How to Accelerate Your Leadflow with Paid Ads & Search

Josh Nelson: Welcome. So glad to have you guys with us today. Really excited about today’s topic. We’re gonna be talking about how to accelerate your lead flow with paid ads, right? And I know sometimes, we think about paid ads and it’s comes with a bad connotation, whether it’s.

Angie, or whether it’s Google Ads or even LSA in today’s market sometimes we think, oh, I don’t wanna deal with paid ads. I just want lead flow. But I can tell you, as part of your overall digital marketing strategy you’re gonna wanna dial in your paid advertising strategy so that you have accelerated options that you can turn on as you look to grow and scale the business.

If you’re running ads today, just type ads in the chat here for me, just so I have some context in terms of. What you guys doing, what you guys have in play, but here’s what we’re gonna cover on today’s session. I’m gonna talk about why paid advertising is the unlimited option for scalability.

If you’re looking to grow, if you’re looking to add trucks, if you’re looking to keep the phone ringing and the trucks running, I’m gonna talk about why you’re gonna inevitably need to have paid ads as part of that, as [00:01:00] part of that approach. We’re gonna talk about the paid ad strategies that are working best in today’s market.

And it’s not just Google Ads, right? In the past you thought paid advertising, it was just Google ads. There’s lots of different channels, there’s lots of different mechanisms, and so I’m gonna talk about the different paid advertising strategies. We’re finding work best for plumbing HVAC home service companies.

We’re gonna talk about. Live examples of paid strategies, especially Google ads generating five to 15 time return on investment because I know for a fact that, if I look at half a dozen plumbing, HVS AC, electrical contractors. Page strategies. A lot of times they’re just barely breaking even and they’re not generating a very good return on investment.

And that’s super frustrating. And so I just wanna tell you that when you do this right, and I’m gonna give you the exact formula on today’s session, when you do this right, you can expect a five to 15 time return on investment. So I’m gonna show some examples of those campaigns and that way you can see the data behind it and actually validate that it is.

Possible when done correctly. And then we’re gonna talk about how to structure your [00:02:00] campaign for maximum success, right? There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. And it’s not, doesn’t have to be super complicated, but when you get it right and you have the right tracking in place and you have the right conversion mechanisms in place it can go really well.

So I’m gonna talk about the 80 20 on this, which is what’s the 20% of the things you need to make sure you configure and that you set up correctly to get 80% of the results? And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about some of the KPIs and how you can track your results. Because the big frustration I hear from plumbing HVC home service companies that I talk with is, I’m spending money, like I’m spending money on Facebook ads, or I’m spending money on Google ads.

I. But I’m not getting return on investment. It feels like even if I do generate a couple of leads or a couple of book jobs, it just barely covers the cost of the marketing spend and the marketing service provider that I’m paying to do this for me. And of course that feels like you’re just burning money in that particular case.

And to give you confidence in that, you wanna know what the KPIs are, which is like, what are the [00:03:00] numbers I need to look at to know if I’m on the right track and to know that this is actually worth my while. And so we’ll talk about that. And more importantly, like how to structure the campaign, the landing pages so that you can get the best results possible.

So real quick, for those of you that don’t know, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of Plumbing and Hvac, SEO. Been doing this for, almost. 11, almost 20 years, getting close to 20 years at this point. I’m the author of How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing Right for Plumbing and HVAC contractors.

Been actively involved in a lot of the trade groups like nexstar, QSC, service, Roundtable, CEO Warrior and all of those different groups have published and spoken to a lot of the industry events and conferences. But I’d say more important than any of that stuff is at this point I’ve had the opportunity to work with well over.

300 plumbing HVAC, electrical companies. Hands on and being able to help see them go from limited presence online, limited results from their online marketing to the point where they’re now the dominant players in their [00:04:00] market generating literally hundreds, in some cases, thousands of leads every single month via the internet.

Many of them I’ve seen go from. A couple million, two tens of millions of dollars. Many of them I’ve seen get acquired by pe. And so what I’m sharing with you isn’t based on theory, it’s not based on hype. It’s based on, actually in the world trench trenches experience working with companies just like yours across the country.

And so what I’m gonna tell you is gonna be based on, reality and not some hypothetical thing that I read somewhere. And this is what we do right day in and day out. We’re on a mission to help 1000. Plumbing, HVAC and electrical companies triple their sales over the next 10 years. And we’ve got a full team of web designers, SEO people, paid search strategists, account managers that do this day in and day out.

And so if at any point while we’re going through today’s session, you’re like, Hey, you know what? This sounds pretty good. I’d like to have Josh’s team look at what I’ve got in place. We would love the opportunity to have that conversation with you. And it would be [00:05:00] complimentary. We’ll just take a look at what you have in place.

And if it’s great, we’ll give you a thumbs up if there’s room for improvement, if there’s some gap between where you are and where you’re looking to go we’ll tell you that as well. And so if you’re interested in doing that, Christian just dropped his link. That’s our Director of business development plumber seo.net/schedule.

