 My name is Rebecca Hasek and I am the director of marketing for Bob Hamilton, humming, heating, pooling, AC, brooder, electrical, everything else. I've been there for two years now and we do everything in-house, that's including AdWords. And I manage our AdWords accounts. My free time is spent a lot of time speaking at very much smaller venues, trying to help small local business owners and entrepreneurs with their AdWords campaigns. Then here to talk to you guys about driving actual phone calls with a search campaign. If you have any questions, please don't hit the page to stop me. Okay, does everyone know what a search campaign is? I'm not sure how familiar I am with it. So there are different types of campaigns you can run on AdWords. Search and display are the major ones. A search campaign is pay for click, the only pay for what people click on. It's the ads that show up when someone is typing in their search bar. And this is for the Google Display network. It's getting harder and harder for your ads or for your website to show up organically. So especially if you're in the home services, places like Thumbtack and Jeaseless Home Advisor are eating up all their real estate above the fold on the first page of your search. Mass is there now too. There's something that's hitting Kansas City next month that I'm going to talk about a little bit at the end called Local Services by Google, who is now my dismissal. But it's getting harder and harder to be found. And more and more companies are getting better at SEO and at having websites and at advertising their website. So having a really strong search campaign is important for your business. So I found that the people that benefit the most from search, I mean really it's everybody, but the people that are providing services, the people that have locations that people want to go to, the chiropractors, salons, lawyers, like I said, home services again, people or places that serve people's immediate need. So think about when you use your search bar and when you're ready to click on where those search ads is because you need something right away and you don't have time to filter through all the web pages to find exactly what it is that you need. And it's not necessarily the best avenue for places that have, or businesses that have a longer funnel, where people are really taking a long time to research something. They're not really in the finding process right now. They're just looking for generic information or it's like a longer sales process. I work for a mobile mail company before. I work for Bob Hamilton and our search campaigns never did really well because their buying cycle was like one to three years with her so we would actually buy a piece of equipment. Anyone have any questions about that? Okay, if you guys have an AdWords account and you'd like to open it up, I'm sure you'd go ahead and open my own personal AdWords account when I go through this, but we are owned by a corporation now so I don't get to do that anymore, which is comfy. But I'm always happy to sit down with people and go through this process with them individually. I do it for free. I just really love AdWords. I like the competition. I like looking at all the data and trying to help people see places where they can improve. So these are the things that I really like to monitor the most on my search campaigns. You can do this by going to your campaign tab and it'll bring up a bunch of information. You'll want to go to modify your column, watch your impressions, your click-through rate, your conversion rate, your phone calls, your average cost per conversion, your invalid clicks, and then you can also go to your auction insight to watch your impression share. There's a lot of different columns that you can add and it can be really overwhelming, and sometimes I'll look at someone's account and they'll have absolutely everything on their campaigns tab, and you don't need all that. You can look at all that stuff, but really you don't need it. These are the important things to tell you how your campaigns are actually reporting. So a good click-through rate is like 2-3%. I have a Gmail campaign that's getting 50% right now. I'm not really sure why. I keep calling Google, they keep telling me to keep doing what I'm doing, so I just don't let it ride. My conversion rate, a good average conversion rate is like around 10-12%. So conversion is like when someone actually takes action on your website, whatever you need that to be, whether it's filling out a form, sending it through your email list, giving you a call. I might only track book appointments because I don't care about the other stuff. Because when it comes down to dollars, Bob just wants to know how many book appointments did we get from our AdWords spend? How many phone calls did we get? That's all I personally count. My average conversion rate is 37-52%. Last month, it was a little rough. March is usually rough for us. They're still at 27%. And then Invalid Place is important to watch because you can get a lot of bots that will hit you, if you can add those to your exclusive location. It's not a major thing, but it's okay, I like to keep planning on. When it comes to optimizing your search campaign specifically for phone calls, there are a few really, really simple, really fast things that you can do when you're helping yourself or you're helping a client with their search campaign set up to prefer calls. I used to not do click-to-call as my goal. I used to not be an opportunity. In fact, this time last year, when I was here last year, it wasn't an option. And so when I spoke to the group last year, I was A.B. testing AdWords Express versus the full AdWords to see how it was performing for us. And I really, even though AdWords Express is really simple and there's got a lot of targeting you can do with it, I really admired how well it actually performed. We were getting, you know, 27 to 35 phone calls a day at about $6 a phone call, which is insane. So I ended up actually putting that over to my full on AdWords because I wanted to get more targeted. Calls was not, click-to-call was not an add option back then. It was just full display ads and search ads. So then they introduced click-to-call. Let's go through some simple navigation. So when I say tab, I'm talking about these tabs on the edge. This is the rest of your AdWords screen that I can't show from the target. But when you click on your search campaign, you can go into your settings tab. And make sure you have the leaves set as your goal. If you want people to actually buy from you, call you, set up an appointment with you, you have to have leaves to edge your goal. When you just have clicks set on your goal, then it's driving people who are still like in the research phase to your website. And that's okay. Like if that's what you want, that's fine. But if you're trying to measure actual money, ROI, set leaves as your goal. Don't forget, this is really easy to do. I've done this myself at the lower level. But don't forget to set your locations. And don't forget to exclude locations that are out of your service range. Or if you are getting bots that are hitting you, I do this like