07 Jan Spending Google Ads Dollars for Remodeling Marketing? Some Tips to Save
Running a home improvement business? 🏚
You probably have spent some money to promote your services in areas you are serving. 💸
If you have a good deal of experience advertising on Google, you probably noticed that your spending is constantly going up, but there is no meaningful increase in number of leads. ☹️
There is no conspiracy and Google isn’t deliberately making you pay more as you spend more. It is a simple system of auction: When you bid for a keyword that is commercially valuable, your competitor is then forced to increase their bid.
As your competitors increase the bidding to avoid losing clients, Google Ads is setting a new norm — you end up paying more for a similar amount of leads. This vicious cycle will start eating away at your profits.
Google Ads is too important for my business: What should I do?
We will dissect what your marketing and branding strategy should be to avoid running into this vortex.
💼 Invest in Organic Visibility
No matter how much advertising you spare for Houzz, Angi or Yelp, the quality and quantity of leads generated by Google Ads will never be the same. But it is a start. Getting a few leads from promotions on Houzz, Angi List and Yelp may be much cheaper compared to the amount you spend on Google Ads. But each business is different and the cost may vary.
In addition to platforms like Houzz, Angi List, Home Advisor, Guild Quality, Google My Business, and Yelp, you should heavily invest in SEO. You won’t get an immediate return, but it is the healthiest and the most longstanding effort in organic marketing.
Remodeling companies spend so little on organic local search efforts that it becomes easier to implement best SEO practices. A good website, quality content, and healthy backlinks. You will slowly see keywords you value will start ranking in areas you serve. Your organic visibility will significantly replace your wasteful spending on Google Ads.
😇 Do What Google Say
There is no tangible proof that Google My Business, organic search results and Google Ads are correlated or reinforce each other’s performance, but Google’s practices and recommendations increasingly point to the fact that the best practice is to fully manage and utilize these platforms well.
The introduction of dynamic search ads, landing page experience, and the requirement for pages to be secure illustrate that Google Ads performance is slightly linked to the state of your organic profile. Your advertising spend won’t help or improve your SEO, but it is highly likely that good SEO will further improve the performance of Google Ads, hence reducing the amount we spend on Google Ads.
🛩 Advertise in Large Areas
We already know that Google Ads spending has a diminishing return as we increase the budget. It means the bigger bid modifier you have or a bigger budget you have, the more you will end up spending per lead. The best way to avoid facing such a situation is to broaden your search area. We know that sometimes you want to serve only a small area, but spending heavily in a small territory will almost always cost more per lead than spending that amount in a broader area.
🚥 Diversify Bid Strategies
One of the curses of this industry is the inability to understand which click will turn into a customer.
🧐 Should we target first-time searchers?
🤨 Or should we target those who are more likely to convert because they checked out a couple of remodeling websites?
🤔 Should we target high-income or middle-income areas?
Too many questions and no one has a definite answer. If you fail to hit the target by misplacing your bid strategy and budget, you will end up spending more and more for months before optimizing your campaigns. 😩
You won’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy because every company and every location is different.
For one business, a certain bid strategy may work. For another, a completely different bid strategy would make them spend much more efficiently. The best way to figure this out is to try everything simultaneously and then roll back as you identify the best-performing campaigns.
🎢 Set a Limit
You should always try to default to underspending on Google Ads. Because the more you spend, the more you compel others to spend more, forcing you to in turn increase your own budget.
You can set a limit to your Google Ads spending. Once you hit that limit, don’t try to solve your problem of dwindling leads by increasing the budget. Figure out other ways to bring in leads.
