How to Accelerate Your Leadflow with Paid Ads & Search for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Service Contractors

All right, hello and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us on today’s session. We’re going to be talking all about how to accelerate your lead flow with Google ads. And you know, when we think about marketing our plumbing, HVAC, electrical, home service companies, there’s so many things that we consider so many different variables that, you know, we’re just going to go deep on paid search as it as a narrow strategy that we can really double down on. So here’s what we’re going to be covering on today’s session. We’re talking about why paid ads is really the key to unlimited scalability in terms of lead flow for your plumbing, HVAC, home service company. You know why we definitely want to have it as part of our strategy, as opposed to just doing SEO as opposed to just doing local service ads. For instance, we’ll talk about the paid, paid strategies that are working best in today’s market, right? Like, we’ve all got marketing budgets, we’re all got growth aspirations, but we want to make sure that we’re spending the dollar in the area that’s going to get the best return on investment, right? And so we’ll talk about the paid marketing strategies that are working best. We’ll look at some live examples of plumbing, HVAC, home service companies getting a five to 15 time return on investment from paid search. And then we’ll talk about how to set up your Google ads campaign strategy so that you can reduce your cost per lead and you can maximize your return on investment. And then we’ll talk a little bit about the KPIs, tracking, landing pages, campaign structure, all the things you want to be thinking about if you are spending money, or if you’re going to be spending money on paid advertising strategies. So real quick, in case you don’t know me or kind of who I am. My name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of plumbing and HVAC SEO. I’m the author of the book How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right. For plumbing, HVAC and home service contractors. We’re actively involved in PHCC, QSC service roundtable, CEO warrior, at some of the top groups. But I’d say more important than any of that stuff is that at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several 100 of the top plumbing, HVAC, electrical contractors across the country, and we’ve been able to see many of them go from virtual obscurity online to the point where they’re now the dominant players in their market. Many of them seeing millions of dollars in revenue increase in our time working together. And so what I’m going to be sharing with you today isn’t based on theory. It’s not based on a blog I read somewhere, it’s really based on our real world experience working with companies just like yours. And so, you know, that’s who I am. That’s what I’m about. Our company, plumbing and HVAC, SEO. This is what we do. We got a team of about 50 full time employees across the country and international, and this is what we do all day, every day, right? Set up the websites, create the content, do the SEO strategy, run the paid search campaigns. And so you know, for those of you that are on with us as clients today, we appreciate your business and appreciate you plugging in to kind of get more in tune with what you can be doing with paid search and how we can help you even further there, if you’re not a client and you’re interested in chatting with us about how we can help. We would love the opportunity to connect with you. You could schedule a time for free by going to Plum rescue.net/schedule,

there you go. Christian, our director of business development, just drop that in. So if you’d like some help with your paid search strategy or just how to generate better results online, we’d love the opportunity to connect with you. So looking at the accelerated growth model, right? Looking at the different things we can do to maximize our lead flow. The Hugh says, Happy client, amazing. Yes, we appreciate your business, and glad to have you on here, and glad to hear you’re happy. Um, three things, right? Things, 333, things we need to do to accelerate our lead flow. Number one, obviously, is we’ve got to drive leads, right? We have to have strategies to get the phone ringing, to get new inquiries, to get new leads into the business. Number two is, we have to maximize conversion, right? If we’re driving leads, but we’re not converting the traffic into calls and those calls into book jobs and those book jobs into converted revenue generating opportunities. You know, the marketing isn’t going to work. We’re not going to work. We’re not going to get the growth that we’re after. And then, number three, we need to optimize for results. This is a racking in place to figure out, like, what’s working best. Where do we spend our dollars? How do we accelerate our growth? And so you know, when it comes to driving leads, there’s three key channels we like to plug into, versus organic, right? Making sure we’re coming up in the non paid listings and the non paid directories. Second is paid search. That’s Google ads. It’s Facebook ads, it’s all of the paid strategies that we’re going to be talking about today. And then third is database marketing, which is looking at your existing client base, looking at your past prospects that didn’t convert, and figuring out how to communicate with them, via email, via SMS, via the phone, so that we can drive as much new opportunity as possible, right? So that’s how we drive leads. From there, we’ve got to maximize conversion, and really, the three variables that

matter most for conversion are your website, making sure your websites convert.

