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

Hello, and welcome. So excited to have you here. So excited for today’s session, we’re going to be talking all about how to accelerate your lead flow with paid marketing, right. And it used to be when we thought paid marketing, really what we thought of was Google ads, right? It was like, Oh, I’m gonna run Google ads. And that’s what I mean by paid marketing. I’m really, in today’s environment, when you think about your plumbing, HVAC, electrical business, there’s lots of different paid marketing strategies that you want to be paying attention to, that you want to be plugging into. And so really, yes, it’s Google ads, it’s local service ads. It’s retargeting. It’s social media. And so on today’s session, we’re gonna talking about what we’re finding is working best with plumbing, HVAC, electrical, home service contractors, to generate the leads, and have accelerated growth within their business by properly implementing these strategies. And we’ll talk a little bit about you know, where you might want to double down on certain marketing strategies and where you might want to pull back. So if you’re excited for today, and we’re ready to take on some new information and get some new insights, give me a one in the comments, just so I know that you’re there, and that you’re hearing me and that you’re seeing me correctly. Here’s what we’re gonna cover on today’s session. And I spent a lot of time kind of rethinking this re crafting it to try and make it as relevant for you guys, the owners of plumbing HVAC home service companies as possible. So number one, we’re going to talk about why

paid marketing is the ultimate strategy in terms of scalability for your lead flow, and really why you want to have paid search as part of what you’re doing for your company.

We’re gonna talk about what’s working best in paid in today’s market. Like I said, we’ve got local service ads, we’ve got Google ads, we’ve got Facebook and Tik Tok, like what’s actually working right now to keep the phone ringing to get the trucks running. I’ll show you some real world examples of companies we work with. That’s one thing I love to do on these sessions than just me talking theory on a talk theory. And then I’m going to show you real clients and say, like, here’s what we did with them, here’s the results they’re getting. And I’ll show you a couple of examples of clients getting at least a five to 15 times return on investment through paid search. I think that’s important, because sometimes we get this feeling that we’re spent a lot of money, but there’s no ROI. And I want to show you that when done correctly, can absolutely have a great return on investment. And then without getting too into the weeds, I’m going to show you some of the key components and things you want to think about to structure your your campaigns for the lowest cost per lead and a maximum return on investment. And then we’re going to talk about KPIs. Right? There’s some really cool innovation available now where instead of just saying like, Okay, I spent money, I got some leads, where we can truly say, here’s what you spent, here’s some of the leads you generated. And by connecting with your, with your dispatch platform, whether it’s service Titan, or housecall, pro, whatever platform you might use, as long as you’re actually running the revenue through those platforms, where we can show you the true return on investment. So type ROI in comments. Yep, that sounds pretty cool. Because the tighter you are, knowing where your money went, and what actually generated sales. And where there’s ROI, the closer you get to moving from a slot machine, right, a slot machine, you put some money in, you kind of run it and you hope, hey, maybe I’ll hit big, and a lot of times you don’t, versus a ATM, where you know, there’s money there, you’re gonna you’re gonna put in $1. And you’re going to take out more on a very consistent basis row. That’s what we want for you guys with your paid search, marketing, and everything else. So real quick, by way of introduction, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of plumbing and H mac seo, I’m the author of How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right. I’m very active in a lot of the industry associations like USC next door service roundtable, SEO warrior, and others. But I’d say more important than any of that stuff is at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVAC and electrical contractors in some of the most competitive markets across the country and been able to see them go from relative obscurity with their online marketing to the point where now they’re the dominant players, many of them seeing over a million dollars in annualized revenue growth. And so what I’m gonna be sharing with you isn’t based on theory, it’s not based on a book I’ve read somewhere. It’s not based on a blog article that I read on SEO journal or something like that. It’s based on years of experience working with contractors just like you, and really knowing what’s working, what’s not working and where things have changed. And so that’s why I think you can take a lot of stake in what we’re sharing with you today. Now, this is what we do. We’re on a mission to help 1000 Plumbing HVAC, electrical companies triple their sales by getting their internet marketing, right. We’ve got a full service digital marketing agency with over 35 full time employees. And so we do this all day, right building the websites, getting the ranks writing the content, running the paid search campaigns, putting the tracking in place

optimizing return on investment. So if at some point in this process, you’re like, Josh sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, maybe I should just hire him to help us with this, we’d love the opportunity to talk. I think Christian just dropped the link. If you go to plumber, SEO dotnet slash schedule, we will, we’ll schedule a time. And our meetings aren’t sales calls. They’re like we do an analysis of your current website, your current rankings, and we’ll be able to show you, here’s what’s good here, here’s where there’s room for improvement. And again, no pressure, right? We love doing this type of review for companies like you, because this is what we do all day long. So let’s get into it. Like talking today about paid search, it really fits into the greater

accelerated growth model, which our mission is to show you very consistently how you can triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right over the next 12 to 24 months. And we’ve developed we call the accelerated growth model. And it really talks about these three key pillars right in order to triple your sales. Regardless, if you’re at a million dollars right now $10 million. Right now, it really comes down to three things, we’ve got to drive leads. And there’s lots of channels for driving leads SEO, paid search, database remarketing and things like that, we’ve got to maximize conversion rate, which means we got to be able to convert traffic into leads, and then leads into jobs and then jobs into repeat customers. So we got to maximize conversion, we do that with our website reputation, and automation, like leveraging some of the latest automation technology available. And then we’ve got to optimize the results, which means maybe we got to increase the total spend, maybe we’ve got to dial in the average cost per lead and make sure it makes financial sense. And really, we’ve got to know what the ROI is and figure out what marketing channel we’re plugging into generates the best results. And so this is the big picture of all the things we believe you need to do to truly accelerate your growth. Again, a lot of times, it’s like, hey, I want to go from a million to 5 million, I need to spend a little bit more in my marketing, I just put more into my paid search, I need to put more money on the table. And as long as there’s an ROI associated with that, it can be a multiplier for your growth. So today, what we’re talking about on this grand scheme of things is just this piece right here, we’re going to talk all about in search and the different paid strategies where you can invest, to get more exposure to get more leads, and to get more more book jobs and more revenue for your business. So this is just another way of presenting that same information and kind of zeroing in on paid search.