Or feel free to email Christian or give us a call anytime. Let’s get into it. Today we’re talking about paid ads, but when you look at really growing your home service company, you look at growing your lead flow, growing the truck count, growing the whole operation. There’s really thi three things we have to solve for from a marketing perspective.

Number one, we have to drive leads, right? We need some mechanism to get the phones ringing. Number two, we have to convert those leads, right? We have to convert the leads. The traffic into leads, the leads into sales, the sales into repeat customers, right? We have to convert and maximize our conversion.

And then number three, we have to optimize results because there’s so many different things we’re spending mar money on. From a marketing perspective, we have to optimize to figure out are we [00:06:00] spending enough? And sometimes if our goal is to get to 5 million, sometimes we need to spend a little bit more to give ourselves more opportunity for lead flow.

Then we need to optimize our average cost per lead. Like how much is it actually costing us to acquire a lead and then ultimately to acquire a customer. And then most importantly, we have to figure out the return on investment. We have to be tracking what’s our actual return on the money that we’re investing in marketing and.

You know which of these channels, local service ads, retargeting, SEO, which ones are generating the best results so that we can redeploy our financial resources to the things that generate the best results, right? And that really is the overall accelerated growth model that we focus on.

All of these sessions and that we implement for our clients. But today we’re gonna be focusing here on the paid search side of the equation, right? Because yes, when we talk about driving leads, we can talk about SEO and that’s a big part of it. We can talk about paid search, we can talk about database marketing and marketing back to our existing customer base.

But today we’re gonna be focused heavily on the paid search side of the [00:07:00] equation. Why paid search, right? And you’re like, you know what? I’ve heard a lot about paid search and I’ve talked with a lot of people about paid search, whether it was reach local back in the day, or one of these other companies more recently.

And it didn’t work out for me. Like I just felt like I was burning money. Here’s really why you wanna have paid search as part of your overall strategy. Number one is it’s quick to implement. Unlike SEO where we’ve gotta build content, we’ve gotta build authority, we’ve gotta, really plant some seeds that need to grow out from the ground and bear fruit eventually.

What’s great about paint search is we can turn on a campaign. Today we can start generating, eyeballs from homeowners that are in need of your services today, and we can start generating leads in the immediate moment. So that’s a big reason, speed to implementation. Number two, you can show up for very specific intent keywords, and a lot of times it might be hard to search, to show up for something like.

Just plumber or just trench sewer replacement or just indoor air quality or specific [00:08:00] product that you’re looking to show up for on a national basis. With Google Ads, we can make sure we show up, bam, right? When they’re looking for that in your market. So we can really, we can show up for things that we couldn’t come up with otherwise.

The other thing is we wanna make sure we’re showing up as often as possible where our customers are looking, especially at the point of decision, right? We think about directional based advertising. We can do Facebook ads, we can do other things. We can do all kinds of advertising and there may or may not be in the moment, so we’re really building top of mind attention.

But specifically when they’re typing on Google or on Bing or whatever engine they may be typing on in the future when they’re typing your service, we wanna come up for that, which means we wanna come up in local service ads, we wanna come up in the Google ads, we wanna come up on the map. We wanna come up organically.

Ideally, we wanna come up with those different directories that happen to be ranking organically. We wanna show up as often as possible so that we have the highest probability of catching that customer [00:09:00] when they’re in the buying frame. And so being in the paid ads, auction and being is part of this process is important, right?

’cause we wanna show up as often as possible. And it gives us unlimited scalability. I think a lot of times there’s a a point where we’ve done as much as we can from an organic perspective, and we need to continually build authority and we need to continually try and increase our rankings. But with paid ads there, there’s an unlimited supply of people that need these services that we can tap into when we set this up correctly.

If we’ve got goals to add another truck, another five trucks, another 10 trucks, it’s a matter of optimizing the spend, optimizing the average cost per lead, and then, increasing that spend as we grow within the constructs and within the, the constraints of our profit margins that we’re trying to optimize for.

So we all know, and I’m not gonna get into the basics of this, there’s a couple different things that come into paid advertising, right? There’s, the Google ads that show up. There’s local service ads, there’s retargeting banners, there’s Facebook ads, there’s YouTube ads, and.

[00:10:00] All of that kind of falls in to paid advertising. And so I wanted to try and give you a model that you could wrap your head around. That’s right. So what’s the approach, what’s the order at which I should stack these, and how does this work best? And this is our retargeting automation.

Model that we kinda like to think of it. There’s paid search, which obviously is the most qualified, the most direct prospect you’re gonna get. So when it comes to paid search, we’ve got Google ads and Bing ads, we’ve got local service ads, still a massive opportunity in most markets. And then we’ve got retargeting.

And all of these paid strategies go hand in hand, and I’ll be talking about them little by little as we go today. Then you’ve got paid social, which would be, Facebook advertising, YouTube advertising, TikTok advertising. These are more brand based and direct spots opportunities, right? We can target people in your area that have a certain household demographic, and we can make them an offer, right?

