Make Google Adwords Work for You. Stop Leaking Money!

Every week or every month, your hard-earned money leaves your hands and goes to Google or it goes to Google and a pay-per-click management company who you have entrusted to manage your AdWords account. You may think it is just a cost of doing business and that plumbers these days need to be “out there” on the internet. While it is true plumbers need to be “out there,” but being out there needs to bring back a return on that investment. You need to question the money you are spending on Google AdWords. If you don’t know whether or not it is working, then it probably isn’t.

So, how do you question the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns? That is something I can help you with right now. PPC for plumbers does work, but it has to be done right and that means being meticulous in everything. Before we get into the details, I want to quickly outline what we will be discussing.

• Are you tracking results
• How does tracking help
• What results should you track
• How do you implement tracking
• Example of tracking

Is Anyone Tracking Results

If you aren’t disciplined and meticulous in the tracking of results, you will never get a clear picture of if, or how well, your AdWords campaigns are working. There be a comprehensive tracking strategy in place before you spend the first penny on a Google AdWords click. Your PPC management agency should have this meticulous tracking in place and reporting to you regularly on those results (not on secondary metrics such as impressions). If you are not getting this information, it is time to give your Adwords account manager a call. And you should be able to understand those results and how they are reported to you.

How Does Tracking Help

Having a strong tracking system in place can provide you with that all important stat—ROI. Understanding the return on investment of any marketing effort is critical to understanding its success. This not only helps you as a business owner, but it also helps your PPC account manager as it gives them more information to work with to optimize your account and increase that performance. Tracking allows you to understand or identify

• Is AdWords working at all
• How well is it working
• Areas for improvement within the AdWords campaign
• Areas for improvement within your office
• Management decisions on where to focus you marketing dollars
• Growth areas
• Growth strategies
  

First, it will help you answer that burning question of whether PPC is working for you and, of course, the ROI numbers will tell you how well the campaigns are working. This is good information for the account manager as well to help with optimization. Much of what is tracked can be traced back to specific elements within the AdWords campaign, so the account manager will know which ads are generating interests among those that become paying customers. Which keyword searches are used by those that are contacting you and become paying customers.

Tracking can also help you within your own office, which is many time overlooked as a benefit of meticulous tracking. If you see that you are getting 50 phone calls a month and converting only 20, you then know you have room to improve the handling of those phone calls to increase the rate at which phone callers become paying customers. You can easily have the phone calls recorded from a forwarding phone number to spotlight strengths and weaknesses of those answering the calls. This will help convert more of those phone calls into paying customers.

As you have probably noticed, I have used the phrase “paying customers” quite often. That is the end game for you and it should be the end game for whomever is managing your PPC account.

What Should You Track

You need to track what is most important to you. Clicks, impressions and ad position are all relevant metrics to the campaign manager, but not to you as the business owner or manager. You care about the end result—customers. How many customers and how much revenue is coming from your Google AdWords or Bing Ads campaign.

As someone in the Home Services industry, what you are after are phone calls from those seeking your service. You need to measure that and know how many phone calls you are getting from your pay-per-click campaigns. You also need to know if those phone calls are turning into customers for you. These are all things that can be fairly easily tracked. You just need to put a system in place.

It is up to your PPC management company to set up the tracking system, but there are things that you are responsible for on your end. They set up the apparatus for tracking and give you guidance and what you need to do on your end. Your role will be to track that AdWords customer once they have contacted you. Your PPC account manager should have the potential customers flagged in some manner so that you will know who they are and can then track them from the phone call to paying customer. Once that customer calls you, you need to know if they requested you to do work, if the work was completed and how much revenue came from that job. If your PPC management company has done their job, your role in tracking is easy. With both sides working together, you will have a clear picture of the success of your pay-per-click campaigns.

Example of end to end tracking

An easy way to track customers is the have tracking phone numbers that forward to your main number. If someone comes through AdWords ads, they see a phone number that no one else sees. You can track that phone call back to the ads. Whomever answers the call from your company notes the phone number of the potential customer. You then keep that phone information with the customer and once the job is completed record the revenue for that particular customer. At the end of the month, you match up the phone numbers from the forwarding tracking phone number with the numbers in your customer database and you have all the information you need to generate an ROI for the month.

• Forwarding phone number: 910-555-5555
• Number of PPC calls: 50
• Number of jobs from PPC calls: 35
• Total Revenue: $14,000
• PPC Clicks Cost: $1,500
• PPC Management Cost: $450
• Return on Investment: 7.18 (every $1.00 in PPC expenses generated $7.18 in revenue for company)

Once the tracking is set up, it is easy to calculate your ROI—revenue divided by cost. Simply add up the costs ($1,500 + $450 = $1,950) and make sure you are getting all the costs associated with the PPC campaign. For instance, if you have to pay a small monthly fee for the tracking phone number, don’t forget to add that into the expenses.

Working together with your PPC management agency

As you have probably noticed, you will need to have a strong relationship with your account manager. You or someone on your staff will need to be in regular communication with the person managing your AdWords account. This is critical! If you don’t have an account manager with whom you can get in touch with easily, or that is not reaching out to your regularly, then it is time for something to change. Either request a more hands-on approach by them or look elsewhere for management. The account manager needs to not only guide your account and the tracking, but that person also needs to understand your business, your goals, the types of customers you are looking for and be ready to adjust to changes in your business. Those are things that cannot be accomplished unless there is frequent, quality communication.

If you have any questions about this information or would like to schedule a free consultation, please feel free to reach out to us by phone.  You will get an actual person on the other end of the line and will not have to go through any sort of phone tree to get to a live voice.

Just give us a call at 1-800-577-3829. We would love the chance to speak with you!