People in the carpet cleaning business have found online
advertising to be very effective for their business. You can target very specific and highly
focussed traffic and keep an easy track of your advertising spending and your
return on investment.
While Google advertising can be easy, it can also lead to
unnecessary costs and wasted money if done ineffectively.
As with everything, there is a right way and there is a wrong
way to do Google Ads. This guide will teach you the basics you need
to get up and started.
Why PPC ads are great
PPC (pay per click) ads are great because they allow you to
get started quickly and get your ad in front of customers eye balls. If you want to perform search engine
optimization (SEO) in order to rank highly in Google, this can take a lot of
money and certainly it will take a long time until you see any meaningful
results.
With PPC advertising you can have your ad set up and ready
to go literally within minutes. Of
course, there is a cost involved. You
will pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
In the end you will need to run a test and see if the costs are
justified.
Start off by figuring out the keywords you want to target
Google ads PPC (pay per click) ads are triggered when
someone types a search term you want to advertise for. For example, if you had a carpet cleaning
business in Parramatta you might want to target people searching for terms like
“carpet cleaning Parramatta” or “Parramatta carpet cleaning”.
The first step is to go to the Google Keywords Tool and find
out exactly what are the popular and relevant search terms (you can go to the
Google Keywords tool by clicking here… go on, I’m waiting).
Now, start off by typing in a search term you think might be
popular. Again, let’s stick with the
Carpet Cleaning Parramatta example.
Since Parramatta is a city in Australia, you’ll want to set the target
country to Australia and make sure that the search language is checked as
English. Change the “Match type” to “Exact”
(more about this later…).
After you’ve started the search, press on the Keywords ideas
tab. This is a great tool since it will
show a list of related searches around the subject that you typed in the box at
the top. This is the way to find out
which keywords you should be targeting and how much you can expect to pay for
each click.
For this example, you can see that “Carpet Cleaning
Parramatta” is indeed the most popular search term with 590 local (Australian)
searches per month. You can also see
that the CPC (cost per click) is $11.96.
Work out roughly whether PPC advertising is right for you
Let’s take a look at the above figures and work out whether
PPC advertising offers us good value. Since
in this example each click will cost $11.96, let’s say that 20% of customers
landing on our site will end up making contact with us and of those 1/3 will
end up becoming paying customers. You’ll
also need to consider your average revenue per client, which in this case we’ll
estimate as $90.
So, for 100 people who come to the site, using our estimates
20 will end up leaving their details or calling us. Of these 20 customers, approximately 7 will
end up using our services. Since the
average revenue per customer is $90, this will lead to revenues of $630. On the other side of the books, 100 clicks will
cost us around $1200. So from this rough
calculation, things are looking pretty gloomy.
The only way to know for sure is to test
While the estimate above may or may not be correct, the only
way to know for sure is to actually start a campaign and test it out – that’s
the beauty of Google ads. You can easily
set your own budget, but make sure that the test is large enough to give you a
statistically significant result (you can use this sample size calculator http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html)
The key drivers
The key factors which determine whether the advertising
campaign will be effective are your “sign up rate” and your “conversion rate”. The sign up rate is the percentage of people
who leave their details or contact you after landing on your website. The conversion rate is the percentage of
people who actually end up paying for your service.
There are lots of tricks available to increase your sign up
rate (which we’ll go into later).
Whatever tactic or tactics you use, a great tip is to aim to capture as
many leads as possible. Instead of
letting people just click and browse on your site, you want to try and capture
some sort of detail such as an email or phone number. One way to do this is to offer a special
promotion which people can redeem by leaving their details.
The conversion rate is affected by your salesmanship. One factor that has been shown to increase conversion
is how quickly you contact your customers.
People expect instant gratification these days, so the quicker you
contact the customer, the more likely you are to get a sale. Get in there ahead of your competitors!
Take home message
Go out and run a test campaign to see if Google PPC
advertising might work for you. Keep
track of your costs and the revenues generated from the carpet cleaning
jobs. We’ll go into more detail about
how to fine tune your Adwords campaign in order to keep costs down (a trick
that most people don’t know and ends up costing them a lot of money) and how to
maximise your sign up rates and conversions.
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