How to Run Google Ads for Lawn Care Leads? Lawn Care Marketing Strategy

If you're looking for tips on running Google Ads for lawn care companies, this is the video for you. How do I even know what to talk about in this video? We work with local service businesses, specifically lawn care companies. We help them grow using digital marketing, running ads as a part of that. Recently, I was actually featured on Masters of Home Services from Jobber. Let me make myself a little smaller. We were talking about new leads, more customers, high rankings. I actually have a new episode that's coming out with them which is specifically focused just on Google Ads. Also, we had this client here. We've been working with them since February, and right now it is May. And basically he's raving about all the great stuff that we've done. Because on his Google LSAs, which we're going to go through on this call, you can see in April, he got all these leads. He got 21 leads, spent $848, so about $40 a lead. And all these people contact his business for mosquito control, cleanup, landscape design, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. I'm going to kind of show you how we do all this. So the plan for this video is to walk you through the two different types of ads. Google search ads, Google Local service ads, show you what they are. This video is mostly going to be talking about, not necessarily like how to set up your ads. That's not the video for this. It's going to be more so how to track your ads. The reason that it's so important is because a lot of times people are spending money, but all they see is, oh, I got 20 conversions. And then they go and they look and they're like, I really only got like four leads. There's not really any visibility into this. So the goal of this video is to show you some ad tips to help you get more leads and to help you know who those leads actually are. So let's get right into this video. So the first thing that we're going to look at is what the heck is a Google Ad? And this, you know, might be basic for you. And you might not, you know, you might say, hey, I already know how to do Google Ads. Well, you might not know what a Google Local service ad is or Google search ad. So if you go to your local area, Google your business, lawn care in Baltimore, wherever you're at, these right here are called Google Local service ads. And Google Local service ads are pay per lead. So these ones here that I showed you, this example, these are Google Local service ads. What happens is when someone clicks this button, Google will register what they selected, the service type, and they're going to charge you. They'll record the call, and then they'll pass the call through to you. And you only pay for each lead. And so in this example, how this worked was before working with us, they didn't have any of these set up. And what we did was we went to Google local service ads, set up the account. You have to do a background check for your business. You want to make sure. This is very important. You want to make sure that you select lawn care, because if you don't select lawn care, even if you don't mow and you just do mosquito control or something like that, you're not going to show up for lawn care searches, which most people are searching for. Lawn care searches, you could do sod installation, you could do other things. But even if you don't mow, you should still do lawn care because you're going to get leads and hopefully you can upsell the MoW calls to fertilizer plants, mosquito control, that kind of stuff. So you're going to put in your categories there. You have to put in your certificate of insurance. You also have to do a background check as the owner. A huge part to Google local service ads, and this is extremely important, is when you do this local search in your area, you want to make sure that you have enough reviews. Because if you're in Baltimore, for example, and you show up and you only have 20 reviews, you're not going to be shown here. So you got to really ramp up your Google reviews so that you can be shown here. And if, yeah, if you don't have reviews, it's going to be really hard to show here. One other really important part to this is let's say that you're in Baltimore, but let's say that you're located, you know, 20 miles away in a suburb. Well, the beauty of Google local service ads is that you can say that you serve this area and it's going to show you here even though you're not located here, which is why these are so important. If you're located in a suburb and you want to target a major city, this is the number one place on Google, number one real estate on Google, to be shown. And you can do that through Google local service ads. All you have to do is make sure you have enough reviews. If you don't know how to get reviews, we made videos about that before, just go to your Google Biz profile. You'll get the review link. There's videos on how to do that. That's not this video. So this is the first thing. Google Local Service ads. What we typically recommend doing is going to the back end of your Google Local Service ads, which I can't do because I can't show people's personal information. But you go to Google Local Service Ads. You go, you pull the reviews, you take all of the information. It's going to look exactly like this. It's going to have the phone number, customer name, if it's available, the lead type, and you put that into an Excel spreadsheet like this. You take the phone number, you copy the phone number and paste it into your CRM. Whether it's Jobber, service, autopilot, whatever else you're using, Service Light and House Call Pro, paste the phone number in there and then you'll be able to see, did you convert this lead? Did you send it an estimate? How much did you invoice? And