Hopefully, you’ve seen some of the other sessions that I put on around how to set up your website for conversion, how to leverage automation, how to get ranked organically. And if that’s a topic of interest for you, you can just type that in comments or reach out to us if you’re watching this after the fact. And we can grab that recording and get it to you so that you get the information that you need right at the moment. So give me a yes, or one of the comments if you’re ready to get into paid search and like some of the key things you need to be thinking about from a paid search marketing perspective.

Okay, so first of all, why should Why should pay even be part of your internet marketing strategy, right? I mean, let’s face it, we all love organic and I’m a huge fan of non paid results, right word of mouth, coming up in the non paid listings on Google average cost per lead for that is practically nothing, right? It’s really usually high quality leads. But the reality is, there are reasons as you look to grow. And as you look to scale to make sure that you’ve got a paid component to your digital marketing strategy. Number one is that it gives you the ability to show up quickly, you know, with organic but and like let’s just say we’re going to focus on getting a website and getting it ranked. With organic it takes time, right, we’ve got to build that website, we’ve got to get the domain indexed, we’ve got to build links and relevance. And while it’s got a great long tail,

it takes some time, right, it’s usually going to take at least three to six months to see great momentum from organic perspective. The beauty of paid search, whether local service ads, or pay per click, or even some of the pay per lead services is you can start to take advantage quickly you can put some money behind it and start getting leads tomorrow as opposed to three months from now. The other reason I really think it should be part of your strategy is we want to show up in all of the places your customer is looking. The beauty of especially paid search and local service ads and things like that is it’s a very directional mechanism. Your customer has a problem right? The the electrical is not working. The heater is is not not working correctly. The plumbing is clogged, they’ve got a problem and so they’ve gone to their phone or they’ve gone to their desktop and they’re looking like I need a plumber in my area how to unclog my drink

In an emergency plumber near me, right, they’ve got a problem. And so we want to do everything we can to make sure we’re coming up in the results in pain in organic on the paid directory listing, so that we’re getting that customer when they’re in their moment of need. So really, really important that you’ve got that as part of your strategy. The other thing that I like with paid search is it gives us the opportunity to show up for things that we couldn’t potentially come up for organically, right, a lot of organic strategy would include terms like your city plus plumber, your city plus Drain Cleaning your city plus water heater repair, right, we’re optimizing for the local market. With paid search, we can come up for, even if the customer just typed in plumber in my area, or plumber, or whatever, AC repair indoor air quality. And so we can expand our reach outside of some of the more localized terms we might be able to come up with, organically. And I think really, the ultimate reason paid search should be part of your strategy is unlimited scalability, right, there’s a certain point at which you saturate all of your organic channels, let’s say you’re coming up really good organically for most of the keywords, but you still don’t have enough lead flow to keep the trucks running and to consistently be able to add new trucks, as you’re recruiting great technicians and you’re getting them ready to rock and roll, you need a knob that you can turn, hey, I’ve got a new truck coming on, what’s the knob I can turn? Well, if you’ve got your paid strategy dialed in, and you’re getting a good return on investment, you can sit ready for that next truck. And you can turn that knob and make sure that you’ve got the volume that you need in order to keep the trucks running and the business booming. So just give me a yes, if that makes sense. In terms of why we want to make sure that we’ve got paid search as part of our overall strategy. I’ve got a visual here and maybe hard to see from from the screen. But you know, really, when you run a Google search, you’ve got local service ads, you’ve got the paid ads, you’ve got the map listings. And when it comes to paid search expecially, we want to drive to a landing page that is built to like eliminate a lot of the decision that they need to make like on your organic website and go back and watch the How to set your website up for maximum conversion. There’s lots going on, right? We’re talking about our reviews, we’ve got links to all of our different services, maybe we get some videos and things like that, when it comes to paid search, we want to give them one decision. And we want to make it very linear. And I’m gonna be getting into that in the next couple of minutes and the next couple of minutes as we go. So specific to paid search and your paid search strategy. Really what we have is for paid marketing, I should say we’ve got paid search, paid social, and then you know pay per lead services and directories. And again, this is kind of how it’s expanded. Because for a long time in home services, when it came to paid marketing online, it was mainly just Google ads, right? Maybe bing ads if you’re feeling a little bit creative, right. But it has really expanded the pie and the different places where we can spend money and generate leads and generate service calls and have a consistent flow of deals. So when it comes to paid search, yes, Google ads is still kind of the bread and butter is still the main thing that you can turn on, you can run effectively, and you can drive outcomes. Second to that is local service ads, which we’re all familiar with, like the Google guaranteed program, you want to be maxing out your local service ads in your service area. I’m gonna talk a little bit about some of the things you can do to dial that in. But I would say prioritize local service ads put as much budget towards that as you can. Usually you can’t spend all of the money on the local service ads, and so then have all the remainder then going to your Google ads and retargeting. So it’s super important. I’m gonna, I’m gonna show a visual for this. What if we’re driving traffic through paid search ads through local service ads, even though they don’t want up on your site for local service ads, we’re driving traffic, we want to make sure that we’ve got retargeting in place so that our banner ads so that our social ads are showing up in front of the customer again and again and again. And that’s because not everybody converts immediately like some people, they’re looking for AC replacement, they may land on your site, they’re still thinking about it, they want to do a little bit more research. very cost effectively through retargeting, we can remain top of mind, and we can get back in front of that customer. So that’s paid search. From there, we’ve got paid social, and this is more brand strategy. But you kind of as you grow and as you scale to the next level, you know, you might want to be doing some Facebook ads, some YouTube ads, even Tiktok ads because you can saturate the local market, you can gain top of mind awareness. Again, I always lead with paid search and as you like as you have dominated that part of the equation, you can layer on paid social as well.

