CLIENT

A plumbing and sewer client offered both general and customized plumbing services for Residential, Commercial & Industrial properties in the Vancouver/Portland Metro and surrounding areas. They wanted to increase the brand awareness of its locations as well as generate new leads through their emergency response service.

This client had been growing well through word-of-mouth referrals and being available in emergency situations. While this was a good source of new business, they ultimately wanted more people in their local area to learn about their services to better compete in their market.

They came to Brandon Pines Marketing with a goal to build out a proper customer journey, develop lead magnets through landing pages, and obtain new leads.

CHANNELS

Paid Advertising: Google Search Ads
Marketing Funnel: Develop the Funnel to align landing pages with Earned and Paid Marketing
Tracking: Set up Google and Facebook tags as well as call tracking to measure online activity
Goals: Set up Google Analytics goals to assign value to leads and conversions through Google Tag Manager

CHALLENGE

The client had originally hired another marketing company to grow new business through PPC Ads. They expressed frustration to me, as the previous company produced 0 conversions while spending several thousand dollars a month on paid search ads. They reach out for assistance and a strategy on how to generate leads and reduce the overall advertising spend.

When I took them on, they did not have any lead capture on their existing website. In addition, they were missing Google tags and a Facebook Pixel for the measurement of online campaigns. The previous data from existing marketing efforts were not at all usable so we were starting with a clean slate. Finally, this vertical is a very competitive space, so the ability to keep leads within a target cost per lead range was important for scaling the account.

SET UP

Top of the Funnel: Built out pages that told the story of the business while tightly aligning with the services and abilities of the organization.
Middle of the Funnel: Built out ads that were used for prospecting clients looking for emergency service. These were the main drivers of conversions.
Bottom of the Funnel: Built out lead forms that offered interested people a free quote or free consultation.

GOAL

The primary goal of this business was to generate new business, especially with emergency service requests, through phone calls. In addition to phone calls, I also drove leads to the website as requests for quotes and scheduled services. 

LEADS

Leads were assigned a hypothetical LTV to determine a proper ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend). Since there was no historical data and the client did not know what a client cost them, I had to make some assumptions to begin the ads. I implemented a 45-90 day plan to challenge those assumptions and update the LTV and CPLs accordingly. I used these values to feed into Google to teach the algorithm what we were willing to pay for a click and a conversion. Leads types included: Calls from ads, Phone calls on the website, form completion on the website as well as submitting lead forms.  

RESULTS

Ensured cost per lead remained within or below industry average while growing the traffic to the website through a thematic themed Ad Group strategy. I was able to maintain growth in emergency service requests along with service inquiries while reducing the CPA to under $15. This took into account the cost per click and cost per acquisition for Google Ads in the Service industry.

• Leads: 40/month average
• CPL: $12-$15 per lead
• CPC: $3.13 Average cost per click
• Calls: +250 calls
• Traffic: Generated 35% of all traffic to the website from paid advertising

LEARNINGS

Upon taking over the Google search account, performed the following changes:

1. Switched from a Google Ads Express Account to a fully managed account.
2. Set up proper tracking through Google Tag Manager to properly measure conversions through tags.
3. Seeing how the data in the account was not good data to use, run the account for 45 days to collect data to determine a Target Cost Per Acquisition (TCPA) for conversions within the account.

As a result of this effort, the spending was immediately cut by 2/3rds. This allowed for a soft reset, which was done by removing the automatic Smart Campaigns and setting up a Target CPA campaign. The end result was an increase in the number of conversions from the previous agency to 40/month coming from a mixture of calls from ads and form submissions on the website.