Built to convert. It’s got all the right conversion elements in place. We’ve got online booking. We’ve got chat available, right? We want to make sure the website is converting at at least 25 to 30% from visitor to lead. The other thing that really has an impact on your conversions is your reputation, right? Is the amount of reviews that you have and what your customers are saying about you on those public sites like Google, like Angie, like thumbtack, like the other online directories, where somebody might look if we’ve got an amazing traffic strategy and our website’s converting, and it’s fantastic, but we’ve got a bad reputation with a lot of negative reviews, that’s going to negatively impact our conversion rate, or if we don’t have enough reviews. And then number three is automation, right? We find that in today’s market, if we’re not leveraging automation to follow up with our leads via phone, SMS and email extremely quickly, we’re missing out on a massive opportunity. If we’re not putting automation sequences to follow up on unconverted opportunities. That’s a big opportunity. So we’re going to drive leads. We want to maximize conversion, and then ultimately we’ve got to optimize for results. Right? How much are we spending to hit the growth targets that we are looking for? What’s our average cost per lead, and putting a metric on that, and then ultimately figuring out what’s generating the best results and doubling down on those areas. And so, you know, as I, as I think about online marketing, this is the accelerated growth model that we try and focus on, day in and day out, right, driving leads, maximizing conversion, optimizing results. And today we’re just going to, we’re going to zoom in on paid search specifically, right? And you know, if you want to look at other trainings I’ve done on the other aspects of the growth model, let us know we can look those up, or we’ll probably be scheduling more of these sessions in the months ahead, that we’re going to be going deeper, but today is going to be all around paid search, right? And

like, the reason I think paid search is such an important component of your overall marketing strategy is number one. It gives you the ability to show up quickly, right when we do SEO. And of course, we’re an SEO agency, so we place a lot of emphasis on getting the website ranked by creating pages and creating content and then building links and citations and authority to get those pages for rank. There’s a gestation period for that, right? If we create a page today, and when you get an index tomorrow, and there’s other competition that already has links and citations, it could be months. It could be even longer than that, before that page starts to rank. One of the beautiful things about paid search is we can set up a Google ads campaign today. We can make sure that the budget is set correctly. We can pick the right keywords, we can set our budget and our our bid strategy, and we can start to show up almost immediately. And so I like the I like the idea of having long term SEO strategy, but knowing that we can turn things on or off very, very quickly with paid search, we can also show up as often as possible where our clients are looking right when someone gets to Google, and that’s the number one place somebody searches when they need plumbing or HVAC or electrical related services.

We want to come up, obviously, organically, we want to come up on the map. We’d like to have our directory listing. Let’s say if we’re on Yelp, or we’re on Angie’s, we want to make sure those listings come up, but LSA comes up at the top, and Google ads come up directly underneath that. And so if we’re not doing LSA, we’re not investing in paid ads, well, we’re not showing up in some of the most prominent spots that our customers are looking and so while I’m not saying just do paid search, I do think we want to have a place in our strategy where we’re focused on coming up in as many of those search results as possible. It also gives us the ability to show up for more geo modified terms. So some people will go in and they’ll type in, you know, Chicago AC repair shock, chicago plumber. Others will just type plumber or plumber near me. And with Google ads, we can make sure that we’re just laser targeting the people that typed plumber near me in our service area, right? And so I love the idea that we can kind of show up for some of the keywords we might not be able to target on a national scale, based on the geography from which that person is searching and the I think the biggest reason paid searching part of your overall online marketing strategy is it gives us unlimited scalability, right? It’s a knob we can turn where we say, you know, as we’re growing, as we’re scaling, we know we’re going to put a new truck on the on the road. We’re going to hire that new technician. We can increase the budget, and we’ve got a knob we can turn, and there’s enough search volume, there’s enough opportunity that we could continue, as long as we’ve got the money to spend, we can continue to turn that dial and generate more leads and generate more sales. So it gives us.

Scalability in terms of our opportunity to generate those leads and opportunities.

So I wanted to kind of talk you through the model that I put through as I was thinking about, like, what’s the right model is to think about your paid search strategy and to optimize your paid search strategy. And really, in my mind, there’s, there’s three key strategies for paid there’s paid search, right, which is Google ads running Google Ads coming up in the Pay Per Click listings. There’s local service ads, which is the Google guarantee that comes up at the top. But I also think when it comes to paid search, we want to be doing retargeting as well, which is making sure that when somebody gets to our website, we’re pixeling them, and then we can start to advertise to them through banner ads and through display ads and through Facebook ads and other ads of those nature, because usually we’re seeing like a 20 to 30% conversion rate from visitor to lead. Well, what’s going on with the other 80% right? Maybe they got busy, maybe they got distraction, maybe they moved on to something else. But we know they’re in market, right? We know that our area, so we can, for a very low cost remarket through display advertising to those customers and get more of them to actually convert into sales. So when it comes to paid search, those are the top three. Then you’ve got your social advertising, which would be Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Tiktok ads.