And then of course, there’s your pay pay, pay per lead and pay per directory services. Like Angie, which I know a lot of you guys don’t love, but it’s still a viable option. Yelp, next door, thumbtack e local. And you know the nice thing about these paid directories and these pay per lead services, you’re only paying per lead. Some people use those services as their main mechanism, we’re finding a lot of markets, customers are going straight to thumbtack, right? They just use thumbtack, that’s the place, they look for the services, and you pay on a per lead. And so by plugging into the sources, you’re gonna get another placeholder typically in the search results, right, so let’s say you come up in, guaranteed and you come up in paid, and then you come up in the organic results. Usually, even your Angie’s listing, or your thumbtack listing can actually come up or those sites come up very prominently. So it gives you another hook in the market to show up where your customers are looking. So taking a different way, if you think about the arrow, that’s the the paid search model, taken another way, I’m going to kind of show you how you would stack this and how I would suggest approaching all of these different paid strategies. So down at the bottom of a of a hierarchy of your of your strategy would be organic, right? Don’t just come in to the digital marketing sphere and say, Hey, I’m just going to do paid like, I’m going to do Facebook ads, I’m going to do Google ads, and we’re going to go crazy with it. I still believe the foundation of your marketing strategy is organic, right? Because you need to be coming up in the Nate non paid listings, your average cost per lead is so much less. And I’ve got lots of great content on what you need to do with your website to get it ranked. If you need that, just let us know. But that’s that’s the foundation moving up from there. As you look to grow and generate more results, you want to make sure you’re tapping into local service ads and Google ads, right, those two and Bing Ads, as more and more people start to move towards Bing because they like chat GPT and things being baked into it, we’re seeing a lot of people shifting towards me, so don’t sleep on Bing, but local service ads would be first and then paid search ads, right, because your your average cost per lead on local service ads or Google guaranteed we’re finding is is lower and the quality of the conversion is super high, you want to do both, but max out your local service ads. Hopefully that makes sense. So from here, as you’ve got your paid search running, and we’ll talk about some things you want to do on paid search to really run it effectively, I think you want to make sure that you’ve got retargeting and automation in play at the same time. Because if you’re getting people to your website, organically, you’re getting people to your website through through paid search, we know that you’re only going to be converting like 30 to 40% on the high side, which means 50 to 60% of the visitors to your site, were in your local area that were looking for your services, they just didn’t call, they just didn’t convert. And so through retargeting, we can remain top align with those customers, so that they remember us so that when they do finally make the call and make the conversion, they they see your ads, and I’ll talk about how to set retargeting up why it’s so important. But it actually serves two purposes, right, it’s going to help you convert more of the traffic that you incurred the cost to get. But it will also help you remain top of mind with your existing customer base. So they’re more likely to use you again to refer you to their friend, which can have a viral effect. And now attended to that if you’re running organic and you’re running paid, you have to be leveraging automation, which is using automation to follow up with your leads quickly so that when someone calls in or when they submit a request, or when they start a chat, they get dropped onto a pipeline, they get followed up with immediately via phone, email and SMS, we’re finding that when properly executed, automation can double or triple the conversion rate of your leads

into book jobs and into money. And so the better your conversion rates are, the better your outcomes. Hopefully this is making sense. I just want to kind of give you guys a stacking order for this somebody give me like a yes, or one of the comments if you’re still tracking along with me. So we’ve got organic, we’ve got paid and local from there, you do want to make sure you’re plugging into those paid online directories. So you know, you don’t want to talk about Angie’s List thumbtack, a local plumber, and some of those pay per lead services. The nice thing about some of those pay per lead services, you can ratchet them up and ratchet them down. So if for some reason you’ve got parked trucks, the paid search isn’t generating what you need your pay per lead, you can kind of turn that up as needed. Now at the very top of the hierarchy, we’re starting to think about branding, right and there is absolutely a place for being the known contractor in your market. Right. All of this is directional, like somebody’s looking not for you, but they’re looking for a service. Right and we want to show up when they’re looking for that service when they’re looking

To solve that problem,

branding is, we just want to get in front of the marketplace and become the contractor of choice where they see our trucks, they see our value proposition, they see our name, get that top of mind awareness. And so that’s to me where social ad ads come into play, whether that’s Facebook ads, Tiktok, ads, YouTube ads, you can put a pan around your local market, you can say, I want to make sure that my ads are being served to the homeowners in this market that are making over $120,000 per year. And I just want them to see me again and again and again and again. And as you grow, you know, let’s say north of 5 million, and you’ll look to go 10 20 million. Oftentimes, the category killer in your market, the one that’s doing 2030 $50 million per year, they’re not just reliant on directional advertising at that point, like they shifted to becoming the brand to creating awareness so that they can bypass somebody even looking. They’re just like, hey, I’m going to performance plan with this company, I’m going to call them, right. And so you know, less than 10 million you want to be prioritizing down here, I think, north of 10 million, you want to start looking at more brand advertising, and things like that. Give me Give me a yes in the comments if this tracks. But I’d say for most of us, we want to focus organic, local service ads and Google ads, some of these pay per lead directories. And we absolutely want to make sure we got to retargeting that are a nation dialed in.

Hopefully some good takeaways here. Hopefully, you guys you track it along with me. I’m getting some comments in here. For the first thing I said that the first thing you want to focus on is local service ads. And so if we run a search right now,

whatever your city is, Dallas, Drain Cleaning, Dallas Water Heater Repair. The thing that comes up at the top is the Google guaranteed listings, the local service add listings, and you want to be playing in this game. I think all of you want to be playing in this game, type LSA in the comments, if you’re already running local service ads, or no in the comments. If you’re not, it just helps me get a good sense, I think most of you probably are.

But you know, either way, I’ll talk a little bit about some things you need to to kind of pay attention to to get the best outcomes with your local search service. So we searched San Francisco plumber up at the top, that initial ban on organic and on I mean on on desktop, and mobile is what comes up very, very first, what you want to do, first of all, you want to get set up

the there’s a basic process where you go in, you tell Google, hey, I want to serve this area, and they’re going to do some background checks, you got to submit some data to them to kind of get approved in their Google guaranteed. From there, you need to make sure you dial in your service area profile and your budget. Lots of gotchas here. It’s it’s kind of a simple Wizzy way platform. But there’s lots of little things that you can do to maximize your flow and maximize your uptime in the rotation of only three results in that in that listing. Number three, and we’ll probably most overlooked by those of you that aren’t running local service ads yet is making sure that you mark the jobs as booked. So it’s a pay per call mechanism, somebody runs a search, they call your number, either by clicking it or by actually dialing it that gets tracked and it gets flown into the Google LSA dashboard. And you’re you’ll see a list of all of the leads that were generated, the contractors that are listening to those calls and marking the outcomes either as I booked this job, I didn’t book this job where this was a non qualified lead that needs to be credited back to me are getting, they’re gonna get most of the leads, right. So over time, if Google gives you 50 6070 100 leads through local service ads, and you will have somebody looking and marking the outcomes, eventually Google’s gonna look at you as a non responsive participant, and they’re going to start to rotate those leads to the other contractors, this is really important that you mark your jobs, deal with disputes, right? You know, you only have to pay for the leads that you do get. And so just make sure I mean the leads that are qualified in your service area. So make sure you have somebody disputing the non qualified leads.