Obviously, if they’re over here in paid [00:11:00] search, they have a problem they’re looking to solve. If we’re just catching them in paid social, we’re just trying to catch their attention and make it a compelling enough reason that they’re like, oh, you know what? Maybe I should have these guys in my home to do that assessment or install that thing.

And then we’ve got paper lead directories, like the sites that we all hate. But Angie, next door, Yelp, Thumbtack. And I think that depending upon the market, depending upon where you’re at in your growth cycle, there’s a place for augmenting with these. Pay per lead sources. Lemme know if you think about right now, if you’re on with me live, what the number one source for you is from paid advertising right now.

What is it for you like, is it paid search? Is it paid social? Is it pay per lead and directories? Just lemme know what happens to be working best for you. Here’s what we found works best, and this is the order that I like to think about it. First of all, when we’re thinking about our online strategy, we always start with organic, right?

We need to make sure we’ve got a great website that’s built to convert, that’s optimized for the most important keywords in our service [00:12:00] area. And we’re constantly thinking about how do we make sure we come up for those key terms? Because as I cover in the last session, the new SEO formula, even in today’s market with all these paid channels.

The highest quality, lowest cost lead that you can get is organic, right? So we still need to have that strong organic foundation. Now, once we’ve got that built and we’ve got a good website that we’re driving traffic to, and we’ve got a solid reputation online where people are like, okay, this company’s got reviews.

They seem to be a solid organization up from there, we wanna plug in paid search and local service apps. Paid search and local service ads, predominantly local service ads. So I’m gonna be talking a lot about that early on ’cause I think you prioritize local service ads when you think about local service ads and Google ads in the immediate moment.

Now, before we go up from there and start add, adding any other advertising strategies I wanna make sure that you’ve layered on retargeting and automation. So what’s retargeting? Retargeting is just pixeling, anybody that gets to your website and making [00:13:00] sure that. If they got to our site, they’re gonna start to see us at least over the next 30 to 60 days in banner ads on Facebook feed and things like that, because not everybody that gets to your website converts in the immediate moment, right?

Usually it’s somewhere between 10 and 25% of your visitors are gonna either pick up the phone, start a chat, our schedule online. And so they still have a problem. Maybe they got busy, maybe they got distracted. Maybe, something came up that prevented them from taking action right in the moment.

But we know they’ve got a problem, otherwise they wouldn’t have probably been on your website. And so we want to connect with those people through retargeting. The other thing we wanna make sure we have in place is automation. Because when you start to spend on advertising, we have to make sure that every lead that comes in is followed up with it as quickly as possible.

Because if your average cost per lead is, let’s call it 60 or $70 per lead, we need to make sure we’re converting those leads into book jobs. And if we’re not [00:14:00] following up quick, if we don’t have some level of automation in place all of a sudden your cost to acquire a customer becomes unmanageable.

And so with automation, there’s two key automations we wanna make sure we have in place. First. If somebody calls in and you don’t answer, we send a text message immediately that says, Hey, sorry we missed your call. Let us know how we can help. If somebody fills in a form or tries to schedule online, they immediately get a text message saying, Hey.

Saw you reached out on our site. We’ll be reaching out as quickly as we can. Is there anything we can do to help? And we wanna have the opportunity for them to engage in a two-way text message. Today’s market, your customer prefers to engage via two-way text message versus having to pick up the phone and have a conversation.

The other, really anything interesting thing we can do with automation is site unmasking, which, especially on the HVAC side, a little bit less on the plumbing side on certain electrical applications, if we’re doing EVs and things like that. The, if the transaction value is high enough. We can capture the name, phone number, and [00:15:00] address of the person that got to your site, even if they didn’t submit the form.

And that’s what we call blind opt-in. And once we have that blind opt-in, we can add them to a little introduction campaign via email or text message. We can have somebody in the office call them, Hey, just wanted to check in. We could even send them a postcard. Even though they hadn’t checked in, does it make sense for if you’re just doing low transaction value services like drain cleaning or standard plumbing repair, but it starts to make sense if it’s a higher transaction value thing.

And especially you get to a certain page on your website that talks about something specific. Just say yes, if this makes sense, we’re tracking along before we go spend a ton of money on advertising, let’s make sure we’ve got retargeting and some automations in place. That way we can capture those opportunities and we can maximize the conversions that happen.

Up from there, assuming we’ve maxed out our paid advertising budget on Google Local service ads and on Google Ads, and we’re not getting enough lead flow because all of your marketing reverses back to. What’s the goal we’re trying to accomplish? How much [00:16:00] revenue do we need? And if that’s the goal, how many leads do we need to generate in order to make that a reality?

So if we’re not hitting our lead targets based on everything we’re doing here, then we might wanna supplement with paid directories and pay per lead services. Paid directory specifically are around. In your market, if we go and search, if you’re a plumbing company, we go and search your city plumbing.

