If there’s one form of advertising that can drive high-quality leads, it’s pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. How it works is fairly simple. You place ads on search engine results pages, social media, and other platforms—then pay a fee each time the ad is clicked. 

There are a ton of handy tools you can use to manage your marketing campaigns (think Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Facebook Lead Ads), and they all have incredible potential to be high-converting. But they can also be a lot of work. 

Think about it: Every ad and campaign needs to be carefully monitored, including pausing or starting the campaign, making adjustments to improve performance, and tracking data. You’ll also need to worry about purchase tracking, incoming lead forms, messages—all across multiple platforms. 

Fortunately, you can use automation to streamline every aspect of your campaigns. Take a look.

Table of contents

Add new leads to your CRM

Without automation in place, information from lead forms on platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads will sit in the database until you manually download it and then upload it to your CRM.

This can cause significant lags in response times, which can impact your ability to convert those users into customers. Since you’ve paid money to acquire that lead information, this is the last thing you want to do.

Keep the sales funnel moving quickly by automatically adding the leads you acquire through your campaigns directly to your CRM. That way, your sales team can strike while the iron’s still hot.

Send notifications for new leads

When you have multiple campaigns running at any given point in time, tracking new leads can be a daunting task. 

Sure, automatically adding them to your CRM is a great way to keep all your data in sync. But your sales team shouldn’t waste time double-checking those platforms every hour or so. 

Instead, you can set up Zaps to notify your team the moment you generate new leads—in a place they spend most of their time (like email or Slack). Here are a few Zaps to keep everyone in the loop:

Alternatively, you might want to notify specific teams when new campaigns launch, so everyone knows what’s going on and what to expect. Here’s a Zap to help with that: 

Add leads to custom lists or matched audiences

Targeting—or retargeting—leads (and existing customers) with PPC ads is a no-brainer. But your leads come from a variety of different sources. They might have already converted on a lead ad, or expressed interest via a form. Perhaps a lead has already been logged in your CRM, or they’ve subscribed for your marketing newsletter. 

Fortunately, you can use Zapier to automatically add them to campaign custom lists or matched audiences in Google Ads (or LinkedIn Ads). 

These Zaps will collect every new lead from your source app, then push that data straight to a predefined audience in your PPC tool, ripe for retargeting. 

Send immediate emails to new leads

You can streamline every part of your marketing campaigns, but it won’t make much difference if you’re not engaging with your leads. Reaching out to them the moment they show interest in your business can mean the difference between a missed opportunity and a sale. 

Of course, the more leads you collect, the harder it is to scale your output. In fact, it can even be impossible to manually reach out to every new prospect. 

That’s why you can use these Zaps to send leads a welcome email the moment they express interest in you, setting them up for success:

Bulk edit campaigns

Have you ever had the deeply unpleasant experience of needing to shift the budget for fifteen different ad campaigns at once? Some platforms require you to go in and edit each individual campaign, one at a time.

There are some automation tools that allow for bulk editing of your ad campaigns. 

You can, for example, adjust the active status of different campaigns by making changes in third-party programs with the right integrations. This can help you shut down, pause, or restart campaigns without needing to manually change each one. This saves time and can prevent campaigns from being missed. 

Add leads to your marketing funnel

One of the greatest benefits to automation is that it can speed up just about everything you do. This means that your customers can receive a streamlined experience, too: They don’t need to wait for follow-up emails or new content, they can get it right away.

Let’s say, for example, that a user converts on a lead form to sign up for a webinar that you’ve advertised on LinkedIn Ads. You’ll want to reach out several times:

• Send them a welcome email right away with details of the webinar and a message about when they’ll get more information. 

• Send an email the day before the webinar with the link they need to access the webinar.

• Send a reminder email 30 minutes before the webinar.

• Send follow-up resources after the webinar. 

You can do this when you push email addresses from specific campaigns to designated lists on tools like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. With pre-set autoresponder campaigns locked and loaded before you ever even start running those ads, you’re ensuring a smooth, consistent experience. This is true whether you’re offering a 10% discount or access to a lead magnet. 

Keep track of offline conversions

Offline conversions can be tricky to track. And what about in-store purchases? Or customers who attended a live event, or users who made a phone call to book a call? These actions can all be driven by ads. While it’s more difficult to track those metrics, it’s important to do so.

Tracking offline conversions (and sending it to your PPC tools) lets you see which search ads result in sales. With that data, you can better understand which ads are performing well and which ones you can cancel. 

With Zapier, you can shave hours off of this task by automatically uploading conversion information to Google Ads or Facebook Lead Ads from your CRM or your other tools. 

Use automation to create a right-sized system

The beauty of automation is that not only is it effective, but that it’s not one-size-fits-all. You and your team can determine what automated workflows and integrations will best help your team and your customers, and go from there. Test what works for you, and see how automation can impact your PPC campaigns and your sales. 

This article was originally published in May 2021, written by Ana Gotter. It was most recently updated in October 2023 by Elena Alston.