Meticulously Managing Your Search Engine Marketing
Selecting the right representative may help boost profit and lower expenses
Any HVAC contractor with an email address is well aware there is no shortage of internet marketing companies out there. And each claims it can bring a company to the Promised Land if that contracting company would simply hire it to administrate the business’s Google AdWords campaign. As a contractor, I received several unsolicited emails each day trying to sell me the same thing.
I would only need to give them a rough idea of what it is that I did (repair and replace HVAC systems), and, from there, they would generate a list of keywords that, when typed in the Google search bar by a prospective customer, would cause my ad to appear on Page 1. When potential clients click on my ad, they would be directed to my website and would then hopefully call or fill out my online inquiry form, all in exchange for a nominal fee that I would pay each time my ad was clicked.
CHOOSE CAREFULLY
Sounds good, right? Well, it certainly can be, but it matters very much the type of company a contractor chooses to build and administrate its Google campaign. With no shortage of “experts” out there who all claim to do exactly the same thing, here are some of the things business owners should be looking for as they decide which company will earn their business:
1) Does the company have HVAC contracting experience, or, at the very least, will the person at the company who administrates your campaign have HVAC contracting experience? I cannot stress enough how important this is. Not only does the company you select need to have a thorough understanding of how Google works and how to properly administrate a search engine marketing campaign, but it also needs to know the HVAC business backward and forward. How many HVAC contractors would feel comfortable creating an advertising campaign for a pizza restaurant, law firm, or limousine service? The same thing is true in reverse. How could someone who hasn’t spent time in an HVAC contracting call center in the throes of summer possibly understand how things like seasonality affect a contracting business and make such a business unique?
2) Are they willing to spend the necessary time with management to fully understand the ins and outs of HVAC contracting? Contractors have worked very hard to build their companies into the unique, successful enigmas that they are. Shouldn’t the person running a business’s campaign understand what light commercial work entails?
3) How much do they charge? Search engine marketing specialists who are HVAC experts should charge less to HVAC contractors. Why? Because it will take them less time to get to the bottom of exactly what type of campaign is right for a business and even less time to administrate it. They will know what questions need to be asked and, more importantly, what to do with the answers. They won’t need to spend countless hours researching topics to create a compelling advertising campaign for a business in an industry they know nothing about.
CTR AND CPC
The success of any Google search engine marketing campaign is measured by click-through rates (CTR), cost-per-click conversions, and cost per conversion. The CTR is the result of a simple equation that divides the number of times an ad shows up on a Google search screen by the number of times the ad is actually clicked. The higher the CTR, the more relevant the ad is to internet users who are searching for the services being advertised. Cost-per-click conversions are exactly what they sound like, the amount of money spent each time the ad is clicked. Conversions, however, are where the rubber really meets the road. A conversion occurs when someone takes the desired action after they’ve clicked the ad. After all, someone clicking an ad and leaving the site right away because it wasn’t relevant to what they were looking for doesn’t do anything except cost the advertiser money for the click. Such occurrences are measured by Google and reported in the form of bounce rates. The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant users are finding a site to be.
To summarize, business owners should be looking for some very specific things when choosing a firm to administrate a Google search engine marketing campaign:
• A company who employs account representatives who possess a thorough understanding of the HVAC industry and insight into what drives the behavior and decision-making of its ideal customer;
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• A higher-than-average CTR;
• A lower-than-average cost per click;
• A higher-than-average conversion rate;
• A lower-than-average cost per conversion; and
• A lower-than-average bounce rate.
How does a search engine marketing company deliver all of these things at the same time? By using its specialized knowledge to not only build out a marketing campaign for a business on Google, but to make recommendations on how to optimize the company’s website pages so that the experience the user gets when they click an ad and land on a website is exactly what they were hoping for.
When prospective clients land on a website, and it’s exactly what they’re looking for, the advertiser’s cost per conversion will go down, and that’s exactly what the marketing company was hired to do. The best HVAC internet marketing companies can roll all of these options into one solution. Now, they’re a rare breed to be sure, but they are out there.
Publication date: 6/27/2016
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