A lot of times we’re gonna see local service ads, and then we’re gonna see the map, and then below that we might see a couple companies, or we might see Angie, or we might see thumb tech, or we might see one of these popular online sites. If those directories are dominant in your market, that’s when it makes sense to advertise in those directories.

Obviously, we’re gonna claim the free listing, but we want to potentially put some money behind it if it’s already got organic traffic in your market. And then, pay per lead services like Thumbtack and Angie. Ideally if we’re not locked into a contract, you have the opportunity to turn it on and turn it off.

Can work well, [00:17:00] assuming you have speed to lead. The biggest issue I hear with Angie and with networks and with Thumbtack is I got the lead and by the time I call them back, they already went somebody else, right? And they got 19 different calls. So guess what happens in those situations?

The company that follows up quickest is the one that gets the opportunity, the company that gets a scheduled booking with that person first. Wins the job. And so we want to make sure we’re in, we’re integrated if we’re doing pay lead into automation, so the second that lead comes in, it fires and text message to them.

It makes a call and it, tries to get a a live interaction. We can do a lot of things today with automatic messaging to those leads or even the leads that come from any of these sources where they submit their details. Automation follows up and it can even continue the conversation until somebody on your team’s available to have that real life conversation.

But if they’re not, we can move them to online scheduling ’cause a lot of people are willing to schedule online today and would prefer [00:18:00] to do that. Up from there, we’ve got paid online directories and paid lead services. And then at the very top of the hierarchy is branded which would be I, in my personal opinion, I know there’s differing opinions on this is gonna be social advertising, which is Facebook, TikTok, YouTube if you’re doing radio ads or you’re doing billboard ads.

I’m willing to wager you’re gonna get a much lower cost per thousand impressions. You’re gonna get a much better brand, cost per dollar through social advertising. But if you’re not at that level, you need to be investing here where customers are actually having problems they need to solve, showing up for it right when they’re in that buying mode.

And make sure you take them through a cycle to convert them as quickly as possible. The companies that you look at that are doing. 50, a hundred million dollars per year. They’ve gone from just capturing the low hanging fruit to branding themselves as the expert in the market to being on tv, to being on all these advertising channels.

And I’m not saying there’s not a place for it, [00:19:00] but I think that place really starts to come in, when you’re over $10 million per year. Now, I say that with caveat that YouTube, Facebook ads can be really effective if you’re targeting higher transaction value services. And I think that’s a webinar for another day while I’ll get into it, we do have, advertising strategies specifically for Facebook that we can implement.

But I think it’s really typically for you and your larger and more established in your company. So let’s get into it. I’m gonna switch screens now. I’m gonna walk you through some slides as we get into actually implement this stuff. So let me share.

Here we go.

All right, so when we talk about the different strategies that I just mentioned. Strategy number one was local [00:20:00] service ads, right? And when we run a search on Google right now for whatever service you provide, like drain cleaning, water heater, repair, ac installation, electrician near me the Google local service ads come up and.

Most of you guys know what this is. Just type LSA. If you’re running local service ads in today’s market, I think most of us are. So I’m not gonna talk about the fundamentals, but you definitely wanna set this up. If you don’t, you want to get your profile fully optimized, optimize your service area set up your budget correctly.

And then most importantly, you need to make sure you’re closing the loop on the leads you generate from local service ads, which means going into the platform marking the outcome for the jobs. Disputes is no longer an issue and drive verified reviews through the platform. We, we have many clients that are generating tens of thousands of dollars every single month exclusively from the leads generated from local service apps.

It’s not. It’s not complicated, but it’s not easy either. There, there’s lots [00:21:00] of little specifics. I’ll be doing a webinar next month all around the specifics on how to set up local service ads, how to expand your service area, how to drive more lead flow, how to make sure you’re more commonly showing up to the three pack.

But the main thing I wanted to say is today is I think. You should open up your local service ads budget as much as you can, because right now the lead quality from that is still really good. The average cost per lead is still a little bit less than you can get from Google Ads in today’s marketplace.

So that’s strategy number two, which is. Google ads and, this is, when we think about online advertising, the kind of the a hundred pound gorilla, there’s been a little bit of a shift, and so I should probably update this to Google and Bing ads. There’s been a little bit of a shift, more and more people using Bing for their searching because they like the fact that it’s easier to pull some of the AI search results in.

But a lot of Google ad campaigns fail and you start to feel like, man, it’s just a waste of money. Oftentimes it’s because the person that set [00:22:00] up the campaign doesn’t really understand the auction process and how complex the plumbing and HVAC industry is. And they just, they think they they work with a lot of companies, right?

So they don’t understand. They think plumbing is plumbing and H-V-A-H-V-A-C is HVAC. And so they take all the key words plumber, plumbing, drain cleaning, water heater repair, trenchless sewer replacement, repiping, and they would just bid on all of that, right? And put it all in the same ag group and put it all in the same landing page.

