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The Top 4 Reasons Pay-Per-Click Campaigns Fail

Don’t Give Up On PPC… Learn How To Do It Right.

There Are Hundreds Of Eager Buyers Just Waiting To Buy From You.

By Rich Harshaw

I am shocked, amazed, and depressed by the number of contractors that don’t participate in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

If I had to guess based on informal surveys I take at seminars and by observing my own clients, I’d say that only 1/3 of contractors and construction companies utilize PPC at all. And that only takes into account “real” contractors with real businesses and real sales.

The other 2/3 either haven’t tried (small percentage) or have tried in the past and found that it didn’t work—so they quit.

If you’re in that group—the group that tried and quit—this message is for you.

I want to urge you to give it another shot. I am confident it can work for you.

Here are the facts:

  • There are hundreds of thousands of searches a month for what you are selling—see below for absolute proof. This is assuming your company is in a decent-sized market.
  • There are thousands and thousands of contractors all over the country that ARE making construction PPC work for them… month in, month out. They know something you don’t.
  • I know of one contractor that spends $70,000 a month on PPC…. And another that spends $135,000 a month (YES, A MONTH!!!!) for this stuff. You know why? IT WORKS!!!
  • I know other contractors who have to TURN IT OFF because they can’t handle the home improvement lead flow. Then they catch up and turn it back on.

And still, there is the jumbled mess of dashed hopes strewn about the marketing highway of so many contractors… it’s easy to see why you might have thrown in the towel on this one.

And that’s why I’m here. To help you see where you might have made your mistakes so you can get up, dust yourself off, and try again.

Reason #1: Your Website Wasn’t Pulling It’s Weight: I won’t spend a ton of time on this because I have already done so here, here, and here in previous blogs. If you nail everything below (in this post) PERFECTLY, but your home improvement website is a flaming sack of dog poo, then you’re sunk before you’ve even started.

Watch this webinar on website conversionability if you need a refresher on this topic.

Don’t skip it—your success depends on it.

Reason #2: Your Budget Was Too Small: Contractors, by their nature, tend to be a conservative bunch. Which means they tend to be cautious when it comes to ANY kind of new marketing and advertising methods.

That’s why most contractors have opted to “stick a toe in the water” with PPC and start with “try and see” budgets of $500 to $1,000.

But that’s kind of like showing up to a gun fight with a knife. It’s not going to last very long, and it’s not going to end well.

The problem is that you have to realize you are competing against contractors for these clicks. If those other contractors are willing to spend more money (and they are), then you are going to be drowned out. You’ll either bid too low and never show up, or you’ll bid competitively and run out of money before you can garner a significant number of clicks.

The PPC management platform we use allows us to estimate how much budget it’s going to take in order to be competitive in your market for your product category. Check this out: The starting point is $2,000… just to have a chance! Then you come around with your measly $500… and you get slaughtered. It’s the most likely scenario.

Pay-Per-Click advertising works. And it works well. It will generate home improvement leads for you. But you have to spend the money to get the leads.

Let’s run some numbers based on the information above. They’re asking for $4,150 to be “Prominent.” That’s where you want to be. So let’s say that you spend that money and generate 2,140 clicks, and those clicks turn into twenty solid leads (that’s about $200 a lead—you okay with that? You should be.) Then you go out and close 30% of those leads—that’s six sales.

What is your margin on six sales? The example above is for kitchen & bathroom remodeling… average sale price of $30,000, and margin of $15,000. Even if the example was for windows and your average job was $8,000 with margin of $4,000 (per job), that’s $48,000 in sales and $24,000 in gross profits.

But you have to buy the leads. If you can’t or won’t, I can’t help you.

Reason #3: You Quit Too Soon: I’ve heard this story 1,000 times before: “We started PPC, and after a few weeks we quit because we were getting low quality phone calls, and not enough quality leads.”

Let me explain something to you: Every PPC takes about one to two months to “optimize.” That means that we are figuring out which keywords work the best, what bid price is the best, which ads convert the best, and what negative keywords should be used (negative keywords tell Google what search results you DON’T want to appear in. Example: for in-ground swimming pools, we would use a negative keyword “above ground” to avoid showing up in searches for above-ground pools).

This process takes time, and during that first month or two, you might experience some growing pains. You might get weird calls for weird stuff that you don’t really sell or want to deal with. Your lead volume might be lower than you like.

But like anything else in life, if you just give yourself a minute (or month or two) to learn the ropes, your campaign will settle in and start to convert (assuming the other three elements listed in this post are adhered to!) traffic into leads.

Don’t be too quick to give up.

Reason #4: Your Campaign Was Improperly Managed: This is a biggie, and if you started your own Google AdWords campaign, you are probably the reason your campaign failed.

PPC advertising is kind of like fishing. It’s so easy, fundamentally speaking, that anyone can do it.

But like fishing, to actually do it well—and catch something worth catching—it takes the right equipment, the right know-how, and the right experience.

There are many variables of PPC management—the bid, the quality of the ad, the quality of the landing page, the format of the ad, to name just four—and if you have any one of these out of whack, you’re dead meat.

In my next blog post I am going to share more information on this topic—you need to have at least a cursory understanding of what is happening “behind the scenes” of your PPC campaign…. But for now know that it’s easy to mess up.

I strongly recommend you hire a professional to manage this for you. The argument against a professional is always cost. You will hear people say that out of $1,000 you pay to Google, you’ll be paying $300 of it to have somebody spend the other $700.

On the surface that sounds like a rip-off.

But consider how much it will cost you to run the campaign yourself. First of all, your time is worth money—or the person on your staff that you pay to manage it will cost you money. Second of all, what is the cost of incompetence? You might well spend $1,000 of your $1,000 to Google (instead of the $700 mentioned above), but would you have an effective $700 or and ineffective $1,000 working for you?

If you think the latter, good luck in life. Cut your own hair, fix your own cars, build your own house, and flap your wings to fly on vacation. It’s the same thing.

I am here to help you. If you’d like to give PPC for your construction company a try again, do me a favor and fill out this form. We’ll contact you and discuss how we can help you succeed.

We charge $250 a month to manage PPC campaigns, but will waive the first 2 months fee if you fill out the form below. Go ahead. Do it!

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© 2015 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.

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