If Google Ads Aren't Working, It's Probably Not Google's Fault.

My company manages over $1 million in Google Ads spend, and I've talked to well over 1,000 home service businesses about Google Ads, of what's working and what's not working. And what I found is that when Google Ads fail, there's usually 4 main things that need to be fixed in order for Google Ads to make sense for businesses. And in this video, I'm going to break down those 4 problems and give you the solutions to help you have better campaigns and actually make money from Google Ads. These are things that, to be honest, when I was working at my home service business, I wish that I knew so I could go to my marketing company and say, hey, let's do these things, because it would have saved me a lot of time and headaches of dealing with these people. All right, number 1, right off the bat, cheap leads are lying to you. So the example here, we had a guy spending $22,000 a month. We get on the transition call and the agency says, yeah, we've scaled up to $22,000 a month. And I said, why did you do that? And they said, we got his cost per lead down to $20 a lead. And I said, okay, well, do you know if those $20 leads are good? Do you know if that $22,000 is making him any money? And they said, no, you know, we asked the business owner for return on ad spend, but they didn't give it to us. And What? You scaled them to $22,000 because they got cheap leads. I don't care about cheap leads. I just want to make money. This is exactly why cheap leads are lying to you. And if your agency keeps saying, oh, well, your lead, your cost per lead is so low, that doesn't matter because cost per lead doesn't matter. So cost per lead is not ROI. It's not return on ad spend. Cost per lead tells you nothing about revenue. I'd rather someone tell me you spent $2,000 on one lead and you made $20,000. Let's do that more. I don't care if I spend $2,000 or $20. It matters what I make off of that money opposed to what I actually spent. And that's the biggest thing is that cheap leads can actually lose money at scale because it's just like Facebook ads, like tire kickers, price shoppers, cheap leads. And if you get more cheap leads, it's going to burden your CSRs on dealing with cheap leads that are not good fit, and it's going to waste your time if you keep spending money on cheap leads. Revenue attribution is the only metric that matters. If I told you you spent $2,000, you made $20,000, let's do more of that. All the other numbers do not matter. What matters is that we actually make money, and this is a 10x return type of thing. So you need to track the full funnel, the lead, the sale, and the revenue. And we're going to talk more about the actual full funnel approach of what you need to do. But the lead, you don't just stop at cost per lead. You got to go to the jobs and the estimates, and then you get to the actual sale. And that's going to show you if this actually makes sense or not. So I would rather take $100 leads if I'm making money than $20 leads. Like if I got 5 $20 leads and they were all bad, I would want $100 if it made made sense, and I think you would too. But the pushback is with marketing companies is do not stop at just cost per lead, because what happened to me, I would get on calls with these marketing companies and they would say, okay, yeah, your search impression share is this, and then your cost per lead is $50. So I would say we should increase this if you want to get more leads, you know, $50. All that doesn't matter. What matters is you spent $50 for a lead and you made $500. Okay, now, now we're talking. Now we're cooking here. Now it makes sense to spend more money on ads. All right, number 2, your funnel is built wrong. Another issue that I had with my marketing company was that they didn't actually look at my funnel. They looked at the point of we got you this lead and now it's your turn, big guy, to go figure it out. We did our job. We were paying for outputs, not outcomes. And that was my biggest frustration. So we're going to talk about your funnel's built wrong and what you need to do to fix it. So first, this is a must, your paid traffic, if you're spending any money on paid traffic, it needs to go to a dedicated landing page, not your homepage. A lot of times you see this with DIY or people that don't know what they're doing, where they just spend money on ads to get clicks that goes to their homepage and their homepage is not optimized to actually convert visitors into leads. And they're spending money on cheap cost per clicks, but they're not getting any leads from it. This is a big problem, is making sure that your landing page is optimized. So what should you do? Remove all distractions. Have a landing page, have no menu navigation, have no extra links anywhere. Right when they go to that page, have a form right on the page that says, "Get your estimate," and a one button that says, "Click to call." Nothing else. You want to make it so simple that someone goes here and they click this button and they turn into a lead. Because with ads, they're literally typing something in and clicking on the first thing that they see and going to a landing page and then want to turn into a customer. They don't need to know all this other stuff. You need them to turn into a lead right away. So you need a form, call button visible right above the fold, so before the first scroll, and on mobile, do the exact same thing right above the first scroll so that way it's right in their face. I can't stress this one enough. When we talk about full funnel, it's not just you got the lead, right? We just talked about cost per lead. You need it to go into your CRM and you need the tracking to happen. And this is not optional. And this is again why a lot of marketing companies miss the boat is because they pass off leads to you and then they say, see you later, good luck, let me know what happens. We can't have that. Like my company, when I built the company, I said, no, we're doing all the way through. We're taking the leads, drop it into the CRM, put the tags on it, track it all the way through to return on ad spend. This is how you get the full funnel approach. It just takes a