And that leads to a lack of relevancy and it leads to a lack of conversion, and it leads to a higher cost per lead. And ultimately a higher cost to acquire, which becomes unpalatable, right? If you don’t understand the nuance, you wouldn’t set it up. And so the other reason campaigns fail is because a lot of companies will just set up one ad group.

For all the services. So one ad group, meaning basically we do plumbing regardless of what they typed and not driving them to a specific landing page. And so I could get into a [00:23:00] lot of details on this, but there’s some very little specific things that most campaigns don’t have set up that are preventing them from performing.

But probably the biggest issue is what I’m showing you here. Having all of your ag groups. So if you like in, in my opinion, I’ll talk about ag group structure in a minute. We’ve got general service, then we’ve got emergency service, then we’ve got water heaters and water heater, installation, replacement, just in plumbing.

And then we’ve got drain cleaning, we garbage disposal and repiping. Each one of those is a different ag group, which means it would have a different text ad specifically. Matching what the customer typed in, and it would take them not to the homepage because the homepage is talking about everything that is the recipe for failure.

And if I look out of 10, nine out of 10 home service companies have their campaign set up like this just because either they don’t understand it or because the contractor or the team that set it up for them didn’t understand the nuance of the plumbing HVAC and electrical business. And with that [00:24:00] said, it can be done correctly.

And so I just wanna show you a couple of case studies of clients we work with that are getting great results with Google Ads. So I’m just gonna pull this up. So one of the companies we work with is Cardinal Home Services. And I just wanna show you here that they’ve got about a $12,000 investment in their online marketing.

So 12,000 investment. That’s our management fees plus their ad spend. And we track really closely, really maniacal about knowing for that spend, how many leads do we get? Which means how many leads, and what’s the average cost per lead, right? So $12,000 spend, we track 936 leads, and that’s an average of $12 and 82 cents per lead, which for plumbing HVAC, electrical is super good.

And then if we drill down on that’s. 223 that came from organic. So their website coming up in, in SEO and things like that. 224 from page search, and then 387 from Google Ads also also organic, and they’re like 102 that either started a chat [00:25:00] scheduled online or filled in a web form. Now, if we drill down and we just focus on the paid ads portion of this, there’s 9,000 that was invested in Google ads.

We track 224 leads from that’s an average of $40 per lead from Google Ads. Now, it depends upon the market. Obviously this market’s gonna be different than la it’s gonna be different than New York. It’s gonna depends upon the competition, which is gonna drive what the average cost per lead is. But when we get our campaign optimized and we’re highly relevant we can really get these average cost per leads.

Quite a ways down. And so if we do the math on this so 224 leads at an average conversion rate of 40%, which let’s just say that’s average and probably a little bit lower than we’d like to see. That would be 89 book jobs, average ticket seven 50. Also lower than we’d like to see in the industry.

I’m just using some benchmarks here. That’s 89 jobs at seven 50. That’s $66,000 in revenue generated. That’s projected seven time return [00:26:00] on investment, right? If we take their $9,000 spend divided it by 66,000, it’s a seven time return on investment. I’m gonna show a couple of examples like that, it, it can be done.

We can get the average cost really down. And what’s great is if we improve the conversion rate from lead to book job and then we improve the average ticket from seven 50 to 1500, all of a sudden those numbers are even better in the return on investment. Even better. So how do we structure the campaign to get those types of outcomes?

Couple of things we wanna put in place. Conversion tracking is a must. Like we can’t be guessing oh I, maybe we got some converted, maybe we didn’t like. We need to have this dialed in where we know how many people got to the site from the paid ad, how many of those that got to the site from the paid ed actually converted.

And we track conversions as a phone call. An online booking, a form submission or a a chat if we’ve got chat widget on there. And we don’t just want to track conversion. We also wanna push that conversion back to Google [00:27:00] Ads so that Google knows which AdWords campaigns or which ad group generated the leads so we can optimize around those results.

The campaigns need to be broken into smaller ad groups like I was talking about before. With the services that you provide, and I’m gonna talk about those different ad groups and how we typically structure it for plumbing, HVAC, home service companies. But ideally you need to understand.

What those keywords are. You’d understand like what the customer’s thinking when they type that in. And then we wanna match the text ads and match the landing page to those keywords. You also have to be really careful of match types and even outside of match types. So the settings inside Google, whether it’s actually just gonna be on Google or it’s gonna be on random sites whether it’s just gonna show up for that word, trenchless sewer replacement, or if Google’s gonna magically add 10 or 15 keywords that it thinks are relevant.

Around that. We wanna make sure we put some tight constraints because Google’s best interest is to spend your money and they’re a rapidly growing [00:28:00] company with massive overhead, but also massive revenues. And they’re constantly looking to figure out ways to pull more money out of your pocket. And understanding broad match versus exact match versus phrase match and setting up those keywords correctly makes a big difference.

We wanna make sure that we’ve got text adss that resonate versus just repeating the key word. A lot of times, if we kinda look at the iteration of online marketing for home services, and if we look at the original intent, it was like, all right, what’s the key word? Let’s just repeat that keyword a bunch of times in the tech app.

