Phil Risher breaks down five Google Ads mistakes home service businesses make. Most costly: sending traffic to your homepage instead of a landing page, targeting broad keywords instead of specific ones, and not tracking which calls come from ads. One company cut spending from $14,000 to $4,000 by switching from nationwide to local targeting and got more leads.
Last month I spoke to 25 home service business owners and 99% of them were making these five Google Ads mistakes. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact mistakes that they are making and how to fix them so that you can get better leads and a higher return on investment. Number one, they don't know if their Google Ads are actually working. We get this question all the time. What should my budget be? How much should I spend? Should I spend more? Should I spend less? If you are not tracking your Google Ads into your CRM and pulling a return on ad spend every single month, it's going to be very, very hard for you to make decisions. Good data, good decisions. When you don't track Google Ads, it's extremely hard. I'll share some strategies on how you can track better down below, but the first thing is you need to make sure that you have a focus on Google Ads. Because if you're just throwing money at the Google gods and praying that they give you leads, nine times out of 10, you're just going to be running blind. The second big mistake is that they're not focusing on the right keywords and also ignoring negative keywords. Most home service business owners are targeting broad keywords and praying that Google will show them in the right places. What ends up happening is that Google just spends the money on these broad keywords and they don't get actually traffic to their website. They also ignore negative keywords, for example, cheap plumbers, cheap electrical contractors, those types of keywords that they would never want to be shown for anyways, but Google is still showing them because they're not going in and auditing their keywords. What you want to do is focus on long tail keywords or more specific keywords that you could rank for, especially if you're in a competitive market, that you need to make sure that you're tracking your keywords all the way through. Because if you are going against broad competitors, Google's going to spend your money and your cost per click is going to be extremely high because you're competing against these big companies with large budgets. Number three, this is a big one. They're sending traffic to a homepage, not a landing page. You never want to drive traffic to a homepage. The reason is because on a homepage, if you don't have the right call to action set up, you're going to lose visibility of that lead. Also, you're not going to be able to convert it as quick as possible. What you need to do is set up a landing page, not only because it helps with conversion rates. They go to your homepage. You're going to click around all over the place, and then you might lose them, they might go somewhere else. The other important thing is that you can set up tracking on landing pages. You can set up a tracking form. You can set up a tracking phone number. You're going to be able to see all the leads that you receive from those two tracking sources. Number four is failing to use any type of tracking phone number. Even if you're driving traffic to your homepage, you can still use what's called dynamic number insertion, where it will change the phone number all across your website to a tracking phone number. That way, wherever someone goes, if they click that number, it's going to tie it all the way back to your Google Ads. There's companies out there that will help with this. The problem with this is that then your forms might not be tracking properly either. And most important, you don't have a landing page that's optimized for conversion rate. And the fifth, and probably one of the most important parts of running ads is when people miss out on local targeting. What I mean by this is we had a company that was spending $14,000 a month on Google Ads, and when we went in and audited their Google Ads, when we started working with them, they were running ads nationally to big suppliers all over the place, and they're a local service business. So we ended up scaling them all the way back to $4,000, and they were able to get more leads just by targeting their local area. The reason that this is important, obviously, is because you don't want to be spending money for people all over the world to see your stuff when you're a local service business. The other reason is because now you can track all the way through and say, in this city, these Google Ads are working at this time in this city, they're not working at this time based off of your conversion metrics. And you can pinpoint and say, I want to spend money on this keyword in this area at this time, because it's producing the best results. And this is really what a good Google Ads game plan looks like. Nine times out of ten, if you're DIYing it, you're not doing this. And it's really hard to do. If you feel stuck with Google Ads and you want a company to come in and help you run Google Ads, that's going to actually pull a return on ad spend every single month. That's what my company does. You can set up a call down below. If not, hopefully these five strategies will help you get unstuck, solve your Google Ads problems and start getting a return on investment today.