couple other steps to show that you actually care is what you need. So CRM tracking is mandatory, not optional, and source tagging keeps your data clean and optimizable. What this means is that when it gets dropped into your CRM or if they fill out a form and it goes to an email, we need it to go into the CRM and get a tag or some notification put on it so that way we can track, did this actually make us money or not? We need this all going into the CRM, a simple point of truth. And this is why the funnel is broken. It's not going to the right place, so you're not getting enough leads. It's going to the landing page, but it's not optimized properly for the right forms or call or call buttons. Then after that actually happens, it's not actually making its way into your CRM the right way. Your CSR, which this happened to me, my CSR just put Google and I'm like, is it Google LSA, Google Search Ads, Google Business Profile, Google Search? What? How is this just Google? We got to make sure that it all comes in correctly so then we can pull the right data. And the third thing is that your campaign's target is garbage. And I'm sorry, you're not buying clicks, you're buying qualified attention. Okay, this one is a little bit more under the hood, and I didn't fully understand this until I got into the agency world because there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that happens with Google Ads that it's not just like set up some keywords and then people go over here and they see this. So I'm going to give you a little ammunition with your marketing company just to ask some questions. So Right now there's Smart Campaigns and Performance Max. I would say these are the basic ones that Google says, yeah, just set it up and like, let it see how it goes. These are more beginner, I would say. The Performance Max ones, people might say, oh, it's not beginner. Performance Max is basically just like letting Google do its thing. It's going to show it all over to the different things, into the Gmails, in the YouTubes, like all over. And I think that there's a time and place for that. It also is not optimized properly for the specific keywords that you want. It's more just like, let's Google do its thing. Not bad, but also not the best targeting. A real strategy, which is why this says this is not equal to real strategy, is making sure that you have specific target keywords. So another issue is broad match wastes budget on unqualified clicks. So to give you a little context, when you're running ads, you can select different types of keywords. You can do phrase match, exact match, broad match. What this means is if someone searches for HVAC repair near me, If you do an exact match, Google's only going to show your ad to that exact match phrase. If you do a phrase match, it's going to show it to something that has to do with that phrase. If you do broad match, it may show it to like DIY HVAC repair or other broad match keywords that it thinks has to do with this. Now you could do some things like negative keywords, like don't show it to DIY or cheap or whatever, but when you do broad match, you allow Google to figure out and show it to whoever you want. The problem is, is that you will get unqualified clicks if you start with broad match. We always start with exact match keywords and then move backwards from there because we want to target specific keywords with high-intent searches that are qualified leads. Very important part. So exact match keywords equals tighter intent, better buys. The other thing about exact match is that it sometimes is more expensive than broad match, of course, because you're targeting specific keywords that are more competitive, but you get much higher intent. So we had a client, they were spending about $5,000 or $6,000 a month on Google Ads, and they kept telling us our cost per lead's too high, our cost per lead's too high. And our last agency, our cost per lead was $150, and now we're at $200 or something like that. And what we told him was, we shifted you from broad match keywords to exact match keywords, but let's not even look at that. Let's look at return on ad spend. He was spending $6,000 and making $50,000, like 10x. And we're like, it doesn't matter about the cost per lead. What matters is that this cost per lead produces this much revenue. So now we know what the baseline is. We can get cheaper leads, but do you want cheaper leads or do you want revenue? And that's the conversation that you have to have and figure out what the actual issue is. The other part to this is location targeting must match your actual service radius. And I can't stress this one enough as well, because a lot of times people will just drop radiuses around businesses and this might work and we do it for some clients that make sense. But for other businesses, like specifically in, in city, like big cities, they'll have areas that they do not want to target. Like, do not take me over here on these sides of the tracks because these are not my clients. Over here is. If you're working with someone, they just drop a radius of 20 miles around your business or something, you're going to get cheap leads from those people that no one wants and you're going to get frustrated because, you know, they're not your target audience. They don't speak English, all the stuff. They're not the right size homes or all the stuff that you don't want. And this is why location targeting must match your actual service radius and more importantly, service area. And last one here, home service requires ActiveCampaign oversight. It's not set it and forget it. So when we talk about like e-commerce or some of these other types of businesses, that's more just like, hey, set up some keywords and then drive traffic to a landing page and then make money. Cool. Home service businesses, it's not like that because we're seasonal businesses, things shift. Heck, when it rains, we might get a bunch of leads. When it doesn't rain, it's cost per lead goes through the roof. Like there's so much that goes into it that you can't just set it and forget it with keywords. You have to have someone who's managing it, looking at negative keywords, optimizing for specific target