There’s a brand play in my mind to be had here, and we’re constantly testing these social advertising platforms. There’s a huge difference in intent, right? If you think about somebody that went to Google and typed in a plumber, plumbing, emergency plumbing service near me, they’ve got a problem that they’re looking to solve right in that moment. We can’t target that same intent with paid social We can, however, know that they’re a homeowner that has a certain income in our service area, and we can put advertising in front of them, but again, it’s more of a these, like YouTube ads and Facebook ads. It’s more of a branding play, because they aren’t necessarily in

motion right at the time they might be looking on those sites. And then you’ve got your pay per lead directories right, which love them are hate them. There are another place that we can get opportunities and leads from that’s, you know, Angie’s, which used to be home advisor, Yelp and next door, thumbtack, any local. And if you’ve got good automations in place, and you understand how to play the game, you recognize that, you know, that’s going to go out to a bunch of different contractors. It’s going to be, you know, first person to get their attention, and usually at the lowest price, is going to be the one that gets these deals. I like to think of these pay per lead opportunities as you know, if you’ve got downtime in the trucks and you’re not getting the lead flow that you need, at least you’ve got another opportunity you can tap into, and you can turn on and you can turn off to keep deal flow, to keep the trucks running.

And so if I think about this from a hierarchical perspective, how we should roll out paid search, first of all, we’ve got organic, right? I don’t think it makes a ton of sense to be spending a lot of money on Google ads, where any of the other paid advertising strategies. If you don’t have a good website that’s coming up organically, that is targeting the low hanging fruit, the low hanging opportunity, right? What we find is your highest quality lead and your lowest cost per lead comes from your organic rankings, the non paid listings. So I really think that’s the base we want to get that nice and strong. Up from there, you want to leverage paid search, especially with local service ads, right? We pay close attention to this. What’s getting the best return on investment? What’s getting the lowest cost per lead right now, local service ads, the Google guaranteed program. If we can get consistent in the three pack, and we can play the game correctly. That’s getting a lower cost per lead and a higher return on investment at this exact moment. But I think in addition to that, we want to be doing Google ads right, because Google ads with local service ads and a strong organic footprint, is getting that directional opportunity. It’s all those people that are in market searching for your service, most of them searching from a mobile phone, and they’ve got a problem they need solved, and those are the customers we want to capture when they’re looking for our services. And like these three strategies really cover that really, really well.

I think you know at that level, you absolutely want to make sure that you’ve also got retargeting and automation in place. So retargeting I talked about briefly, but it’s just pixeling everybody that gets to your website and serving banner ads to them. Right? If you’re spending money on SEO and you’re spending money on Google ads, it’s a shame if you’re not running some type of retargeting to bring those customers that don’t convert back.

Right to the site. I think in addition to that, we want to be doing automation, which is, if somebody does start a chat on the site, or if somebody does fill in the web form, or somebody does call in and we don’t have a live answer, for some reason, we’re using automation to follow up with them via SMS, to follow up with them via, you know, via emails, quickly and effectively, so that we don’t drop balls right. If we don’t leverage automation, we’re missing a big portion of our conversion opportunity. And when you start to spend on these types of advertising, and you don’t, you don’t convert every lead you can get, it becomes hard to monetize. So kind of going up from there, we have our paid directories, and then we’ve got more of the branding play in my mind, which is your Facebook ads, Tiktok ads, YouTube ads. And where I see home service companies struggle a lot of times is they’ve got this pyramid invert. Usually they’re spending a lot of money on, let’s just say, Google ads or Facebook ads. Or somebody came in and told them, hey, Facebook is, you know, where it’s at. We need to be running Facebook ads, and they’re spending a lot of money, but they’re not getting a lot of leads, and they’re not getting a lot of sales, and they’re like, what’s going on? Well, if you don’t have a strong organic Foundation, and you’re not really playing local service ads and paid search, you’re missing out on the biggest foundation of your opportunity. So I just want to spend a little time to kind of walk through that hierarchy and kind of the thought process behind how I think this should be approached.

So in my mind, number one, first thing we want to be really leveraging and playing all out is local service ads, commonly referred to as Google guaranteed program called commonly referred to as LSA. But if you run a search in any of your markets right now, Chicago, AC repair, chicago plumber, whatever city you’re in, you’ll see at the very top is the Google Local Service ad listings. And there’s three that rotate, and there’s a very specific strategy you want to put in place to make sure that you’re spending enough that you get your profile set up correctly and that you’re feeding the data back to Google so that you can remain in that three pack for those listings. And so basically, we have to get the account set up. We’ve got to dial in the service area, the profile, the budget, little nuance here, but if you don’t do it right, you’re not going to be putting your best foot forward. We have to make sure we’re marking the jobs as books. So once we’re through the background process, which I think most of us are, let me know in the comments. If you’re running LSA, you’ve already gone through the background checks. Just type LSA in the comments or no, if you haven’t set it up yet, and this would be a new strategy for you to roll out.

