There are more than one billion users on the web browsing one billion websites. Your PPC ads can entice some of these users to click. It is at that moment that they decide to stop whatever they are doing, and embark on a journey down the path that leads to your website, and hopefully conversion.
The conversion being spoken of is whatever you’ve set as the end goal for your campaigns. This goal could be a sale, a booking, a user registration, a subscription and so on. The path you take users on is called your sales funnel.
A sales funnel is the process users must take in order to convert. This process is comprised of several steps. While many users enter a sales funnel, most get lost at one of the steps along the way. Hence the name funnel; it starts out with more on the top and tapers out to fewer on the bottom.
After a user clicks on your ad, they land on your website. The first page they land on is called the landing page. Here the user can be termed as a ‘lead’. The landing page is the most critical part of your sales funnel. If your ad manages to momentarily distract a percentage of the billion-plus users searching the web of more than a billion web pages, your landing page must entice them to stay.
This is done through compelling content or they will bounce and never return. Every sale funnel starts with a landing page, but what comes next varies based on the type of business you are promoting and how the website’s funnel is designed.
If the lead likes your content and decides to stay, it can be termed as a ‘prospect’. The prospect is then spoken to or contacted for more information. Once the prospects show any buyer intent, and there is enough information to pitch a deal/make a sale, the prospect is now a ‘qualified’ lead. Before the qualified prospect makes a sale however, he/she needs to commit to the deal.