areas. Optimizing landing pages, making sure the return on ad spend data is there. Like, it's a whole game every single month with all these things that have to happen in order for this to actually work for your business. All right, and the last one, oh man, this one's a really, really big one. So if you're like around $1 to $3 million and you never run ads before, this one's going to hit you pretty hard because if you're treating cold leads like referrals, it's not going to work, okay? And what I mean by this is usually around $1 to $3 million, you shift from like, okay, I get referrals, I get word of mouth coming in, but like, I need a predictable way to scale my business. I want to grow my business. And so you start running ads. The problem when you run ads is that they specific— they're not searching for you by name. They're not getting referred to you. They're searching you cold. They're searching for HVAC repair near me, and then they're finding your business. They don't know anything about you. They're a lot less lenient on communication times, a lot less lenient on building trust because they don't know you. They weren't referred to you. So there's a big difference between cold leads and warm leads and how you actually treat them. So the real issue is that most businesses blame the ads instead of fixing their sales infrastructure, and cold traffic exposes weak operations. I know that was tough, but it's true. Cold traffic exposes weak operation. So Googlies are cold. They do not know you or trust you yet. Referrals come pre-sold. Cold traffic requires trust building. Here's how you do it. Speed to lead is critical. Minutes matter, not hours. When someone reaches out to your business who does not know your business at all, the number one way you can build trust with them is speed. You need to text them and email them right away. Ideally, you'd have a video in the text or the email that says, "Hey, my name's Phil. I'm the owner over here. You know, feel free to shoot over another picture or some more information about your project." Instant trust builder. What does not build trust is they fill out the form and then no one calls them for 24 hours, and you call them, they don't answer, and then it's gone forever. No trust there. So speed to lead is critical here, and speed to lead specifically when it comes to building trust is very, very important. And this is the full funnel approach, right? The lead comes in, what happens to it? Drops in your CRM, calls, texts, all the stuff. Call, text, email immediately upon submission, and then also automated nurture sequence, video intro builds trust fast. So not only send them the text and the email, but let's say you call them and they don't answer. Put them into a nurture sequence with texts and emails and educate them. This will build trust throughout your process, even if they never reach out to you, even if it takes them 7 days to get back to you. Having emails, texts, touchpoints, educating them about your business builds trust. Do this, please do this. All right, so here's the real order of operations. You get tight targeting, so you get your targeting very, very tight. Control who sees your ads. Then you set up your landing page, and your landing page is built to convert, not to inform. So you get good targeting, landing page, CRM attribution after the landing page, then you make sure you have a good follow-up system, and then you scale the spend once all this makes sense and you have return on ad spend. Ads don't fix businesses, they expose them. I'm gonna say this again, ads do not fix businesses, ads do not even scale businesses, they expose the issues. So you gotta make sure you have the tight targeting, a solid landing page, the CRM with attribution for return on ad spend, Then you need to plug the holes, make sure you have a good follow-up system. Then you scale the ad spend, which whatever makes sense over here. All right, the old approach: optimize for cheapest cost per lead. The new approach: optimize for revenue, return on ad spend. Old approach: send traffic to a homepage. No, dedicated conversion landing pages. One pro tip on this: if you run ads for like HVAC and plumbing, or even HVAC service, HVAC install, have two separate landing pages for that. It helps you convert better because it ties directly to what the person is searching. Smart campaigns and Performance Max. Get exact match keywords and intentional targeting. You can layer in some Performance Max on top, but don't just rely on these things. Build a specific, very tight thing for your home service business. Treat Google leads like referrals. Do not do this. Speed to lead and automated nurture is the way that you build trust with cold leads. Scale first, fix later. Do not scale first. Build the system and then scale. Get the return on ad spend report so that way you know, hey, let me go and do this. Now, before I get into this checklist, if you need help with this, if you run a home service business between $1 and $10 million, that's exactly why I built my business. I was at a home service business. I faced all these problems. I figured these things out. That's why I just gave them all to you. But if you want a company that actually cares and knows this stuff, I'll put a link down below. You can set up some time with my team. We do a great job. Our average client last year grew 27% revenue, and we know that because we use your CRM. I love the opportunity to talk with you. Let me get to your ads checklist. Switch tracking for cost per lead to full funnel revenue attribution. So you need to switch your tracking. It's not cost per lead, it's full funnel revenue. Build your dedicated landing page. Set up your CRM source tagging so that way you have all your data coming in. Audit targeting, cut broad match, tighten to exact phrase. Audit the keywords that you're targeting. Configure city-level campaigns with proper radius targeting. So make sure that you have the right areas that you want to target. Build a speed-to-lead automation channel. Add a video to your introduction. Only scale spend after the system above is confirmed working. I appreciate you. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.