Do This If You’re Spending Money on Ads and Not Closing Sales

One of our home Service clients spent $2,083 on ads. They generated 38 leads. Out of those 38 leads was $74,000 in potential revenue. But they only closed $4,000. It wasn't a lead problem, it was a sales problem. In this video, I'm going to walk through exactly how to track your marketing so that way you can uncover the real problem in your business, whether it's leads, whether it's your lead to sales process or it's your marketing channels. We're going to uncover six ways to track performance from your ads and four decisions you have to make. With that way you can stop gambling, stop throwing your money at ads and praying that it actually works, and dial in your marketing process to create a predictable stream of revenue to grow your business. So we started working with this home service business. They're a couple million dollars. They use jobber as a CRM and they were spending money on ads. Google local service ads, Google search ads, Facebook, Yelp, all these different platforms. But they didn't know what was working. So what we did in month one was set up tracking. And I'm going to walk you through the six steps to set up tracking. And it illuminated the problem and that their ads weren't broken. In fact, they were performing great. The problem was, is that they weren't closing anything and they needed to fix their sales problem. And you may be saying, hey Phil, I'm good. I close at 60% so I don't need better sales. And they're going to say, well, you need more leads to grow. So there's two sides to the equation here and this six step process to track your performance. And the four decisions that you're going to have to make are going to help you get more leads that are actually generating revenue for your business or figure out how to dial in your sales process. And we're going to break it all down. So the next two things that we talk about are going to be very helpful regardless of which side of the equation that you're on. Let's start with setting up ads tracking and then we're going to talk about those decisions that you need to make. So the first step is you need to set up a landing page. Landing page is a separate page on your website, like flashconsulting.com landing page where you can send traffic to a specific ad channel. So you run Google search ads. You say go here to this landing page and you know that any traffic that comes from this ad is going to this landing page. Step number Two, on that landing page, you need to have a tracking form and a tracking phone number. The form and the phone number are going to be specific to the ad channel, which means you're never going to get a form and from anywhere else unless they go from this ad channel. So that form, you can have it, say in the subject line, this is a estimate request form from Google Ads. Estimate request form from Facebook. And that phone number, you have a whisper message on there that says, this is a call from Facebook. This is a call from Google. Step number three, whatever ads that you're running, you want to take that tracking number and put it in your ads. So on Google Search, just because you run ads doesn't mean that people have to go to your website. They could click on the call to click option right from your ads. So you need to take that tracking number and put it into your ad. If you're running Google local search ads, for example, you're not going to run people to a landing page. You're going to have a custom tracking number. And that tracking number is then going to be able to show you who all the calls were from. Google local service ads. If you're running Facebook ads, same thing. You can put a tracking number in your Facebook ads. If you're running Yelp ads inside of your messaging, inside of your Yelp ad in particular, you can use a tracking number. So you want to take that tracking number and put it natively on these platforms. Step number four, this is where most people miss the mark. When someone fills out that form or calls you, you needed to go somewhere, of course, you can have it go to your CSR. But when I was in the trades, we have four CSRs and they always put the wrong marketing channel in, even though it whispered it, even though it put it into the actual email subject line. And maybe that's all you need. But what I would recommend and what we do is when someone fills out that form or they call you, it goes into a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet is a list of all the leads that came from this channel and a specific time. A very easy way to do this is you create a Google form. And when someone fills out a Google form, it goes into a Google sheet. Now, we obviously do this way more high tech, but that's a very simplified version of forms and calls go into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet. Then at the end of the month, you have all the leads that came from this ad channel. So you know the leads that you got from this ad. Step number Five, we used to do this manually and sometimes we still do this manually if people don't have a CRM, a client relationship manager that actually integrates. But what you do is you take all those leads that are on the spreadsheet now and you take the phone number or email address and you go into your CRM and you plug it in one by one and you see exactly what happened. We quoted this much money, we invoice this much money, this many people turn into leads and you start to build a story around this. Now the problem with doing it manually, which is what we ran ran into, was that you get like a one time snapshot. So you might give someone an estimate and they close in seven days, they close in seven weeks. But you really only get it one time if you do this manually in a manual pool. So there are ways to automate this process. We have some custom integrations with Jobber and other platforms that we utilize. But there's also tools out there. Like what converts where kind of get there ish, but it's not as clean as you would want. But worst case, just do it one time, maybe a month after and then you'll have a clean data. It's just not clean up to date constantly. But at least at the end of the month you have all your leads and your return on ads spend reporting right there. And number six, this is again where most people miss the mark is that now you need to take this data and you need to make decisions on this data. Just because you get return on ad spend reporting, there's four decisions that you have to make which we're going to talk about next. And this is going to help lead you to actual marketing that will grow your business. Okay, so the four decisions decision number one, here's the scenario. We spent $2,000 and we got one lead that's too expensive for our cost per lead. A good cost per lead is usually about 5 or 10% of your average ticket. So if your average ticket's like $2,000, you should be spending around 100 to $200 to lead coming in the door. Especially if you close at 50%, that means that it's going to cost you $400 to get a new customer, $200 to get a new customer, whatever those numbers are. So the $2,000 and got one lead that's too expensive. So how do you fix this one? You can update your landing page copy with special offer. Usually this means that you're getting traffic to your website or you're getting people to find you. But they're not converting into a lead. So what you want to do is to give them some type of a special offer inside of your ad. So this could say get $50 off this, get a hundred dollars off this. Sign up now and get X, Y and Z. Download this custom thing, get this with your estimate, whatever promo that you want to run, you can add this into your ad and it's going to help you convert more people that are seeing your ad into leads. You can also revise your keywords that you're bidding on. For example, let's say you're bidding on all these very expensive keywords and the traffic is not getting there. So you're spending $50, $100 for someone to click and go to your website. Then they also have to go to your website and convert into a lead. So you might say, this is too expensive for my cost per click. So I need to figure out how am I going to lower this by bidding on other keywords or other areas. And the second decision, this ad platform is not platform for me because it's not working to get the cost per lead that I need. So you start to make decisions and you might say, hey, this might not be the best thing for us. This one literally happens. Probably nine times out of ten you spent $2,000 and you got 20 terrible leads. 