of interest, as well a preferred time frame for how often they’d like to be contacted about opportunities. This makes it easy for their team to source the right candidates, for the right jobs, at the right time. 

You may not have Lockheed’s resources, but the key thing to learn here is focus. Communities based around a specific skillset or persona, will have a better chance of success than ‘generalized’ ones.

4) Start turning those leads into applicants.

As any great lifecycle marketer will know, getting a prospect’s email address is only the first step. Turning leads into customers can be a lengthy process with numerous different touch points.

Inbound recruiters face the same issue. After they capture contact information for candidates, they still have to sell their company and convince people to apply. In other words, lead nurturing is just as important for recruiters as it is for marketers.

Most companies lean heavily on email marketing for this. Comfortably the most effective tool, it’s 40x more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined for customer acquisition.

Well-timed email is also your best bet when it comes to nurturing your new hiring leads. Keep candidates in the loop about new opportunities that match their skillset, major company news (e.g. funding) and relevant events (e.g. graduate hiring fairs).

It goes without saying that all communication should be targeted. Only sales candidates should receive emails about sales roles. This sounds simple, but it can be the difference between successful nurture and irritating your entire candidate database!

Here’s are a couple of quick examples of the kinds of messages that are effective:

Find something worth sending

If your company has been in the news or released something cool, one of the first things you should do is tell your candidates. Smart people typically want to work at companies that they perceive as successful.

Share your culture

Show candidates what you’re like when you’re not tied to your desk. 56% of people see your culture and brand as the most important thing when they make a job decision.

As you can see, the best nurturing emails provide candidates with something of value, not just a bunch of different job links.

You might not end up hiring everyone you make an effort with, but that’s not the point. Maybe six months down the line a great salesperson will have read another one of your ebooks and changed his mind. Maybe a top engineer has been following your email updates and wants to get involved.

It can take a lot of touch points to influence a decision, so you never know when these relationships will start to pay off. Invest the time in building them now to reap future rewards.

5) Optimize and iterate your recruiting efforts.

It’s pretty rare that new company initiatives take off without a hitch. In fact, there’s usually a little tweaking necessary before things run completely smoothly. This makes a culture of testing and optimisation crucial to success. And the same can be said for your inbound recruiting efforts.

You need to test different content formats to attract candidates. You need to explore different ways to connect with prospective employees. And you need to experiment with different career page designs to encourage visitors to apply.

To get the data you need, you’ll need to lean on your marketing automation software or Google Analytics to track how candidates are finding your content. For example, if your team has been sharing content on LinkedIn, dig into the numbers to see if candidates are clicking through to your site and converting into applicants or new leads. If not, maybe it’s time to try a different approach.

You should also use your analytics platform to determine what content is most effective at turning prospects into applicants. Are there particular landing pages on your careers site that have a higher conversion rate? Are certain job descriptions encouraging more applicants than others?

Make sure you use your learnings here to improve your less effective content –constantly tweaking your approach is the best way to get better results.

However, data only paints part of the story. We recommend asking applicants how they found out about your company, and why they applied. You can add this to your application form as a short question, or ask it in the first interview or screening. This should give you a little more information on what gets people interested in applying.

Ultimately, the key to optimising your inbound recruiting machine is finding a repeatable model. You need to know what kind of content helps you connect with talented people and start producing more of it.  

Immerse yourself in the data and you’ll see what works for you.

Getting Started

Inbound marketing has fundamentally changed the way that we acquire customers, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it has other applications. Inbound recruiting is a developing area, but if you give it enough attention, you should be able to reap the rewards.

Do you use inbound techniques to fuel your recruiting process? If so, share your ideas in the comments below.

Just ten years ago, we founded HubSpot and set out to make the world more inbound.

That meant transforming the way we market and sell to be more human, helpful, and empathetic. Before long, people from all corners of the globe started adopting this new way of doing business. The concept of inbound became a movement all its own.