Number four, it’s super important is to drive verified reviews, you want reviews, not even just Google reviews that you would get like if you were sending an email after the service call through pull Sam or through nearby now or through whatever platform you use. There’s a spot in the dashboard on local service ads where you can say this job was booked and request to review. And those reviews come in as verified reviews on local service as and you want to drive as many of those as you can. And so I really believe to be effective with this. You want somebody to set the profile up correctly. You want somebody that’s listening to those calls and reading the outcomes.

Closing the loop in the dashboard. And then you want somebody pushing the review request manually. Unfortunately, at this point, it has to be manually to drive more verified reviews. And then you want to be targeted at 5% booking rate. This is just, there’s a metrics dashboard that you have within local service ads, where you can see what percentage of the leads actually got booked or marked as booked. And so this is something you want to manage for in the reporting, right within local service ads.

And so

little things go a long way on this particular front.

Number one, I would say be sure you’re playing local service ads, if you haven’t already, get the background check, get yourself, you know, guaranteed and get into the rotation, expand the budget, what really, if you’re getting if you get four grand dedicated to it now, up to 10. It’s not all going to spend usually, but you need to make sure that you get that money so that you can be in the rotation. And then make sure that you get somebody that understands how to set the profile up correctly, optimize the profile and close out the outcomes. This is something we do as a standalone service. And that we can do for you if you’re one of our clients, we will manage this entire process for you. Christian, I don’t know if you have the link, I think it’s plumber, SEO dotnet slash LSA. If you’re interested in talking specifically about having us help you optimize your outcomes with local service ads, we can definitely help you with that. Yep, Christian just dropped in the link. So that’s local service ads. Number two is Google Ads ran, I really think you want to be sure that you’re optimizing your outcomes. Again, we’re showing up in the paid results in the paid listings. And then we’re sending them straight to an optimized landing page that matches what we’re looking for. I’m going to show you exactly what I mean, you should be able to really be clear. And

with local service ads,

let me know in comments here, this is a good spot for engagement.

Run like type in PPC, if you’re currently running Google ads, or you’ve run Google ads at some point in the future, we’re in the past, I should say.

All right, Dan’s running PPC a lot. I mean, I would say most of you have probably won PPC, at some point. Um,

what I find why talk with a lot of contractors is they’ve spent money on PPC, they didn’t get a good return on investment. And they feel like man, like PPC is a waste of money. It’s like flushing, flushing money down the toilet, because I’m spending $1,000 or $2,000, or $5,000. And maybe I generated enough leads to cover my cost, if I’m lucky. But most of the time, it’s a negative ROI. And I want to kind of talk about why most PPC campaigns fail and what you can do differently in order to generate a tangible, measurable return on investment from your from your Google ads. Specifically, I think one of the main reasons most campaigns fail is because they fail to understand the Google Ads auction process, they don’t understand that it’s not just about who spends the most per click on Google, it really, there’s a quality score in play, and a relevancy factor in play, that impacts what you’re going to pay in order to be in the top position. And so knowing that there’s very specific things you can do differently to generate better outcomes. So

first of all, it’s not understanding that that’s the way that it works. Second of all, it’s, it’s thinking as plumbing, or HVAC, or electrical is just one service item has a lot. A lot of the bigger companies you might have dealt with, I’m not gonna say any names. But maybe like the massive companies that you dealt with that they came in, they had great conversation with you, oh, we’re gonna set these landing pages, we’re gonna extract the ROI and your phone’s gonna ring off the hook. They don’t understand that within plumbing. It’s not just

plumbing, right? And it says, regardless of what they type, plumber, plumbing, Drain Cleaning, water heaters trenchless, sewer replacement, repiping, right? With HVAC repair, AC repair, heating, repair, indoor air quality, like they would just like, put all of those key words and say, Hey, we’re running ads for everything, without breaking it down and having a different ad group for each of those different terms, having a different landing page and text ads for each of those terms. And so it’s really like, this is the big mistake, I see a lot of people doing it themselves. Doing it with an in house individual that doesn’t understand how to set it up properly, or dealing with a big company is that they set up one ad group for all the stuff and they’re sending traffic basically, to the homepage. So we’re not using specific text ads and landing pages. There’s no strong call to action on the landing page. Here’s the deal for driving traffic. We’re spending 1729 $50 per click, we better make sure that we’re retargeting the person when they get to the page and that when they do get to the page

It’s got a strong call to action that matches exactly what they were looking for. And so here’s the recipe for failure, as I look at a lot of these campaigns is want to take all of the terms plumbing, emergency Drain Cleaning, garbage disposal, and we’re sending it right to the homepage, right, and we’re not able to track the conversions, we’re not able to push it back to Google ads, we’re not converting that traffic at the level that it needs to be done. And so there’s some very specific things you can do differently to generate better results. And because I hear so often from plumbing HVAC home service companies that they tried Google ads, and they didn’t get a return on investment, I want to show some some some case studies of our actual clients and show you the actual data and show you that you can absolutely get a five to 15 time return on investment from Google Apps. And so one of the companies we work with as Cardinal, you know, they’re a plumbing HVAC, electrical company that we work with. And here’s our our dashboards, we’re very close. With data, like we want to be able to show how much you spend, how many leads to generate, what’s your average cost per lead. And so you can see here, it’s about a $12,000 investment, that would be our management fee, you know, plus the spin on Google ads, we track everything. So we get 936 leads for an average cost per lead at $12.82. And we can see like 223 came directly from organic, and I’m a big big believer in organic, I’m 24 from Google ads, pay per click, and 387 from Google Maps, right. And so if we want to drill down on this, so let’s look specifically at the Google ad campaign. So total spend that went to Google ads directly was $9,000. And from there we had 224. Leads, that’s an average cost per lead of $40 per lead, which which is a great measurable, winnable number on a on a per lead basis. And so if we plot this out, we kind of do the math, and really look at is this making it rain for the client is this generating return on investment, to earn 24 leads average conversion rate of about 40%. Right? Everyone knows, sometimes you’re higher than that, sometimes you’ll lower than that. But that’s a lead comes in what percentage is converting so it’s just using 40%. In this case, that’s two and 24. And 40% conversion rate would be 89. Book jobs. Let’s say the average ticket was 750. And I know if your next door seal warrior, or even service round table, your average ticket is higher than this. But just if you use 750, as the average, that’s even on jobs at 750 $66,000. In collected revenue, that’s a seven time return on investment, if you just kind of do the math on that. And so this is a real world example of an HVAC contractor, we’d love to see that number greater. But I believe as long as you’re seeing at least a three time return on investment, dollar spent to revenue generated, you can continue to scale that up, we shoot for a minimum of three times we’re targeting at least a five time return on investment from our Google Ads campaigns. Here’s a company we work with in Miami, Florida, Falcon plumbing, you can see here $6,000 spend for under 44 leads $14.28 per lead, you kind of see where those leads break down. If you look specifically at the at the paid portion of this 3800 towards paid 237 book