I think most of us are running it based on what I’ve seen. And so the key is, if you’re running LSA and you’ve got the budget open, you’re getting those calls that are coming into your office, you need to have somebody go into the dashboard and mark the job as complete, or mark it as abandoned. That way, we’re pushing the data back to Google, where they know how responsive you are, and they know that you’re doing something with these leads, and you’re creating a great experience for their customers. And so we got to deal with the disputes, which means, like leads that come in outside of your service area or outside of the services you provide, you don’t have to pay for those. And we want to make sure we’re driving verified reviews. So there’s reviews that you get on Google Maps, right? And those are Google Map reviews, but then there are verified reviews, which means the lead came in through Google Local Service ads, and in the dashboard, you’ve got an opportunity to request they write a review. What’s different is, in that case, Google knows who the customer is. They know that you did a very specific job, and they can verify that it came through that platform. And so as often as possible, we want to make sure we’re not just using or whatever automation we might be using for review generation, like if you’re using

review buzz or pulse Sam, or some of these other review automation platforms, that’s great. I highly recommend it, but I would encourage you to have somebody manually going into the dashboard on Google Local Service ads, pushing the request Review button and getting more of those verified reviews. And then we want to, we want to match the targeting to like shoot for an 85% booking effectiveness ratio. And

typically, what I’ve seen home service companies do is because it’s a wizzy wig. It’s like a do it yourself platform. They set it up once they put their budget in, and they start getting calls, and it’s set it and forget it. And then eventually the number of calls they’re getting starts to drop off and like, I don’t know what happened. That seems like you know that didn’t really work very well.

And what I would encourage you to do is either have a dedicated person in your team that’s trained on local service ads, that is logging into the platform at least once a day or at least once a week and marking the outcomes and dealing with the disputes and managing the reporting to try and shoot for that booking effectiveness ratio and.

Or hire a company like ours. This is something we’ll do for you as part of our program. We’re talking about the accelerated growth model. We have a complete done for you, local service, ads, management service, where we can take that off the plate for you. So either hire a company like ours, or make sure that somebody is on top of it, otherwise this becomes, you know, a channel that’s not going to work really, really well for you. So number two on that hierarchy, in my mind, is then running Google ads, right? And, you know, those are the Pay Per Click listings, cost per click ranges based on the keyword, based on the service area. And you know, one of the feedback I’ve gotten from a lot of people is over the years, right over the last 1015, years, they’ve tried Google ads in a variety of ways, either they used like, you know, Google ads directly, or they used like, reach local or yellow pages to do it. And they spent a lot of money, and they didn’t get a great return on investment. And I just want to kind of walk through some of the main reasons that most Google Ads campaigns fail, and what you could do differently in the way you approach the campaign to generate a tangible, measurable return on your investment. And so number one reason most of these campaigns fail is because there’s a failure to understand the nuance of the plumbing, HVAC, electrical industry. So if you had a company like Yellow Pages or reach local, one of the other Pay Per Click companies say, Okay, we’re going to do your Google ads for you. Typically, they think of plumbing, let’s just say, as an example, as plumbing, right? And the main keyword they’re thinking about is like Plumbing, Drain Cleaning, Water Heater Repair. And those in their mind are pretty much the same thing and this, so they feel good driving that to the same page, right? And with the same text ad, they don’t understand the nuance. And so that’s going to mess with your quality score, it’s going to mess with your relevancy. It’s going to reduce your conversion rate. And so dealing with a company like ours that understands, like there’s a big difference between Plumbing and Drain Cleaning and re piping and trenchless water heater replacement and understanding. We don’t just put all that in one lumped ad group. We need an ad group specifically for the drain cleaning keywords, and we need a text ad that speaks to what that customer is looking for, and we need to drive them to a very specific page on the website that speaks to that particular function. And so having people that understand the industry and understand the nuance, you can structure the campaigns better. You can get much higher relevancy, which leads to a lower cost per click. And ultimately, you can convert those leads at a much higher level, which generates better ROI, which is what we’re all after when we run these types of campaigns. So number one reason most campaigns fails because they don’t understand the complexity or the nuance of the plumbing, HVAC industry. They tend to set up one ad group for all the keywords that’s like, whatever. Throw them all into one ad group. They’re all going to see one text ad, and it’s all going to go to the homepage on the site. That’s a recipe for really poorly performing campaigns. They don’t write specific text ads and landing pages for each of the keywords, and it’s not a strong call to action or incentive once somebody gets to the page to convert. And so in a nutshell, right? And if I looked at dozens and dozens of plumbing, HVAC, Home Service Company, Google Ads campaigns, a lot of times, is what we see, right? It’s all lumped together. It’s all going to a homepage. And so it’s low quality score, low relevancy, low conversion rate, lot of money being spent, very little in terms of book, jobs and revenue. And so, you know what we do that’s different, is like I said, we’re going to we’re going to take each of these different keywords and create a separate ad group, very specific text ads, and they’re going to land on a page that speaks to that very specific topic, which is one of the reasons our campaigns perform as well as they do. So just a couple of examples of this Cardinal home services company we work with that you can see a really nice looking website here, and we track the metrics like, one of the things we’re manifold about is like, how much do we spend? How leads do we generate? What’s our average cost per lead, and what’s the average cost per lead by channel, and then where possible, we want to integrate with your dispatch system, whether that’s service Titan or house call pro so that we can marry back how much revenue was actually generated. What’s our true return on investment? But in this case, we can see we’re spending $12,000 per month on average in their in their SEO Services, management fees, ad spend. You can see that’s 936. Leads have been tracked. So that’s phone calls, that’s web submissions. That’s the actual number of leads. So if we divide that out, it comes to $12.82