then you'll have all the clean data. And then at the end of the, you'll have how much money did you spend? How much money did you invoice estimates? And you can make decisions from there. So for Google Local Service Ads, that's going to be the best way to do it. And it's pretty straightforward. There's not much back and forth. Now let's look at the next ones, which are Google search ads. So Google search ads are these ones down here which you can see True Green and Lawn doctor. They are going to be on every single search ad all across the country. We all know that. And a lot of times they're going to be set up here unless the local companies have better reviews in them. So for Google search ads, this is a huge one that always comes up and people say, you know, I have a budget of $2,000, $5,000, $10,000. And they don't know the leads that are coming through. I'm going to walk you through a framework for that. The other question that always comes up is, well, how much should my budget be? So here's our answer. Typically, companies are spending 3 to 10% of their revenue on marketing. So let's say that you did a million dollars. Let's say you're, you're going to do 10% marketing budget. That's a hundred, you know, around $100,000 per month. Excuse me, $100,000 per year divided by 12. That's going to give you your monthly marketing spend. So you can figure out of that $10,000. You know, do I hire a marketing company? Do I spend some on tv, radio, billboards? Do I spend some on thumbtack, Angie Yelp? And then how much do I spend on Google? And you can figure out your budget from there. So that's kind of where I would start, is figuring out your budget from there. All right, now let's look at actually how to track this stuff, because this is super important and a lot of people miss this. So what you want to do is you want either you or your digital marketing company to create what's called a landing page. And a landing page will look like this. I picked a company that's not a lawn care, but they're all going to look the same. So it's going to look like this. You ideally want to remove that header section of the website, you know, services about all the dropdowns. And you, and you want it to just be a landing page that says call now and then fill out this form. These are two important things. One, the call now button is a tracking phone number. And you could use a platform like CallRail. Jobber has an integration with CallRail. You can use CallRail. There's other places that you can buy phone numbers. We, we work with what converts, which uses tracking numbers. We work with CallRail, we work with Java, all this stuff. But you want to get a specific tracking number just for your landing page and just for your Google Ads, really. So then you want that number to be here, you want it to be here, you know, you want it to be all over. So that way when someone lands on your landing page, they click this button and they call you. That's the first thing. The second thing is you want a custom form on this page. This form should just be a Google Ads form only. And what it should say is in the subject, anytime someone fills out this form, when it sends an email to your CSRs or your leads email, it should say new Google Ads lead. And same thing with your call button, it should say a whisper message should say call from Google Ads. This will hopefully alert your CSRs in your lead in whatever CRM that you're using to put this in the, in the place that the lead came from. So this would say, you know, call from Google Ads. Then on your back end, you can track that, hey, how many calls do we get? What exactly? You know, who are all these people? And then you can pull all the leads that came from that specific source. The other side to this is each month, here's what we do and we recommend is go to where your forms are, pull all the forms that came from Google Ads, put them into a spreadsheet like this. Pull all the calls that came from your Google Ads, put them in a spreadsheet like this, and do the exact same thing. Take the phone number, plug it into your CRM. Take the phone number, plug it into your CRM. This is going to allow you to see is this actually working or not? And how much, how many converted, how many estimates did I send, how many invoiced. The reason that we want to look at estimates and invoice, because if you send an estimate to someone but you don't convert it, you should still count that as potential revenue. You just didn't do a good enough job to convert it. And so if you spent $2,000 and you generated 10,000 estimates, you could have had a 5x return, but you only closed 3,000. So you only had a 1:1 time return. So you need to work on your conversion rate for sure. So when you're running Google Ads, you want to have a landing page. And if you're running your Google Ads or someone else is helping you, they got to have a landing page to run these ads too. Now, we could get into the nuts and bolts of exactly what you should be doing and how you should set up your Google Ads. But this video is specifically about tips and tricks on how to track your progress and get better. So in reviewing, there's two types of ads. Google local service ads. Google search ads. Google local service ads. We talked about that, Getting the reviews, making sure that you have some way to track this, which I showed you a way to track it. Google search ads. Extremely, extremely important that you track what's called your conversion, your cost per conversion, your cost per lead. And the way that you do that is you set up these tracking things here. So if this was helpful, be sure to hit like and subscribe. If you're interested in having a company do this stuff for your business, I'll put a link down below. This is what we do, and we'll see you in the next video.