generated calls. $16 per per per lead. Even if you do the math 237 leads at a 40 40% close ratio $550 average ticket in this particular case, that’s $51,000 in revenue, that’s a 13 time return on investment. And so I could show a bunch of examples like this, I just wanted to feature a couple just type case study and comments. If it’s helpful to see some real case study data. It’ll just validating like if you do this right, and I’m gonna show you exactly what to do, you can get a tangible, measurable return on investment from your Google ads. So let’s talk a little bit about how to structure your ads for maximum return on investment.

Number one, you have to have conversion tracking like this is mission critical. If you’re running Google ads, if you’re running bing ads, you need to be able to see not just that you got some leads, but conversion tracking that flows back into the platform so that you know which ad group which keyword generated it so that you can optimize and you can let some of your automations optimize the outcomes. Your ad campaigns have to be broken into smaller ad groups. So you know, I’ll show some examples of this but plumbing needs to be separate from emergency plumbing needs to be separate from indoor air quality, right? You want to break up your ad groups with very specific keywords, very specific text ads, and very specific landing pages to truly optimize your outcome.

Got to have the right match types. I don’t want to get too technical enough.

Focus on the ad 20. But you can get yourself in a lot of trouble using broad match and modified broad match, you really need to make sure that whoever’s running your campaign understands the different match types for keywords, and that they’re also negating certain words. But one of the biggest gotchas I see is we’re running a campaign that feels like it’s pretty well optimized, but there’s no negative keywords. So somebody might type in plumbing job, right. And you might get a bunch of clicks for that. But the person wasn’t looking for plumbing services, they’re literally a plumber looking for a job. And so there’s a lot of examples like that we’ve got hundreds of words on our negative keyword list. So super important that you understand match types, and that you’re negating the non relevant terms.

The way that you write your text ad is really important, right? Because a lot of your key a lot of your quality score is based on

how many times did your ad come up? What’s the click through rate on your ad? And what’s the relevancy of the landing page. And so if you don’t have a good tech, a good text ad, that’s making people want to click you, your click through rate is going to be lower with a lower click through rate, your relevancy score is going to be lower your quality score is going to be lower, you’re going to wind up spending more on a per click basis than you need to.

And then we want to make sure we leverage text ad extensions, Google gives us lots of little widgets we can play with, we can add little elements that make our ads stand out even more on the page. And super important, I talked about this briefly, but you’ve got to make sure that you’re driving the traffic, not to the homepage. But to a very specific style of landing page, we’re finding that landing page versus homepage generates about a two time better conversion from visitor to lead expecially from paid search. So you know, you want specific landing pages, for the different ad groups that should run it, this will have a huge impact, it takes a lot of extra energy, it takes a lot of extra mapping in terms of which keyword goes to which landing page, but it really does generate a lower cost per lead, and a better return on investment, which is what makes this whole engine part right, it’s very easy to set this up incorrectly spend a bunch of money, not get enough leads and have a negative ROI, at which point, you got to come out from that rotation and not even be in the game anymore. So that’s super important. And then you should always be split testing, tweaking and fine tuning. The thing with Google ads, it’s not set and forget it right, you can’t just set up your ad groups, set your bids and call it a day, you should always have two versions of your text ads running so that you can figure out which one converts best. And by doing that over time, you can constantly be improving your click through rate, which is improving your quality score, which is improving your average cost per click, which is going to reduce your average cost per lead. You should also be really split testing your landing page, which version landing page converts best, right and over time you do the same there. And if you can improve your ads, and then you can improve your landing page conversions. You can really optimize this over time. I’m trying to go a little bit more in depth on this. I do typically I know, I don’t want to go so deep that I’m losing all of you. But I want to give enough deputy Okay, see some things I could change. Just give me a one of the comments if this is helpful. And you’re kind of tracking along with me love to get some feedback from those of you that are on with us live. So out of all of that, the main thing I would say is, if you don’t have conversion tracking in place, don’t spend money on Google ads, right? You know, it’s very hard to generate ROI, even when you’ve got this dialed in. And so make sure you got this in place, make sure that the contractor you’re working with the agency, the service provider understands this, and really has it tracked in a super, super specific way. Conversion Tracking essentials, like at a minimum, you want to have dynamic number swapping for paid traffic versus organic traffic versus direct traffic, right? It’s easy to put a tracking number on your website and say, Okay, we got you know, 227 website calls.

That only gives you so much useful information. Really what we want to do is have a script so that depending upon if they got their from paid search organic, a different number shows up right at it at a minimum, you want to have that type of numbers whopping in place. And there’s lots of great services for this, whether it’s call rail, or what converts. We do this in conversion amp, you want to be able to have a script so that you can see which calls came from which channel This helps you identify what’s actually working. The next level beyond that would be to have a keyword pool specifically for your Google ads. Because if you’re bidding on a bunch of different keywords and you’ve got a bunch of different ad groups, you need to be able to

tell Google, which ad group actually generated a lead, so that you can push that data back into the system. And so with a keyword pool, basically, you get like six or seven numbers that rotate, right. And if you had tons of traffic, you might need more. But usually, even for numbers rotating gives you the ability to timestamp to figure out which

keyword did they type, which ad group generated the lead, and you can push that back through. So I think most digital marketing agencies should have not just call tracking in place what for you guys, but you should have a dynamic number pool so that we can truly identify which campaigns are generating the results. We should have webform tracking, more and more of your customers have moved from wanting to call in to wanting to book directly online, to submit a form to start a two way chat. And so you want to make sure that you’ve got that tracked as Lee that goes back into your tracking. And it’s really important that you’re not just tracking this to look at it manually, the data needs to be flowing back into Google, so that you’re passing that type of data back to make better decisions through your manual calculations. And ultimately, over time, as AI gets smarter and smarter, so that you can feed Google, hey, I spent five grand with generate a tour and 27 leads. These were the ad groups that generated those outcomes helped me barked. Google’s automation helped me figure out how to optimize my five brand to get the best return on investment. And so that’s why having this conversion tracking is so important.