per lead. Now if we look at like the sources, looking at the accelerated growth model, we’ve got 223

came from organic so they clicked on a non paid listing. 224 from Google ads specifically.

387 from from Google Maps. So we can see kind of like it’s going, coming in from a variety of different places, a variety of different sources, if we drill down just on the Google ads, PC, the equation. So we’ve got $9,000 that went to just the spend on Google ads. There was those 224 leads, specifically from Google ads. So about $40 per lead from the Google Ads channel. So our average cost per lead from organic obviously, is less, but this is a very healthy average cost per lead that leads to great results. I’m not going to talk about the other metrics, because that can get a little bit confusing, but if we just kind of reverse engineer the math right,

what does that mean if we get $40 average cost per lead and decent conversion ratio, what does it mean in return on investment? So 224, leads, let’s just say an average conversion rate of 40% from lead to book job, and some of our clients are higher than that. Some of them are lower than that. But we just use 40% that’s 244 leads at 40% conversion would be 89 book jobs. Now they’re plumbing, HVAC, electrical. They have a really nice, you know, in in home sales process, average ticket $750

per book job, which is which is solid. Some of you guys do much better than that, but that’s still good. So 89 jobs at 750 is $66,000, in generated revenue. Divide that out by the $9,000 spend. That’s a seven time return on investment. And you know, I could pull up a bunch of different examples of this, but typically we’re seeing somewhere between five and 10 time return on investment when we get this dialed in, when we get the you know, the metrics really humming. So

how do we set up our Google Ads campaigns in order to reduce the cost per lead, in order to maximize return on investment? I think this maximize ROI is the most important thing, because who cares if we’ve got a lower cost per lead, but it’s not actually generating more revenue. I’d much rather have a higher cost per lead and know that we’re getting an HVAC system replacement, or we’re getting a new water heater installation. We’re getting a whole home re pipe or trenchless sewer replacement job, because the value of that is so much higher. Who cares if you spent $1,000 to attract some of those jobs if we’re talking about a 10 or 15 time return on investment? So here’s how we like to suggest you structure your Google Ads campaigns. Is how we do it here in our agency, number one is we have to be tracking right if we don’t track not just how many calls came in or how many web submissions came in. But if we don’t track inside the Google ads platform, the conversions and pass that data back to Google so we can optimize around it, it’s very hard to optimize the campaign and get the results we’re after. Campaigns have to be broken down into smaller ad groups and the various services you provide, right? So if you do plumbing and you do Drain Cleaning and you do Water Heater Installation and you do Water Heater Repair and you DO RE piping, we want different ad groups for each of those, right? You have to really break that down so that when somebody types in one of those keywords, the ad that they see in Google ads, the text speaks to what they were looking for. It shows relevancy. It also has a higher click through rate, which impacts your quality score.

Number three is you have to understand that the different match types. So you know, there’s broad and there’s,

there’s, there’s other match types that you want to be paying attention to. And so if you’re like, if you’re running broad match for the term plumber, there’s literally hundreds of different keywords that can spawn. And so we want to be careful that we’re not running just like all broad match terms. I’ll talk about some specifics and how to set up the campaign, but that’s really important. You want to write compelling text ads, right? And it’s not as simple as just writing a text ad that we think makes sense. Really, what we like to do, because it’s different every market based on competition, is see what do the other text ads look like? If I run a search for Dallas Drain Cleaning,

what’s coming up? Who are the competitors? What are they saying in their text ad? What’s their message? And make sure that yours stands out. The one of the key things is that your text ad is relevant to the searcher. It’s compelling for them to want to click it, but it also is differentiated versus the other text ads that are on the page, so that you’re more likely to get the click right, which improves our quality score, but it’s also more likely to get the lead and the book job because of it, we want to leverage our ad extensions. Who goes gives you the ability to add a location extension, reviews extension, there’s lots of little extensions, and if we want to differentiate the way we show up on the page by having more ad extensions activated, we take.