Inbound really is everywhere. It’s found where people are respected, whether by valuing their time, by solving for their needs first, or by not interrupting them with something they don’t need.

We believe a more inbound world is a better world for everyone.

Tastes and technology change. What’s important is to keep in mind what doesn’t: People matter. They have choices, and they have power. People want to be valued and feel respected. That’s not going to change, nor should it. It’s just as true today as it was 100 years ago.

Without you, there is no HubSpot. We’re extremely grateful to our customers, partners, employees, investors, alumni, friends, and members of the inbound community who have joined us on this remarkable journey. Today, we celebrate what we’ve built together. And as we look toward the future, we can already see that this is only the beginning.

Here’s to the next 10 years,

Brian & Dharmesh

You’ve poured thousands of dollars into your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search campaigns and have managed to generate a substantial number of leads. You’re rocking your conversion rates and your cost per lead is great.

So what’s the problem?

It’s only when you start analyzing your results and dig a little deeper that you realize an overwhelming majority of these leads are in essence “junk leads”. Very few are turning into opportunities, let alone customers. The bottom line is, you’re just not seeing a healthy ROI.

In this post, we provide nine proven strategies that you can use to generate better quality, bottom of the funnel leads from your B2B PPC campaigns. Let’s dive in.

1) Set Up Proper Tracking

In order to accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, you need to make sure that you are able to track other important elements besides conversions. This data will allow you to determine which campaign and site a lead came from, the keyword they searched for, the device they were on, and so on.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use UTM Parameters and ValueTrack Parameters. These tags are data that you append to the end of your landing page URLs, and you’ve probably seen them when you clicked a link or ad. They look something like this

 http://ift.tt/1UAGLGc

As a best practice, you should use the naming convention specified below and use at least these 6 parameters in your URLs:

In Google AdWords, the most efficient way to set up tracking parameters is in the “Campaign URL options (advanced)” section under campaign settings. Here, you can enter your parameters after “{lpurl}?” as shown below. The {lpurl} portion will be automatically replaced with the landing page URL that you have set up for each ad within your campaign.

2) Implement Opportunity Attribution

Once you have your tracking parameters, you need to capture them on your landing pages and store them—along with with other lead details—into the contacts database of your marketing platform. This is usually done by creating hidden fields in your landing page form. You will need one field for each UTM parameter that you have passed to your landing page:

You may first need to create custom fields or properties in your contacts database before you map them to the new hidden fields in your form.

Next, you need to make sure that your contacts or leads data is synced with your CRM and that you are able to view all opportunity data for your leads.

At a minimum, you should be able to view lead status or stage—whether they are a sales qualified lead, marketing qualified lead, opportunity, customer etc.—and the opportunity size or deal amount. If you have lead scoring data associated with each contact, this will be extremely beneficial as well.

Once you have all of the available data, you should create reports to isolate and segment your data. The most important data you want to extract are the number of opportunities, opportunity amount and customers won for each source, campaign, keyword and device, and the name, email, company, lead status/stage, lead score, opportunity amount, source, campaign, keyword and device for each lead.

You will now be able to determine which opportunities are being generated from a particular platform (Google, Bing etc.), campaign, device and keyword. When you combine this with the spend data from your ad platform, you will be able to get your true ROI. 

Next, isolate poor quality leads. If you use lead scoring, look at the leads with the lowest scores. Otherwise look for leads that have provided invalid or junk data in the name, email and company fields. Then check to see what campaigns, devices or keywords these leads have in common.

3) Segment Your Campaigns

Many companies make the mistake of setting up campaigns or ad groups for each product or service they have. They don’t dig deeper into the many different ways in which their target audience is searching for the solutions they offer.

You can address this by carefully planning your campaigns in order to segment your offer into as many groups as possible. You can segment by each main feature, benefit, sub category, target industry or geographic location relevant to your product or service.