KPIs right, as you think about running this correctly, and and really dialing in your paid search strategy, it’s important to know what your key performance indicators are. So you can know hey, we’re doing good, or we’re doing bad, do we need to go just something what we’re shooting for? Obviously, we need to very easily be able to say how much they spent. Right? If my budget is 10 grand, have I spent my 10 grand? Am I over? Or am I I’m under total spend very easy to track, average cost per click right? What’s it costing me every time somebody clicks? And this varies on a market by market basis, right? LA is gonna be much different than Tupelo, right? But you need to know like, is it costing me $19 Every time somebody clicks? Or is it costing me $1.50, right, depending upon your quality score, depending upon the relevancy of your of your campaign, your average cost per click should be comparatively less than the competition. And then most importantly, we really want to be optimizing for average cost per lead. And that’s how many people called in how many web forms were submitted, how many chats were initiated, and what we’re finding kind of a benchmark to shoot for. In today’s market with locals with Google ads, specifically, plumbing, it’s going to be somewhere between 50 to $90 per lead, right. And it’s going to vary. If it’s a repiping search versus a water heater search, that’s kind of the average, we’re finding a water heater, installation leads going to be somewhere between 102 $150 per lead. Drain Cleaning has tons of competition, because you’ve got the drain specific companies, somewhere between 50 and $100. On the high side, and very competitive markets. Of course, we all know, if you’re smart plumbing company, you can take a train a drain lead, and convert it into a very high transaction value on the back end and be very profitable. On HVAC, somewhere between 90 and $175 per lead repairs and maintenance is less than somewhere between 85 and $150 per lead installation replacement between 102 $100 per lead. And it’s important that you don’t just try and bucket your average cost per lead. And that’s why these breakdowns are important, because let’s face it, is an install somebody looking to replace their system more valuable to you than

a repair? And the answer is absolutely. So knowing that you can shift your budget to house spend a little bit more, you know, I’ll shoot for a little bit more average cost per lead. As long as I know, I’m going to get this bigger job on the back end. And then electrical is going to be between 35 to 270 $5 per lead. That’s kind of the range that we shoot for. Hopefully this is helpful. This is our latest data in terms of what we’re seeing is the average cost per lead for these various services. Of course, we work with over 175 Plumbing HVAC, electrical contractors across the country. So this is a very good data set across this across this. But really in my mind, these benchmarks are helpful, but the most important thing, the most important metric you’re shooting for in your paid search campaign is return on investment. Right? Who cares if it costs you $300 to generate a lead if it generated a $3,500 install?

elation are a $10,000 installation on the back end. So I really internally and focused, how do we structure these campaigns? How do we get the average cost per lead as low as possible. But more important is that we’re all on the same page, if we want to grow, we want to triple our sales, that’s about revenue. It’s not even about the number of leads. And so let’s focus on the return on investment.

So you want to make sure that you or whoever you’re working with, can show you a dashboard where you can easily see how much should we spend on the leads that we generate from that, what was our average cost per lead, and kind of move towards optimization of that kind of the next level beyond that is making sure that you’ve got your phone calls ringing in to your system in a way that you can see, or how much did we spend, how many leaves came in and what actual revenue was generated that a projection, but actual revenue. And so initially, when when service Titan set up their marketing scorecards, that was the idea, right, here’s our pay per click number, how many of those calls in leads generated revenue. And so that’s the next level up, I’m really excited to say, we actually now have a next level reporting mechanism, where we can take a feed directly from service Titan or house call Pro, and hopefully some other platforms as they come online, and really be able to show you not guesstimates, but true matched, and booked jobs and book revenue automatically. And so that’s where a lot of the struggle has been with service Titan, the data is there, but you’re gonna manually figure it out, you’re gonna manually calculate it. And it’s very hard to ascertain, like, is that accurate? You know, is it is it showing me the real data. And so with our, with our updated reporting platform, and this comes at a premium, because there’s a large cost associated with implementing it, and, and really keeping it up to date, you can see how many leads came in how many active customers what matched back to service Titan, or to house call Pro, how much revenue was actually generated, like, and this is based on dispatch revenue through your platform, and what’s our return on investment. And this is a real, this is a real client, like this is one of the clients we work with, where you can see what they spent 12 grand, what actual revenue was generated, which is $126,000. It’s the 4,000% ROI, not based on theory, but based on their real tracking, type ROI. That’s pretty cool. If you like, especially as you get to over a million over 5 million, the better your your ROI tracking is, the more you can you can grow, right, the more you can really confidently expand your your horizons. And so that and then, you know, some cool things we can do is we can drill down by zip code, how much revenue was actually generated from the online marketing strategy based on zip code? What are the zip codes that generate the best return on investment?

Where did the money come from, how much of it came from organic, versus, you know, our actual advertising versus other advertising channels. Really excited about this, I’m really excited about bringing this to the plumbing HVAC home service industry and really taking us one step beyond just guessing our ROI or kind of projecting ROI, to truly tying it back to actual customers and actual booked revenue.