Up more space, and that gives us what looks like a more quality organization. It also gives us more, you know, more space on the actual search result, which makes it more likely that we’re going to get the click. We want to make sure we have a solid landing page that’s well thought out that matches what they’re looking for, but it also isn’t as complex as your website, right? If you think about your website, typically, it’s written with specific pages for SEO and the searcher, and it gives lots of additional information. It lets them link off to read the reviews, read the about us section, lots of details. What we want to do with our paid ads is drive them to a page with very little friction where it’s like, okay, this company does what I need. They’re in my service area. They can get to me today. Here’s why I should choose them and keep them on that page and get them to convert. We found that by using like really well tested landing pages, we can get a much higher conversion rate from click to lead and or to book job. And then we need to be split testing, right? And there’s two things we want to be split testing, maybe more, but at a minimum, we want to be split testing our text ads. If we’re running this ad group has these two text ads, which one’s getting a higher click through rate, right? And then at the end of that, we’d say this one performed better. Now let’s test the different variation. We’re always trying to beat the control on our text ads and on our landing pages. Right two versions of the landing page, which one’s going to convert better? This one’s working better. Boom. Based on that data, we can double down over time. That’s one of the reasons our campaigns outperform, because we’ve got so much split test data that we’ve run year after year, working with hundreds and hundreds of plumbing, HVC, electrical contractors, that our text ads and our landing pages just convert better, right? Which drives a a better result.

So big thing here is like,

if you’re if you’re not able to track what you spent, how many leads you got, and which ad group actually drove that conversion? You might as well just fold it up, right? You might as well just say, hey, whether it’s 2000 or $10,000 per month, if we’re not tracking it, then there’s no way for us to optimize it. There’s no way for us to win this game. There’s too many other independent plumbing, HPC, home service companies, too many other solid agencies that are tracking this information religiously, and if they are tracking and you’re not, they win, right? Because they have the data, they have the outcomes. So if we’re not tracking in place, that’s that’s a no go. So conversion tracking essentials,

we like to use a dynamic swapping number so that when somebody gets to the website from paid search versus organic. They see a different phone number, right? So we can say this came from SEO, this came from pay per click. But we also want to have a keyword pool that dynamically swaps. So let’s just say within our drain cleaning ad group, we’ve got clogged drain, drain clearing. Drain Cleaning company unclog my drain. Like all those keywords,

in order for us to know which ad group and which text ad actually drove the lead, we need to swap the phone number back to the source, because most leads convert via phone number, and so we use a keyword pool with dynamic keyword insertion. This gives us the ability to track which keywords are actually driving leads, which ad campaigns are actually generating leads, web form tracking. And then we have to make sure that the the we have

to make sure that the conversion data from whatever system we use, like in our case, we use call rail,

that when the conversion happens, it fires back into Google ads. So the conversion actually doesn’t just get tracked from a tracking perspective, but also within Google ads, it shows as a conversion, which gives you a additional reporting, additional optimization opportunities that you can run to win. So these are the conversion tracking essentials that I really suggest you have in place if you or your contractor are running Google ads, some of the most important KPIs. We want to know, how much did we spend during the period? And usually we’re looking at a week. We’re looking at a month, how much should we spend? What’s our average cost per click in Google ads? This is really important, because we’ve seen cost per clicks go as high as 230 $300

per click. That doesn’t mean lead. That means that they click. So if the cost per click is just out of control, it could be too competitive in your market. It could be we’ve just got such a low quality score, we have to pay so much more to get the click. And then most importantly, is the average cost per lead right across Drain Cleaning, across water heaters, across AC installation, across whatever the different keywords are. We need to be able to track

that average cost per per lead right and within plumbing. You know, we’ve got a.

Spectrum between 50 and $90 per lead that we’re shooting for. Water heaters, 100 to 250

Drain Cleaning, this can be super competitive, depending upon the market, between 50 and 150

ideally, you get a good process to turn that drink cleaning into a higher transaction value. HVAC, between 90 and 175

so repairs, maintenance service, typically gonna be 85 to $150 per lead on average, installation and replacement to 150 to 200 again, all these are just averages. You know, we’re looking at massive, massive markets like Los Angeles and small markets like Tupelo, the average, right? It’s going to be more in the larger markets, typically, because there’s more search volume and there’s more competition and electrical is somewhere between 35 and $75 per lead. But I think the most important KPI, right? Yes, we want to know how much we spent. We want to know what our average cost per click is. But most importantly, we want to know what’s our return on investment, right? If we spend this amount, how many leads, but most importantly, how many jobs were booked and how much revenue was generating. And if we can sync with your dispatch platform, with a service type or house call Pro, we can connect the dots between which ads are generating the most revenue and make sure we’re optimizing our budget to those particular campaigns into those particular areas. And so here’s another example company we work with called the meridian company. They’re based in East Lansing, Michigan, plumbing, HVAC, electrical remodeling, $4,000 in ad spend, $33 average cost. Believe About 137

leads generated.

