How Home Improvement Businesses Can Get The Most Out Of Their PPC Budgets
Chad Faith
Director of Content
It is common knowledge that PPC marketing is an incredible means for contractors to engage in marketing for their home improvement businesses. It is an excellent way for them to introduce their services to homeowners that are looking for suitable contractors. There are many effective platforms such as Google Ads that make it easy for contractors to market their businesses, but this is not to say that creating a home improvement PPC is an easy task. It is important to note that if you cannot effectively plan for an economical advertising budget, it will be extremely difficult to find new business that can increase your profits. If you are using the Google Ads platform, below are some ways you can maximize your PPC budget.
Improve Your Quality Scores
If you want your home improvement business to make the most out of your PPC advertising budget, it is only wise that you strive to improve the quality scores and get them as high as possible. The quality scores are actually the way that Google rates how appropriate and relevant your keywords and advertisements are. This would decide whether or not your ads will be shown on pages that are related to other similar ads. The quality scores range from a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the highest. The higher your quality score, the less you will have to pay for your paid search campaigns and the less you will have to pay per click. If your quality score is 7 or higher, Google will actually give you a discount. It has been shown that improving your quality score by just one point can decrease the cost of each conversion by 16%.
What you can do is to focus on the click through rate when dealing with your quality scores. You also have to ensure that the ad copy relating to your home improvement business makes sense and is relevant to the keywords. In fact, using just one keyword per each ad group usually improves the score. It is best that value packed headlines are utilized to garner more traffic. Try to take up as much real estate that you can with your ads because it can increase the number of clicks. Using call out extensions can also help to ensure that your ad takes up a bigger space on the front page.
Another thing that you can do to improve scores is to strategize where you send traffic. Needless to say, your ads and keywords have to be as relevant as possible to the destination page. Landing pages are useful for seamless modifications of various aspects like the text and images.
Look at Your Search Query Reports
It is also equally important for home improvement PPC strategies to ensure that the ads come up for the relevant internet searches. For example, if you your business revolves around water damage mitigation for residential properties, you would not want your ads to show up for searches for the same services regarding commercial properties. This would essentially be a waste of a click and would increase the cost per conversion in the long-term. If you want to check your search query reports, all you have to do is to log onto your Google Ads account and access the correct ad campaign and ad group. After that you have to choose the keywords that you are searching for and tick off the box that is on the left of the keyword. Now you will be able to click on ‘search terms’ at the top of the page. If you want to ensure that your ads to appear in results of relevant searches and attract prospective customers, you have to capitalize on these query reports.
After analyzing your query reports, you will be able to see the common keywords and phrases that result in your ads appearing. This will definitely help you to utilize your PPC budget wisely. In your analysis of the reports, you have to look for the searches that do not make sense or that are not related to your products or service. After you have identified the words that do not make your ads appear, you can choose to add these words to your list of negative keywords, further reducing any potential wastage of your advertising and marketing budget. Ultimately, if irrelevant searches make your ad turn up, it will increase costs unnecessarily. You should check these search query reports regularly and update the list of negative keywords to prevent this from happening.
Capitalize on Location and Time Settings
Making sure that you take advantage of the time and location settings can help you to maximize your Google Ads budget as well. Common sense would tell us that your ads should only turn up to people who live in a location that you operate your business in. Although this might seem obvious, significant amounts of money are being wasted by many businesses.
What you should do is to choose “people in my target location’ when you create an ad campaign, instead of the other two options. When you do this, you will be able to show ads to the people in locations that you can customize. Another good method of targeting people in a certain location is to target counties inside of a state, instead of the entire state itself. This can help you to customize your bids according to each different county, and in the process make better use of your campaign budget.
For example, if your business operates mainly out of New Jersey, you would want to target the various counties such as Bergen County, Somerset County, and Hunterdon County. After you have gained some experience and data from how this process works, you will be able to tell which counties give you more business, and which are simply not worth advertising to. With this newfound knowledge, you can then adjust your bids on different locations accordingly.
Once you have settled the location where you want your ads to be targeted, you can save even more money by choosing to show your ads only on chosen days in the week, or at certain times of a day. This can only be done once you have figured out what is the best time to screen your ads. All you have to do is modify your bids to the time settings and you will be able to maximize your PPC budget.
What we can learn from these points is that Google Ads accounts allow for many customizations and settings that can help you to garner more traffic for your home improvement PPC. However, the three tips are not ranked in order of merit. Not one of them is more important than the other, but business owners should use a combination of the three in order to maximize their advertising budget. If you find it overwhelming to take care of your PPC strategy on your own, you can always contact professional PPC marketers who can help you to elevate your business to the next level.
It is also imperative that you make sure that your Google Ads marketing budget is something that you stick to for at least a few months. Google Ads allows clients to set daily limits on the amount of budget spent on certain days. This is possible because Google shows your ads more often when the relevant terms are searched for. While your daily cost can vary up to 50%, fret not because Google Ads ensures that your daily limit is averaged out across the month to help you keep within your budget.