I ended up going the Vancouver Business Network meetup last night. The meetup speaker was Earl Flormata, from Loud Ninja Marketing, who was discussing funnels. It was absolutely amazing the creative ways that he has used various funnel strategies to grow his business.
What do funnels have to do with PPC?
Well the way we manage online advertising at Vancouver PPC is through optimizing for a target cost per acquisitions (AKA CPA). A target CPA is the amount you as a business owner are willing to pay for a lead or sale. Once you have your target CPA, we can then create an online advertising campaign that is designed to hit that target CPA. Now the cool thing about funnels is that they allow you to up-sell, cross sell and down-sell to people who have already purchased from you.
Math example:
Lets say your current target CPA is $5. Then we implement some funnel tactics and get people to purchase an additional $2.5 product. This means that each acquisition is now worth $7.50 and thus your target CPA raises to $7.50. Which means you can bid your online advertising more aggressively and get you way more sales.
The bottom line is that funnels can increase the average life time value of a customer, which in turn multiplies your online advertising results.