So, again, I don’t want to get too too technical here. But I do want to give you some specifics. Again, we want to break our campaigns down into very specific groups. So you want to have a brand campaign. And you can argue with me on this. But if someone’s typing in your actual company, let’s say your company is Valley plumbing, and you’re in Salt Lake City, Utah, if somebody types in Valley plumbing, you don’t want your competition up there, you want to make sure you’re up there and you’re coming up organically and then your secondary and third listings are coming up. And so you want to have a brand campaign a general plumbing campaign. So let’s just say looking for plumber plumbing services, plumbing

hydrojetting Drain Cleaning, I break that down, I don’t want to get too specific water heaters all of the different water heater repair replacement, tankless water heaters still repair trenchless repiping. And this is what I mean, each one of these categories would be a separate ad group. And you do the same thing with an AC, AC repair, AC installation, AC maintenance, right, and you break down those specific ad groups. And so within Google ads, if you look at it, you’ve got a brand Geo, you’ve got plumbing, you’ve got all of the different services. And then if you drill into that, and you can see within let’s say Drain Cleaning, we’ve got a whole set of keywords that we’re specifically using that would spawn that particular ad group. And then we’ve got text ads and again, we want to have at least two text ads that were constantly rotating to see which has a higher close ratio or higher conversion rate from search to click. This

impacts your quality score it impacts

Your your average cost per click, which is going to impact your average cost per lead. So like in this case, the one on top is the 70% versus 9%. So we can optimize for that to generate better results and better outcomes.

Some of our best performing text ads, again, I don’t want to get too into the weeds, what, where you can really make sure that you’ve got compelling copy that sells the click sells the reason they want to click on your ad versus the competition, it can have a huge impact, again, on your outcomes on your conversion rates. This is what our best converting text ad looks like on mobile.

From their text ad to landing page, we want specific landing pages for the different thing, right, if they typed in Drain Cleaning, we want them to land on a page that talks about drain cleaning, and makes a specific offer for drinking. So like this is one of our companies colonial plumbing. And you could see obviously, it scrolls from here. But you’ve got a really nice page that doesn’t have a lot going on. It says local service, special offer phone number, and then down here on the left is a webform, you want to make sure that you’re driving traffic to very specific pages like this, not the homepage on your website. And so like same thing, like here’s the drain version of this, and if you scroll down, you’ll see the drain specific content and why somebody would want to contact them. This serves two purposes, it matches what the person typed to the actual landing page. That’s going to improve relevancy quality score, but then it also is more compelling for the person searching because they’re like, man, I was looking for drain cleaning, I clicked an ad that talks about Drain Cleaning and says, Hey, we’re the local Drain Cleaning experts. And it speaks all about drain cleaning, and there’s a drain cleaning offer. That is one of the reasons these convert as well as they do. And so from a broader sense, like this is a format we found works really well. Headline at the top left that’s about the service offer that they can click on that makes them want to choose you versus the competition that’s relevant to the situation, a web form they can fill in, and a very simple call to action. Now if you scroll down, there’s testimonials and everything else. The key is to make sure that it’s congruent with what they typed in. And it doesn’t give them 100 decisions, right? If they typed in Drain Cleaning, we want them to call about drink cleaning, or schedule a call specific around Drain Cleaning.

Hopefully that makes sense. Give me a one in the comments if that makes sense. It’s not lost on me that most of you guys on here, one plumbing, HVAC, electrical companies, and you’d like to understand how this stuff works. You’re not going to go in and personally run the campaign, right? Probably nobody on your team is going to personally get in and run the campaign. And so over the years, the question I get most often is like, what should I be asking my PPC contractor? What should I be asking to see if they’re doing a good job or a bad job? And so I want to walk through some of the key things you want to ask a new provider you’re considering? Or maybe just go to your existing provider and ask, hey, just so I know, like, do you have these things in place? And so number one question I think you want to ask is how much of my money is going to Google Ads versus your management fees? Right? You need to know that number. Some companies, unfortunately, they’ll say, Hey, give us five grand a month. And we’re gonna we’re gonna run your campaigns. And if you were to ask, like, how much of that is going to Google ads?

How much is going to manage or how it’s going to retargeting like, Hey, don’t worry about that. It’s all blended, right? And you can’t really truly quantify your outcomes and manage your results if you don’t know where the money’s going. So I think this one’s really important. You want to have that transparency to see how much is it two grand going to Google ads and 1002 retargeting? Is it, you know, five grand, four grand going straight to you guys as pocket to manage this for me? How’s this stuff being split up? Number two is what type of tracking Do you guys have in place? Are you tracking the Google Ads calls and the web conversions and pushing it back into the Google Ad console? Or do you have conversion tracking really, really fleshed out? Again, if they don’t have that, that’s gonna put you at a major disadvantage versus the competition? Do the delineate paid Pay Per Click versus organic calls? I think this is, at the minimum, you should be able to see how many calls came in from organic versus pay per click.

Are you going to track your KPIs? Will I have some type of live dashboard where I can see how many leads we got, what our average cost per lead was and what our return on investment is? You want to make sure you got access to those metrics? Are you setting up specific landing pages for each of the different categories of things somebody might type in? Can I see my landing pages show me what is my drain page look like versus my water heater page versus my emergency plumbing page? Like show me those pages prove to me that that is broken down? Again. If you don’t have specific landing pages, your relevancy score is going to be less, your conversion rates going to be lower.

Lower, which means you’re gonna pay more per lead and your conversion, your number of leads and revenue generated isn’t going to be where it needs to be. Are you split testing your ass? Like for the drain stuff? Do you have two ads running? Are you constantly trying to figure out which ad is outperforming? And are you optimizing to generate higher and higher click through rates higher and higher conversion rates for the ads that we’re running?

are you leveraging the ad extensions to make our text ads kind of generate better results? What are our what are our benchmarks? What are we shooting for? What’s the average cost per lead that we’re targeting? Do we know Do we have something that we’re that we’re aiming for, right? Ask for that data?

I think if you get those questions answered from your provider, you’ll get some insights, maybe, hey, look, they’ve got all this stuff in place, and they’re doing a great job, right. And they’re mentioned benchmarks makes sense. That’s wonderful. And they know, you know, there’s probably money being spent that can be better utilized. And if you’re interested in talking with us, and having us evaluate what you have in place, we’d love the opportunity to talk again, that’s a plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule, we’ll do a free evaluation to be able to show you exactly where there’s things that are going well, Cliff Notes, things that we do different that most agencies don’t have. So part of the reason our campaigns perform as well as they do, we do split out very, very aggressively. The ad groups like this is what we do all day. And so we’ve been working in plumbing, HVAC, and electrical for the last 10 plus years, we’ve run hundreds and hundreds of these campaigns, we’re very familiar with the services with the ad groups, and kind of how to really break this down to the granular level, we have conversion optimization, conversion optimized landing pages, and we change this every month that we try and figure out which version of the landing page is going to outperform. And we’re not doing that on a one by one basis, we’re able to look at the aggregate of hundreds of plumbing HVAC home service companies. And that lends to the outcomes we’re able to bring to the table. We have true conversion optimization, which means as we generate a lead, it pushes back to Google ads, and we’re actually optimizing the campaign. Based on that data. We know what came from organic versus pay per click, you know, which keywords actually drove a call at which lead. This makes it possible to optimize the results. And to generate better outcomes. We give you a really cool dashboard where you can see your average cost per lead. And your your true return on investment. If you’re willing to invest in the true data that matches to service Titan or to housecall. Pro, you’ll be able to see the actual return on investment.