For example, let’s say you provide web design and development services. You can segment your campaigns as follows:

• Sub category: Ecommerce Website Design, Custom Website Design, Responsive Web Design, etc.
• Feature: WordPress Web Design, Magento Development, PHP Development, etc.
• Benefit: High End Web Design, Agile Web Development, Enterprise Web Development, etc.
• Target industry: Real Estate Website Design, Restaurant Web Design, Healthcare Website Design, etc.
• Geographic location: San Francisco Web Design, California Web Design, New York Web Design, etc.

Once you identify the segments you want to go after, you can set up each campaign with the necessary assets: 

• Keywords: All keywords related to the associated segment
• Ads: Ad copy customized to that segment
• Landing Pages: Customized landing page that has content only about that segment

Setting up campaigns in this way allows you to focus your efforts, and will result in better quality leads and increased conversion rates.

4) Target Relevant Keywords

Keywords are at the heart of every paid search campaign, and you need to go wide and deep to identify the best ones for your business. 

The first step is identifying the most focused and relevant keywords. Segment your campaigns as described in the previous section and then search for keyword ideas within each segment. There are a lot of excellent keyword research tools that you can use to find the best keywords.

To attract the best quality leads at the bottom of the funnel, you have to target keywords with searcher intent in mind. For example, when someone searches for “WordPress Website Design Services” you know that they are looking for a company that provides WordPress services.

However, when someone just types in “WordPress Website Design”, you can’t be certain about their intent. They could be looking for services or they could just be looking for a how-to design guide. Location-based searches also convey searcher intent adequately. For example, “San Francisco Web Design” indicates that the searcher is looking for a web design company in San Francisco.

Based on the volume of searches, you can also decide to further segment your campaigns to get even more focused. The more tailored your campaigns are—including keywords, ads and landing pages—the better your leads will be. For example, you could create a new campaign that combines two of the segments we just discussed titled “San Francisco WordPress Website Design”. Some of the keywords in this campaign could be:

Another way to get more focused with the keywords you’re targeting is to find long-tail keywords—those that consist of four or more words. Searchers who type in these longer search terms have typically done their research and honed in on exactly what they are looking for, making them quality prospects.

A good tool to find long-tail keywords is Übersuggest, but you can also source them directly from Google. After conducting a search, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the section “Searches related to…”. A search for “Ecommerce Design Services”, for example, shows the following suggestions:

5) Filter Out Irrelevant Keywords

Targeting the kinds of keywords we discussed in the previous section, will go a long way in attracting high quality leads to your ads, but there are also steps you can take to proactively ward off less desirable clicks.

Look over your Search Terms Report to determine whether you are getting any irrelevant clicks to your ads. If you find any such clicks (or impressions), add those keywords to your negative keywords list—this tells Google or Bing not to show your ads for any of these keywords.

Going back to our earlier example of web design services, some negative keywords you would likely want to add are: cheap, free, themes, school, jobs etc. This will make sure you don’t waste your money on clicks from users searching for keywords like “San Francisco Web Design Jobs” or “WordPress Website Design Theme”.

If you followed our guidelines for tracking and opportunity attribution described in sections 1 and 2, you will now have the ability to determine which keywords are leading to poor quality leads and which keywords are producing opportunities.

If you find that certain keywords are predominantly producing poor leads, you can add them to your negative keywords list to stop receiving traffic from these types of searches.

On the other hand, you will now have a list of keywords that have produced opportunities (and customers) for your business.

You can double down on these keywords in three ways:

• Increase their bids so your ads rank at the top of search results.
• Segment these keywords into a new group or campaign so you can have more customized ads and landing pages for them.
• Find other related keywords you may have missed the first time.

6) Use Ad Copy to Pre-Qualify Visitors

Writing ad copy that focuses solely on increasing click-through rates is a mistake. You should write ads that pre-qualify visitors, so that the traffic you do get will be a lot more relevant and targeted to your business. Some of the best ways of doing this, are by adding the following elements to your ad copy.