In today’s market. We wanna actually sell the click with our text dad. And beyond that, we need to look at our competition, right? We should run the key word and see for the key word drain cleaning in my market. Who’s coming up? What does their text dad say? How do I make sure that my text dad.

Isn’t just the same, but it’s different and it stands out on the page, and that’s different in every market. The great thing is we have some great tools that [00:29:00] can help us do a bulk analysis of this and see like for these key words, like what are the common themes, what’s the best offer being made, and how do we plus one it in some way, or make our text dad stand out so we can get a higher click-through rate, which leads to a lower.

Cost per click, which leads to higher relevancy, which leads to better results of the campaign overall. We wanna make sure we’ve got the ad extensions enabled, which just makes it so we can take up more space on the page. And then we have to make sure we land, we have to land visitors on a solid wall while thought out.

Landing page that is built to convert. And this is different than your website, right? Your website. And even if you’ve got a website that’s got a page that talks about drain cleaning as an example. ’cause I keep talking drain cleaning here. That’s your website. So it’s gonna have links to a bunch of different things.

It’s gonna have links to reviews, it’s gonna have divergent paths. You can drive the potential customer down when it comes to paid ads. We wanna give them one path. We wanna give them a very specific page that’s [00:30:00] not got a lot of clutter, but it’s just very clear. Here’s what we do, here’s how we can do it, and here’s your next action.

That way we can track it and we can eliminate some of the distractions. And then we want to be split testing over time, like split testing the text ads split, testing the keyword combinations, split testing to see what actually gets a better conversion rate. And what’s beautiful is now that we’ve done this for literally hundreds of plumbing HVAC electrical companies.

At scale, it was really spending millions of dollars in advertising on Google’s platform. We’ve got a lot of the split test data and, data is the most important thing. It’s the most important competitive advantage that you can have. And we’ve got the benefit of a decade of testing data that we’re able to deploy into your campaigns to get even better results.

But if there was one thing I want to hammer when it comes to your Google ad structure is don’t even think about spending a penny until you have the tracking in place, because without the tracking, you’re flying blind, [00:31:00] you’re guessing, and it’s hard enough to get great return on investment to get a solid ROI.

When you’ve got this dialed in, if you’re guessing it’s literally just like burning money. So what do we wanna make sure we have from a tracking perspective? For our, for ads campaigns, we wanna have dynamic number swapping with a different number for PPC versus organic. At a minimum, you or your marketing agency should have set up where you can say exactly how many calls came in from Google Ads.

Versus organic traffic, right? That’s a minimum that’s easy to set up in today’s marketplace. We also wanna make sure we have a keyword pool with dynamic number swapping so that you can track phone calls back to the keyword campaign. And so this is the level up where we need to know not just how many came from Google Ads.

How many of those leads, phone calls, web submissions came from this particular ad group versus that particular ad group? And that’s not just useful for your own personal reporting. [00:32:00] It’s useful because we can push that data back into Google and let it fully optimize with AI to, to give us better results over time.

And if we don’t have that keyword pool, there’s no way we can push the conversion back to the exact. Keyword that they clicked on webform tracking, web chat tracking. We wanna make sure we have all of that stuff set up. And it has to be pushed back into Google Ads. And I can tell you, a lot of agencies say that they do this, but then when you get right down into it, they actually don’t.

And it’s really, it is a major competitive advantage when you have this set up correctly. So let’s talk about KPIs, key performance indicators. The main things we wanna look at, how much do we spend? Obviously how much we spend, and sometimes, by the way, we should spend more, right? But it has to be, once we’ve got the constraint in place, we know, alright, I’m spending this amount, I’m getting this amount of leads, I’m getting this amount of book jobs, I’m getting this amount of revenue.

Once I’ve got those in place, obviously I probably want to increase that spend [00:33:00] so that my return can continue to grow. But total spend, average cost per click. Very important metric. Average cost per lead, and that’s the number of leads generated from web forms, from phone calls, and now from online booking.

Typically, and I’m just giving you broad metrics, plumbing, we’re seeing somewhere between 55 and $90 per lead is gonna depend upon the job type. Water heater is a hundred to 250. Drain cleaning, 50 to 150. Again, depends upon the market. HVAC, between 90 and 175, repairs and maintenance between 80, 85 and 150.

Installs and replacement between 102 hundred electrical between 35 and 75. You probably need to, it really depends, right? I’d love to give you guys a very specific number of pulses on all of this, but. It’s changes and it changes obviously from if you’re in a small market, you get less competition than a large market where there’s literally hundreds of contractors competing on these same terms.

And then most important metric is [00:34:00] return on investment. How much did I spend? How many leads did I generate? How many of those turned into revenue? And then what’s my true return? On investment. And I like to say you wanna have a dashboard, right? Similar to the dashboard I showed you earlier. This is one of the companies we work with, the Meridian Company in East Lansing, Michigan.

