I've had several discussions of late where clients are only using PPC to try to generate leads. While PPC clearly places ads during a search, you end up being there with ever other advertiser competing for rank. Effectively, you are in the "Red Ocean," surrounded by all your competitors.
Your goal should be to get ahead of the competition and engage potential clients before they realize they have a need. Or you reach them early enough in their self-education to want to engage your company. Omni-channel marketing leverages several communication channels with the same message and look.
We recently deployed a program for a banking software organization, leveraging mail, PPC, content and content promotion. We dropped a pixel on the site to identify visitors to the website and our call group to follow up all of it.
In just 6 weeks, they have 6 appointments and 84 leads identified by the pixel!
Lead generation is a lost art...depending on search terms is not lead generation