20 people from overseas, people that are not in your area, or people that are just tire kickers, price shoppers that are not good. So what can you do to get better quality leads? First, you can add more friction into your lead process. So maybe you don't just have a form on your website that just says give us your name and, and your phone number and your email address. Or you don't just run Facebook ads and people just randomly click, yeah, send me a quote or whatever. You actually have a couple other steps in there. Usually two or three friction points, which is like what's your budget, what's the square footage of your house, what's your address? Things that people wouldn't want to give unless they're really serious about getting an estimate on something. People that are not just window shopping but they're actually in the market, you want to add a little bit more friction. This might take your leads from, from 20 down to five or six, but they're going to be all high quality leads. The second thing that you could do is update your geo targeting. So sometimes when you're running ads, you might target all over like a 20 mile radius of where you're at and there's pockets of areas that are not the higher quality leads. So you get a lot of tire kickers for cheap leads, which unfortunately, most digital marketing companies are focused on trying to get the cheapest leads possible because they're not following it all the way through into return on ad spend. They just want to try to get you cheap leads so they can say, hey, we got you $10 leads. But what you want to do is you want to update your geographical targets. So you want to say, okay, I know that this city and this city and this city always have the higher quality leads. So I want to get rid of these other cities and not target them because they're lower quality leads. And you can literally see I got this many leads and here's the leads from this area. So let's pull this back and only focus on these people. The other thing you can do with keywords to try to get better quality leads is remove broad match keywords and do exact match keywords. What this means is when you set up your Google search ads, you can set up broad match, which broad matches. If someone searches for H Vac contractor or H Vac service, they might also pull in like H Vac manufacturers or other keywords that people are searching and show them this. With exact match, you're literally saying, only show it to people that search for H Vac service or H Vac repair. Don't broad match it and try to match things. Just go for those high, high quality keywords and only show my ads to those people. Yes, your cost per click might be higher because you're targeting very specific keywords, but your lead quality is going to go up because it's very narrow focus of who's going to be seeing your ad and converting into a lead. And again with this, there's dozens of ways that you can increase your lead quality. Really what you want is a marketing company that cares about lead quality and not just cheap leads. All right, and the third situation, this is actually a blessing if this happens because this means that you just have to fix your sales process. You spent $2,000, you generated $70,000 in potential revenue for your business, but you only closed $2,000. This is the exact situation that I mentioned before. Here's how you fix this. First, you set up an automation process to follow up on your estimates. So when you send out an estimate, you need to have a estimate nurture sequence in place for 1421 days. That's following up on your estimates. When you follow up, you don't want to just say, hey, did you make a decision yet, Jack? You want to say, hey, Jack, are you still having the same problem with your tree? Hey, Jack, you still having this problem with your H VAC system? Were you able to get this solved yet? You want to tweeze out and poke at the problem that they were having to see if it's still an issue for them. The second thing you want to do is you want to have a rehash program internally. It's cool to rely on emails, texts, but you want to have a CSR or an inside salesperson or a salesperson in general that's following up on these estimates via calls and texts. That's a real person answering questions. This is called rehash. We had an H VAC contractor that we work with. We help them increase their estimates. Then they hired an inside sales rep and they literally went from 3 million to 6 million in one year just by doing this process, creating a bunch more estimates out in the field and having someone internal rehash all of those estimates. And the third one, this one goes under the radar. But it's crucial add an expiration date to your estimates to give people the sense of urgency. You want to get them to a yes or no as fast as possible, not just lingering estimates out there. So inside of your automation process and your rehash program, say, hey, this estimate's coming up. You know, we got about 30 days on this estimate. Did you make a decision yet? We got 10 days left on this estimate. Do you make a decision yet? You're trying to count down to get people to a yes or no. And the fourth decision you make, you spend 2,000. You had $70,000 in potential estimates. You closed 35,000. So this all sounds great. I spent 2,000 and I made 35,000 for 11x or whateverx return. So let's do more of that. How do you do this? You go to the ad platform, you increase your budget. Now, it's very, very important on this because ad channels, they all change. You might be spending 2,000 and you crank it to 20,000, but you have diminishing returns. So you have to make sure that you're tracking this on a monthly basis and make sure you're doing this for all your ch just because it's working right now. You know, you're in a seasonal business. Things change every single month. And then you look at it on a quarterly basis and you make tweaks every single month. And you can zoom out and see what's working and what's not working. This is what a good marketing plan looks like if you're running ads to track return on ad spend all the way through and make decisions to help you grow your business. Alex Hormozi, he has a really good saying on this. You do more, you do better, you do different. So more you do more of what's working, then you crank that out as much as possible, then you do different. So you change it up. Then you do better. Better means you change the copy. You might add some other offers in there. You change your landing page offer, you change the keywords, the geographical targets, and you just keep dialing this in, dialing this in. Then the third thing is you do different. Just like the company I mentioned before, we did more of something. We did better, we made it better. Then we said, okay, we need to do something different. And that's the process that I will go through when you're looking at these ad channels. So, as I mentioned, we've dialed this in for some home service businesses, and one in particular, we took them from 1.5 million to 3 million revenue in 12 months, and we dialed in all their ad channels, and I break down that exact video here, and if that one's not out yet, you can check this one out.