Online keyword advertising delivers potential deals to your doorstep with little effort and the benefit of scalable, per-click investments. Good marketers convert about 10% of their clicks into leads. But, whether the clickers become leads or not, you pay for each click just the same.

The expense associated with paying for clicks that never become leads is a challenge that has two solutions: enhance your Website to convert at a higher rate or keep out those clickers who are least likely to become leads.

To enhance your conversion rate, employing click tracking is a must. Take advantage of Website analytic tools, especially Google Analytics, to identify which of your keywords is most likely to deliver leads, not just clicks. Google Analytics (third tab from the left in your Google AdWords desktop), allows you to set up conversion goals. You assign a dollar value to each time a user visits a certain page on your site. (You'll need to drop a short line of code onto your pages.) When someone visits a designated page on your site, for instance the "thank you" page served after someone provides his/her contact info, then Google logs that as a conversion. What you end up with is a measurement of each of your online ads' ability to convert clicks into leads. Place conversion tracking on other pages of your site too, like the "contact us" page, "mailing list" sign-up page, etc. Some of your keywords will perform much better than others. Drop the keywords that don't perform well, which will free up a portion of your online ad budget to buy more clicks that do perform.

Another path to converting a higher percentage of your clicks into leads is imposing "negative keywords." Google, Yahoo and other search engines will show your ad when the keyword you bid on only partially matches the users search terms. These may be keywords for which you do not want your ads shown. So for instance, you may want your online ad to appear when someone searches for "Caterpillar backhoe," but not when someone searches for "Caterpillar backhoe parts." If you had set "parts" as a negative keyword you would have avoided the resulting clicks that had a very low likelihood of becoming leasing leads. Again, you free up room in your online ad budget to spend less on low-value keywords and more on high-value keywords. Other negative keywords you might consider (because people commonly search them along with obvious equipment finance keywords) are toy, manual, job, driver, picture, tire and attachment. Use the keyword suggestion tools offered by the search engines you advertise on to identify more keywords you should exclude.

Stop wasting money on low-value clicks and start investing that money in the clicks that are most likely to become equipment leasing leads. Use click tracking tools like Google Analytics to identify the best keywords and set negative keywords to keep out the clicks that you don't want.