And we’re completely transparent. So in our world, do you know how much we got, you know how much went to Google ads, you know how much went to retargeting, and so there’s no guesswork, like we’re very transparent. We’re here to work on your behalf. Here’s how much money we spent, here’s where it went, here’s your average cost per lead and all the data that you need in order to make good decisions. So hopefully this has been helpful. Hopefully, you got some good insights on how to run better Google ads, what to look for in your campaigns, your landing pages, what to look for in your contractor to make sure you get the right company managing this for you. And really making sure that you’re being well taken care of to get the best outcomes to have that knob that you can turn as you grow. And as you scale. So we talked about local service ads, we talked about Google ads. I’m going to breeze through the rest of this quick. But the next thing is we want to make sure we’ve got retargeting and automation in place.

Type retargeting in the comments if you’re familiar with what retargeting is, how it works, that is already patched as you know.

Ultimately, what this means is somebody gets to your site, they’re pixeled. And now they start to see you in banner ads on like, the famous websites that they go to the non-famous website, they go to on Facebook, we want to retarget to get them back to the site, we know that someone that comes back to your site is twice as likely to convert into a lead. And then we want to also leverage automation, which means when a lead comes in a phone call web form a live chat, we’re following up immediately through automation via phone, email, and SMS. This has a huge impact on your outcomes and the results that you generate. We know if you don’t follow up in 15 minutes or less, they’re gonna go somewhere else. We know that if they didn’t convert on the initial call, we need to touch them five to seven times before they convert. And we also know that your customer in today’s environment would prefer to engage with you via SMS than a live phone call. Right and so these are all trends that you want to be aware of and you want to be paying close attention to and the beauty of it is through automation. You can get this done consistently and well and convert significantly more of your leads into sales. So a visual on retargeting, so he gets the website, they get pixeled they start to see you on their different websites that they visited.

If they click back to your website, and they’re more likely to convert, that’s just a proven method. The common sizes are, you’ve got the big one along the top, the one along the side, and then you’ve got your social feed ads, you want to be you want to be showing up, right? Why not show up, to get them back to the site if they haven’t converted, and keep top of mind with your customers, right? Your lowest cost customer is going to be the one that you’ve already done business with. And so there’s no reason not to pixel set the length of your retargeting as wide as possible so that your customers see you again and again and again. And they’re like, Man, why would I go anywhere else these guys are in my social feed, they’re showing up in my inbox, they’re following up with me through automation, we’ll talk about that on another webinar.

And they’re going to use you, they’re going to refer you, which is what we’re all after.

In terms of automation, again, we’re already kind of at the hour. So I don’t want to go too deep on this, I have a whole training on how to increase your lead flow, and your book jobs through automation. But we’ve got this platform called Conversion amp. And what it does is it makes it so that when a lead comes in, via a web form on your website, or via the chat widget on your website, they immediately are gonna get a phone call, it’s gonna call your often so you get a lead press one to connect now that we were calling up in 15 minutes or less, they’re gonna get a text message, Hey, I saw you just filled in the form, how can I help? And they’re going to be added to a long term drip sequence that follows up with them if they haven’t converted? Hey, did you get that book? Hey, would you like some help with that, and we know for sure that if you follow up quickly, you follow up via text, message and phone, and then you’ve got a sequence that stays top of mind, you can get three to five times better conversion from your leads into your book jobs. And that makes everything you’re doing from a marketing perspective, more effective. So if you want to learn more about that you go to conversion amp.com. You can also schedule a demo there, we’ll walk you through exactly how it works. And you can see exactly how this plays out in the real world.

Oh, hopefully that makes sense. But if you take all of this in combination, right, you set up your local service ads correctly, and you optimize it, you get lots of lead flow coming in, you set up your Google ads correctly, you get an average cost per lead. That makes sense. You have unlimited traffic, then you set up retargeting automation, you convert more and more of that traffic, and more and more of the leads in the book jobs and book sales. You can absolutely grow and scale your plumbing, HVAC lead flow and take things to the next level. I hope you got great value. Hope you got great insights. Again, if you’d like some help with this, if as you were listening, you’re like, you know, Josh, and his team seemed like they’ve got a pretty good mechanism here to help me get better results online. They’re doing some things a little bit differently. We’d love the opportunity to chat. You can go to plumber, SEO dotnet slash schedule. And just you know, when you schedule with us, it’s not like, hey, you know, here’s how much you cost, like, good luck. Do you want to hire us or not? It’s not a veiled sales call, our team does some serious due diligence, we’re gonna pull up your website, we’re gonna run a ranking report, we’re gonna show you where you’re coming up and where you’re not coming up, we’re gonna review your current paid strategy and Bill to show you, you know, where there’s room for improvement where there’s holes, and we’re going to spend some time aligning where you are right now what your goal is over the next 12 to 24 months and see, hey, look, if we did this, this and this differently, can we help get you to that goal faster? Can we help you grow to the next level? And if we can, and if it makes a lot of sense.

We’ll we’ll talk about how much it costs and we can decide whether or not it’s a good fit. So again, no pressure, no obligation, you go to plumber, SEO dotnet slash schedule, or you can call us anytime. 866-610-4647 Thank you so much for being on here. Do you have follow up questions, feel free to post them in the comments here or post them wherever you happen to be watching this after the fact and says good stuff, lots of homework to do. Fantastic, hopefully, hopefully really valuable information that you can sink your teeth into Anna and the rest of you. Thanks for being on here. Thanks for your engagement. It’s been my pleasure to walk you guys through this. I look forward to talking with you all soon. Thanks, everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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