Hi all, Happy September.

A few months ago I shared a new tool of ours on how we are able to forecast new revenue based on being visible for local keywords in your area that describe your business.

Leads from search engines are much higher quality and result in higher close rates as these prospects are actively searching for your services to solve their problems compared to cold traffic leads.

In this post, I share some results from google ads that have given our clients their own source of daily inbound leads at a stable cost.

Our philosophy as an agency is building lead generation systems our clients own. Whether it’s their website for organic traffic, or paid media channels like Facebook and Google Ads for proprietary data.

Owning these digital assets is imperative to build a diversified lead generation system to support a business for years to come.

Google Ads is no different. Being able to own the conversion data in your account is highly valuable. Like a locomotive, building conversation data is a momentum exercise. The more we spend over time and build new leads/conversion in the account, the better adept, and more efficient our account becomes.

A common misconception in home services and especially solar, are that purchasing 3rd party leads is the best near-term endeavor. While these can certainly add revenue to your business, there are many drawbacks:

• You don’t own the conversion data. Instead you are funding another company to build very high valuable data in their account, where they can take this conversion data and optimize it for your competitors if you leave. If you’re going to pay money for ad spend, put it toward your own account!
• You don’t own the funnel. Often clients are in the dark what is being advertised in the ads, landing pages, and the offer, and they are more generalized as they plan to sell the lead to multiple parties.
• You don’t own the lead data. If you are buying leads, most likely the marketer is filtering out many “unqualified” leads that they determine initially. You should be the final check if a lead is unqualified. Following up with leads who you were unable to get ahold of via phone for example, may respond to an SMS or email reminder campaign a few months down the road. Or you can begin to create exclusion lists of unqualified leads.

Regardless, controlling the lead and data from first touch point to sale is much more valuable than relying on 3rd party leads.

We brought on a brand new Virginia solar company back in November 2021 and fired up their brand new Google Ads account.

Since then we’ve generated 1900+ leads averaging $26 a lead and generated over 540 phone calls that has resulted close to $8 million in closed sales.

For another client in Toronto, we’ve generated 1600+ plus leads averaging $14 cost per lead since October 2020 that’s generated millions in revenue for this client.

The system has become more efficient overtime and better adept at capture people searching for solar in a variety of ways every month. Their business would not be the same if the campaign were to be turned off. This case couldn’t be more true for a brand new solar company in Virginia, where we have developed a system that produces 6-20 leads per day depending on the week.

We have been building Google Ad campaigns for home service companies for close to a decade now. Specifically solar, roofing, plumbing, and HVAC. The process is simple and repeatable once you understand how a high performing campaign is built.

Trust Backed Offers

The first are crafting offers around your brand pillars/philosophy. Customers are looking for a brand they can trust and deliver value. How do we communicate this trust and value? This is imperative to paint this picture on our landing pages, ad copy, and automated follow up sequences.

Thematic Ad Groups

We adhere more of less to the Single Keyword Ad group strategy, also known as SKAGs, where we group themes of keywords as closely as possible, to drive maximum relevancy for our users and the Google Ads algo. That combined with a strategy that tests new keywords, improvements to ads and landers while feeding our account new audience data helps keep this lead source stable and productive.

Bing Ads Import

The beauty of Google Ads, is we can import a successful campaign straight into Bing Ads. While Bing ads has lower usage, there are still plenty of people searching on Bing, mostly the older demographic, which is our ideal customer base anyways. Once we have a productive Google Ad campaign humming along, already have worked through the kinks of finding the best ads, keywords, and landing pages, we have incredible data to shortcut and launch a ready to close campaign in Bing Ads.

If you’re interested in seeing what kind of revenue forecasts a Google Ads campaign will generate your business, or perhaps you’d like a second set of eyes on your current Google Ads campaign, feel free to reach out. Here to be a resource.

– Doug