And really what I like to see again, if we can sync with your platforms, we can, we can use the call tracking in there, but we also have an RL I Insights report available for clients, where we can automatically sync that data. There’s a premium for because it’s expensive to access that information, but it’s it’s the gold standard in terms of being able to really track our ROI and optimize for results. And so this is an ROI Insights report for that particular client. You can see here more recent report, $12,000 in spend, 1170

1771

leads, 390 match to the CRM revenue potential, $550,000

close revenue, $330

4,000%

return on ad spend. This is the gold standard, right? And so regardless of where you’re at in the spectrum of running your Google ads, you know, ideally, at a minimum, we’re tracking how much do we spend, how many leads do we get? What’s our average cost per lead? If you’re going to spend more, and you want to get more aggressive, you want to be able to double down, we want to make sure we’re syncing with your dispatch platforms to get the best possible results. And that’s our ROI Insights report, and again, there is a premium for that particular service. So

when it comes to structuring your Google Ads campaigns, kind of getting into the nitty gritty, we want to run a brand campaign which would be your company name, right? Because people are typing your company name, we want to make sure we’re coming up for that your quality scoring, your relevancy should be extremely high. So your average cost per click on your brand is really, really low. We want a general plumbing campaign so it’s just like they just typed in plumber, plumbing, plumbing services, Drain Cleaning. When we want to break that down into hydrogen and rooter services within water heaters, water heat repair, water heater replacement, tankless water heaters, sewer parent replacements, trenchless for piping, etc, etc, etc. I’ll be sure to share these slides if you want them. But like this is how we want to think through the granularity of these ad groups. And we want to do similar with on the within the HVAC side of things. But if we come in here to campaign structure, you can see over on the side, we’ve got those different ad groups, and then each one of those ad groups that we click on Drain Cleaning, we want to have exact match keywords like Drain Cleaning, Drain repair, unclog, drain, et cetera, right? We’ve matched the keywords and the ad groups, and then from there, we want to write very specific text ads for that particular thing number one, drain cleaning service. Call this company today, right your trusted area, plumbing, HVAC company. We want to use those call extensions. We also want to make sure that we’re looking at what’s coming up for those keywords and making sure that our text ads stand out against the competition.

And so some of our so I’ve got this in the slides. It’d be hard for us to really reference this, you know, in this way, but some of our best performing from search to click, from click to actual lead. I’ve got a visual here. Some of the top performing ads that we’ve seen work best.

Yeah, so landing pages, right? And I really think you want to have a landing page that’s different and distinct from your website. So, like, this would be a landing page that we find, like, works really, really well. We’re not giving them a million things to click on. We’re not, you know, giving them a million pages to access. We want to just take them to a page that matches what they were looking for and ask them to convert. And so in this case, you know, we’ve got request service phone over the top right hand corner, local company and a and I know a lot of us don’t like coupons, but give them a special incentive you just paid in order to get them to your website. Let’s give them a first time visitor, first time customer coupon in order to convert, right? And so there’s a general plumbing and then drain cleaning. We want to talk about the specifics of drain cleaning and why they should choose you for their Drain Cleaning versus the competition.

And so, like another example, kind of seeing more of it right. I still like to have personality and authenticity, like we do on our websites, but we want to just simplify the page. We want to make it super easy for them to call or submit a form so that they convert into an opportunity with as little friction as possible.

So hopefully that gives you some details, kind of on like why some campaigns fail, how you would want to structure it, to really get into the nitty gritty, to match the quality score, the relevancy, to reduce the average cost per lead, but also to maximize your conversion from click to lead, and then have the tracking in place to optimize the results. So things you want to ask your provider, if you like, if you’re thinking about hiring a company to do this for you, which I would highly recommend, like, it’s very hard for a plumbing, HVAC home service company to do this themselves, even if you’ve got a dedicated full time director of marketing, so to speak. Like,

to have somebody that understands the nuance of Google ads and can spend the time and energy to optimize the campaign, make the adjustments, get all the tracking in place. Is a very rare person like those people work for agencies, and they get paid really well for that particular role. So if you’re not doing it in house, these are the questions I would want to ask the contractor. First of all, how much of my budget is going to Google Ads versus management fees? If you don’t have access to that data. I think that’s a problem, right? If you’re just saying, like, here’s 10k go figure out how to generate new sales, and they’re not telling you this much is going to retargeting, this much is going to Google ads, and this is what we get paid as an agency. That’s a lack of transparency, and it’s really, I think, a conflict of interest. So you want to know, like, how much is going to what? What type of tracking Are you going to put in place? And do you do Google ad and web form tracking for me, right? I

think they’re not tracking it, and they’re going to say, yes, I track it, but do the conversions flow back into Google ads? Are you making optimization decisions based on that.