And on our dashboard we look at these key metrics, but it’s mainly how much do we spend $4,615? How many leads do we generate? 137. What’s our average cost per lead, in this case, $33 and 69 cents. We got other data down here, but those are the key metrics that we wanna focus on. If we can tie that back to ServiceTitan or to House Call Pro or to Field Edge or whatever dispatch platform that you use even better.

We’ve found like the built in, marketing reports that they provide. Give you limited attribution, right? And like in a case like this, we can track back, alright, on the organic lead phone we got this amount of leads and this amount of actual book [00:35:00] revenue. That’s great to see, right?

It’s really good to see. But there was also gonna be things that didn’t track perfectly because it’s really can only isolate back to that one particular number. We have a, an integration with ServiceTitan and Field Edge. It costs more to set up and to configure, but we call this our ROI Insights report, and what this does is it can match the number of the lead that came in to what’s actually inside your dispatching platform.

We’ll match those leads back to the source and then help us generate true return on investment data reporting. And this, in my mind to right now, is the gold standard where we’re not guessing. We’re not like, Hey, I think you generated this amount, or you should have generated this amount. Like we can say back to the actual booked revenue in your platform, how much revenue came into pipeline, how much of that was booked, and what your true return on investment is.

Which is really. [00:36:00] Awesome. And I just, I’m showing this because if you’re interested, we’d love to, show you this and implement it for you. But if you’re not, and you’ve already got something, greater place, these are the types of things you wanna look at. These are the things you wanna put in place so that you can give yourself the highest probability of success, the highest probability of growth in your marketing.

All right, so let’s talk about how to structure your paid search campaigns and really what we’ve seen best over our decade or so of experience, or almost 20 years, excuse me, of experience in this. You wanna make sure the ad groups are broken down into the smaller. Services, right? The actual things that you typed in and the ad groups that we found make sense.

You’re gonna have a brand campaign, which is the people actually searching for your exact company name. If they were looking for Bob’s Plumbing and Heating, right? And that’s the company name, it’s worth bidding on that. ’cause if you don’t, your competitor is, and they’re gonna actually come up in the paid search ads where you can’t, ’cause there’s only so much trademark [00:37:00] protection.

The good thing about a brand campaign is it’s your quality score is the highest on that. And so your average cost per lead is gonna be very low, right? But we wanna make sure we’re coming up general plumbing services. And then within drain cleaning, we want general drain cleaning, hydro jetting, rooter service within water heaters.

We’ve got water heater repair, water heater replacement, tankless water heaters. Sewer replacement trench list repiping, right? Each one of these are different ad groups, which means they have a different set of keywords that go with them, which means they’re gonna have a different text ad and they’re gonna go to a different landing page on your website.

This is how when you get this granular with it, you can really optimize your quality score to get a lower cost per lead for the for or loss, lower cost per click for the same, for the same key words. And we got repiping sum pumps, leak detection on and on, right? I’m happy to share these slides with you if anybody’s interested.

But, this is the kind of the campaign structure we use within plumbing. I think I’ve got a slide here that [00:38:00] talks about how we structure it for, no, we don’t, but it, same concept within HVAC. You get AC repair, AC installation, indoor air quality, duct cleaning, and their separate subcategories for each, so that we can really dial these in.

Travis, reach out to Christian and he’ll make sure to get you the slides. And then basically if you look at this inside Google ads, right? You’ve got those different ad groups and then you’ve got the actual keywords for each one of the ad groups. And then we’ve got very specific text ads that aren’t just written for the sake of repeating the key word, but they’re written to try and sell the click.

And then we wanna make sure that we’ve got. All of our ad extensions so that instead of just a little block of text, maybe we’ve got an image, maybe we’ve got some site extensions, and we can take up more space on the search results. There’s an example here of one of our top performing ads with the with the direct call button built into it.

And the other thing is we don’t wanna land them on the homepage, right? There’s a distinction between your [00:39:00] homepage and a page that’s made for conversion. And as an example here, like this is the style of landing page we find works best where it’s, phone over top right hand corner, opportunity to request a very specific call to action specific to what they typed in.

On a special offer for first time customers, makes it compelling, makes it easily trackable and easily a attributed back to the original campaign. And you’d have a page like that for each one of those ad groups, right? So if they typed in drain cleaning, it’s gonna be a page that talks specifically about drain cleaning in that particular market.

So the question is. Do you have a well thought out landing page that’s specific to each ad group that you’re driving traffic to? Or are you just pushing to your homepage? Which is, like the lease effort, but also lease reward in terms of how well it’s gonna convert and how relevant it is.

Oftentimes I get asked what [00:40:00] should I be asking my PPC provider to make sure I’m in good hands? Number one, how much of my budget’s actually going to Google ads versus management fees? This is important if they’re commingling your investment. If they’re saying, Hey, just give us 10 grand.