Business size

If you target businesses of a certain size, reflect that in your ad copy. For example, if you want to target larger businesses, you can add “Enterprise” to your ads and create copy such as “Enterprise Class WordPress Design”.

Industry

If you work with specific verticals, you can make that clear in your ads. For example, your ad could read: “WordPress Design for Healthcare”. This usually works best with segmented campaigns and keywords (see sections 3 and 4).

Pricing

Many companies are uncomfortable adding pricing to their ad copy, but this is a good way to weed out prospects who may not have the budget for your solution. You can do this by adding text such as “Starting at $499/month” or “Packages Starting at $10K”.

Target persona

Including your target persona in your ad copy is another excellent way of pre-qualifying your ad traffic and even personalizing your ads. You can do this with text such as “For Small Business Owners” or “For Discriminating Marketing Execs”.

It is also important to consistently A/B test your ads to optimize their performance. As a general guideline, you should always have two ads running for each ad group in your campaigns. You can then decide which ad is performing better by looking at the number of conversions and opportunities generated from each, in addition to the click-through rates.

7) Develop Tailored Landing Pages

Once a visitor gets to one of your landing pages you have already paid for the click. This means that measures such as adding extra form fields or validating for a business email address in an effort to reduce the no. of poor quality leads, are misguided. Instead, you should focus on maximizing the conversion rates of your landing pages by optimizing the elements below.

Customize landing pages to your ad groups

Tailor your landing pages to the needs, wants, and challenges of your ad groups, with particular focus on the content you have above the fold. While it is ideal to create unique landing pages for each ad group, sometimes this is not feasible—especially if you are working with dozens of different ad groups. Should this be the case, you can use dynamic headlines and subheadings on your pages. This will let you alter the content of your landing pages by passing in headlines and sub headings as parameters of your landing page URL.

Determine which offers drive the most results

Test multiple offers to see which get you the most traction. Make sure you look beyond conversions to see which offers are producing the most opportunities. Some offers to test include: Free Trial, Schedule Demo, Free Evaluation, Request Consultation, Request Proposal, Free Assessment, etc.

Test, test, test!

A/B test your landing pages to determine which variants are driving the most conversions, opportunities, customers and ROI:

Always A/B test a single element at a time to isolate the effect of that element on performance. Also, test only two variants of the page at a time. The most important elements you should run tests on are above the fold, and include: 

• Headline: Test different versions of your main selling point, benefit or offer.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): Try out different CTA copy, colors, sizes and placements.
• Hero Shot or Background: Test different images or videos for your hero shot or background
• Form: Test different lengths and placements for your lead generation form. You might display your form in the hero area, at the­­ bottom of your page or as a popup.

8) Make Adjustments Based on Mobile Performance

If you implemented device tracking as described in sections 1 and 2, you will now be able to determine which devices (computer, tablet or smartphone) are driving opportunities. If you find that mobile leads are not converting into opportunities, you can stop running your campaigns on mobile devices or reduce bids so that computers and tablets receive the bulk of your traffic.

9) Create an Ad Schedule

Even if you are running your ads 24/7, you should set up an ad schedule for your campaigns. You can add days of the week or break your schedule down further by adding hourly segments for each day of the week. Once this is done, you will be able to track performance for each day or hourly segment that you define:

Once you combine your opportunity data and your ad schedule, you will be able to determine which days or hours produce the most opportunities. From there, you can adjust your bids for each segment or stop running your campaign for those segments.

You should typically look at this data over a longer period of time—at least one quarter. If you find that you are not generating any opportunities on weeknights or weekends, and can stop running most of your campaigns during those times and move your budget over to regular business hours.

Conclusion

PPC campaigns are an effective way to attract B2B leads. However, many companies struggle at generating opportunities and driving a positive ROI from their campaigns. These nine strategies will help you create targeted campaigns optimized for high quality lead conversions, and boost your bottom line.