How are we tracking KPIs? What are the KPIs that we’re looking for? Do we have a live dashboard where we can see what we’re spending, how many leads, what the average cost per lead is? Will you be sending visitors to a very specific landing page, or are you driving them to the website? I would even ask like, when someone searches like Drain clean for instance, or water heater repair or AC installation, What page are they going to get to? Right? And if they’re mapping to your home page, that should be a big red flag. If they’re mapping to just the drain clean page on your website, that might be something you like, hey, look, you know, have you considered using a landing page for that

do split test ads for each of the each of the ad groups. Yes or no, this is important, because if they’re not split testing, they’ve got, like, a couple of ads that they basically just run, and they’re not optimizing to figure out what’s going to get a higher click through rate, which ultimately is going to drive better relevancy and more leads for you for the same spend, will you be leveraging ad extensions? We talked about that. What are the targets? What are we shooting for? What am I looking for in terms of my average cost per lead and my projected return on investment,

quality? Paid search contractors will have great answers and solutions for each of these if they don’t and they’re like, Oh, we don’t do that, or that’s not something that we think that’s important. I think that should be a red flag. That’s like, hey, you know what? These are some things we want to think about possibly going a different direction.

Skip over this.

Okay, so we talked about the hierarchy of your paid strategy. We talked about actually running ads. In addition to that, I really think we want to make sure we’re using retargeting and automation. You know, I think if we’re spending even 1000 to $2,000 per month and we don’t have retargeting automation in place, we’re going to be leaving money on the table. And so retargeting, basically, we find is that you.

You know, leads that aren’t follow up within 15 minutes or less go cold. The average customer has to be touched five to seven times before booking, and today’s customer would prefer to interact via text message than a phone call. Now, yes, we want to optimize for phone calls, but when they don’t answer and when they’re not available, if we can text message them, and we can use automation to trigger the initial text, that’s where we’re seeing the highest conversion rate in our customer base. And then retargeting again, if we’re getting people in the website and they don’t convert, we can, we can serve banner ads to them while they’re still in market. And we find this usually, if we get somebody back to the website a second time, they’re more than twice as likely to convert.

So just some examples, you know of some banner ads that you can run. You just want to make sure you get all the standard sizes so that somebody got to your website and then now they start to see your ads all over the place again, much more likely to convert the marketing automation platform that we use, that we’ve built, is called Conversion amp, and it’s an amazing platform where we can text message, phone call and email in follow up any of the leads that we generate. And we can put some automation in place where we keep following up until they say no, or until they book in their their service. Call Christian, put a link in there if you want to check it out. There’s a free demo at conversion amp.com

so that that’s the scoop, right? You know that’s the accelerated growth model, specifically on accelerating your growth with paid ads. We talked about LSA, we talked about Google ads. We talked about how to structure your campaigns and why most Google ad campaigns fail. We talked about retargeting and automation and how that’s going to level up the results that you generate if you are doing Google ads. If you’d like some help with this or anything we talked about today, feel free to type. Let’s

type. Let’s talk in the comments, or Christian if you could drop the link. Probably the best thing if you’d like some help. If you’re a client, there’s something we talked about here that you’re like, you know what? I’d like to learn more about that? Or I’d like to actually implement that in our campaigns. Absolutely, reach out to your account manager and they’ll, they’ll walk you through it and kind of either, either show you exactly how we can do it for you, or there may be an additional fee for some of the things we talked about today. If you’re on here and you’re not a client, you’re like you know what? I’d like to learn more about how you can help me with my online marketing strategy as a whole. We do what’s called a a lead flow acceleration session. And what we’ll do is we’ll look at your website, we’ll look at your current rankings, we’ll give you a complete assessment where there’s room for improvement from a conversion perspective, from a ranking perspective and from a paid search perspective, and we do that for free. And so if you’d like to schedule that, you can go to Plummer seo.net/schedule

that’s Plummer seo.net/schedule

so thank you guys so much for joining me on a Friday afternoon. My goal is to keep this practical, to keep it quick, and to hit some of the key points that you want to be focusing on to accelerate your lead flow with paid search. Uh, hopefully I accomplished that objective today. Um, would love the opportunity to connect with you like some more help with this again. You go to plumber seo.net/schedule,

or feel free to call us anytime. 866-610-4647,

and with that said, I will wrap it there. Everyone have an amazing weekend, and we look forward to talking with you again real soon. Thanks, everybody. You.