We’ll spend some of it on Google Ads and other places, and you don’t know how much is actually going to the paid search campaign. That’s an issue, right? You need to know, here’s how much is going to us like we charge, and here’s how much is going to your Google ads. Here’s how’s going to retargeting, here’s how much, maybe going to re whatever, Facebook ads or whatever.

You need to know that and you need them to answer that question. What type of tracking have you put in place? Do you do Google ads and web form conversion tracking. Super important. And can you tell me how many calls came directly from the Google ads? Yes or no? If the answer is no, then they’re really not tracking your stuff in a way that’s gonna be preferential and you personally have no way to guess what’s gonna work.

So super important to have that in place. How well do you track key performance indicators and will you have a live dashboard? Will I be able to [00:41:00] see exactly how much I spent, how many leads I generated for the last month? What my average cost per lead was. If no, again, you wanna have those key metrics will you be setting up specific landing pages for each of the ad groups and will or will traffic be going to the homepage?

Really important, like to ask that, Hey, can you send me an example of what the landing page looks like? Just so I can know that you actually set it up correctly and I can just see it from my own personal reference. They won’t send it to you. There’s a good chance. They didn’t do it, and they’re just literally bidding on the term, sending it to your homepage and driving traffic, that is not gonna convert very well.

And then do you have split testing going on each of your ad groups? And are you leveraging extensions on your ads? And what is your target cost per lead and return on investment? Do they even know what they’re shooting for or are they just spending your money and hoping for the best? So hopefully this helps.

Feel free to take a screenshot of this particular slide because I think this is really useful as you’re [00:42:00] considering. I don’t think any of you should be doing this yourself, right? You guys are the owners of plumbing, HVAC, home service companies. You should be doing, running your business, right?

Hiring technicians, training the technicians. Hard enough to do that plus become a master at Google Ads, if you wanna learn it, I, I’m giving you lots of great insights here on how to do it, but you’re probably gonna say, who gonna hire to do this for me? And I think these are really important questions to ask to make sure you get great results.

Some of the things we pride ourselves in here at. Plumbing and hvac. SEO is some of the things we put into our campaigns. We split plan, we split the campaigns into strategic aggregate, just like I showed you broken down in a very granular way. We do set up conversion optimized landing pages.

We set up true conversion optimization, which means when the lead comes in, it passes back to Google Ads and we can make adjustments based on that, which makes a big difference and why we’re able to get some of the results I showed you earlier. It can keep going. We do provide you a dashboard where you can see exactly where your money went every day, every month, every quarter, and track those key [00:43:00] metrics.

I think probably most important is we’ve done this for, going on 300 plus plumbing, HVC electrical companies. So we’ve got a lot of data and we’ve got a lot of expertise and we’ve got a lot of split test information. And so we’ve got what would take, hundreds of campaigns of experience that we can hand right into your account, which is gonna help you get the best results right outta the gates.

And if you’re using ServiceTitan or House called Pro, we can actually do true ROI tracking so we can help you see, not just, what we think your ROI is, but what the true return on investment is. So that’s the scoop. The last thing I wanna talk about, and I wanna get you guys on with your day is.

Retargeting, and I think this is really important and I think retargeting and automation is mission critical. Leads that don’t get up, follow up within 15 minutes or less go cold, right? Leads that don’t get followed up with five to seven times are gonna probably go somewhere else. And so what we wanna do is.

Retarget people. So they get to the site, they start seeing our banner ads [00:44:00] all across the internet, and then we wanna make sure we put automation in place so that if somebody gets to the site and they submit the form or they call in and there’s not a live answer, an automatic text message goes out and there’s some automations that fire, we can even like layer AI into this, where they understand your company, they understand your services, they understand your service area, they understand, your parameters of who you work with and who you want, and what your availability on your calendar is.

And follow up with leads until they do say yes. And that’s something you wanna make sure you put in place as part of this process. And so if you’d some help with this, we’d love the opportunity to chat. You can give us a call anytime at (866) 610-4647. Or you can go to plumber seo.net/schedule.

And what we’ll do on that call is we’ll run a, an initial analysis of your current website, your current online rankings, be able to show you, hey, look, here’s the things that you’re coming up for. Here’s the things you’re not coming up for. Do a review of your current [00:45:00] paid search strategy and help you build a plan to grow the company and hit the goals that you’ve set out for yourself.

That, and we do all of that for free. We’re gonna give you that information. You can take it, the keyword list, the ranking report, the game plan and run with it. Or you could say, Hey, this sounds awesome. I’d like to hire you guys. And we’ll have that conversation if it makes sense.

But there’s no obligation to do that. And you can schedule that by going to plumber seo.net/schedule. That’s the scoop. Guys, thanks so much for hanging out with me today. I hope you got value from today’s session. If you have any questions, feel free to drop ’em into the chat. Or you can reach out to Christian or myself anytime by, by going to plumber seo.net orChristian@plumberseo.net.

Awesome. Thanks so much everybody. I’m gonna wrap it up there and we’ll see you guys next time.