once a month. I'll go in and I'll set those as an exclusion so that I'm not spending money. Google tries to pull some of that out. But I'm not spending money on those people. A lot of people, I used to do this too. One time last year I switched over to automated bidding, which really saved me a ton of time. So every morning for about a year, the first thing I would do when I got to work, I'd open up my laptop, I'd pull up my keywords list, and look and see what people are bidding for the day. And then I would adjust my bid based on what they're bidding and based on the traffic and impressions and how many people are searching for that. And it was super time consuming. And it wasn't really effective. I was driving a lot of traffic to our site and we were still doing really, really well. But it just didn't seem worth it. And it got me into a bidding war where people were paying $65 per click on the word AC. And that's standard for my industry. So I just, I said, nope, not doing it. So it's automated bidding. I maximized for conversions for my display or your display ads. You can maximize for clicks. You can maximize for impressions. You can maximize for all kinds of different things. There are a lot of people that just want to be top of the page. And that's fine, but that is really expensive. And from my personal experience, it's not necessarily the most profitable. So don't worry about targeting for search page location or outranking share. That's something that a lot of business owners that I work with have a lot of really hard time. They'll call me like this mad, frantic panic. How come my ad isn't listed at the top? Like, well, do you want to pay $70 for every thumb click actually a click on that ad? No, you want to pay for the person that's most likely to convert off of it. And then you can also use, you can go to your location options if you are local. You can set it to make sure it sets people in your area. Otherwise you'll get people passing through or people who have expressed interest in your area. Make sure that it's open or living in your area. Do you guys have any questions about that? And then just a pro tip. Adwords, they like to change things. And no matter how much you follow them and read their blogs and stay up to date, they tend to change things sometimes without you really ever knowing or noticing. So make sure you check your campaign setting periodically. Especially if you start noticing major changes. Hopefully they're major positive changes but sometimes they can really hurt your campaign. So when I first had an example, when I first imported my AdWords Express account over to full on AdWords, I kind of beat the system and it accidentally, I don't know how it did it, but it set calls as my goal which was awesome because you can't pick that at all. So I was really, really excited and then they caught on to it and it made a huge change. So one day, you know, all of a sudden our call started dropping. I was like, what the heck is going on? You know, we still had great traffic, our impressions were fine, our costs were still really low, but we just were keeping the same volume. My goals had changed. The next thing you could do that's really simple to help your search campaign is go into your audience tab. There are people that are interested in your travel business or people that are pet owners. These are people that are your website visitors, people that have already engaged with your business. So set that and then you can also create an audience that's similar to your website visitors. So Google will automatically go out and find people who have the same buying activities as people who have bought and then you can also add a customer list if they're larger. So we have a customer list and it's like 20,000 some odd people and so I can target my ads for those people so our return customers can even send different ads to them. You might get really pretty greedy. I always adjust my bids for these audiences because they are so strong and they perform really well for me up 50%. When I first did that it was kind of freaked out. I don't want to pay 50% more than what I'm already paying for people who already buy from us but it's done really well. It's actually increased our call volume and it's lowered our cost. Don't forget to set your demographics tab if you have a specific age range or gender that you're targeting. I guess one of my tips for you guys is never assume your demographic age range for your gender. You might be surprised. I always say don't guess it. Prove it. So you can see that by who's engaging on your social media. You can see that by who's engaging on your website. You can see that by who's engaging with your ad. Prove it. Look at your call log who is actually your audience. For some people it is very cut and dry. We a lot of times we get calls from marketing agencies we have this magazine and it targets the wood people with this certain household income and this certain industry and they think that that's going to make me buy from them but really who we serve is everybody. No matter their income level no matter where they're located we serve everybody. So don't narrow yourself down too much if you don't actually know who you're serving. Building your ad group A lot of people talk about keywords. Don't guess your keywords. Prove your keywords. Search terms is a helpful tab that you can use under your option insights. That shows you what people are typing into their search bar. Describing them to click on to your ad. Typically if they're looking for your brand your brand name could show up you know hate added the top 10. If you have really good ads it can be lower. Ours is like usually the top 4 to 6 out of top 10 search terms is by Hamilton but the other top keywords are competitors so you buy your name do not buy your name up to you. Under your ad groups tab you can create ad groups based on your major services or audiences. So we have you know practically five different businesses under one book. We have plumbing, we have heating, we have pooling we have router and we have electrical so I have ad groups based on all of those. I really wanted to get nitty-gritty I could do water heaters because that's a whole different audience you know or energy efficient or I could do people who are looking for whole home rewires if you can get really nitty but I don't it hasn't proven most effective for us I just keep it simple and to create your ad groups based on your major services after you create your ad groups be sure to go back into that settings tab and adjust your settings again. Now this is to drive calls. Make sure you adjust your bidding to maximize conversions and you can set a landing page if you have one. Not everyone needs multiple ad groups if you're if you only really offer one major service or one service is kind of applicable to all of the people that buy from you you might only need one. Under your ads and extension tab go use this little arrow create a new ad and there are all different types of ad types that you can create I only now, I mean I do dynamic ads I'll do search ads but really what I really focus on is click the call so you can do a click the call ad it's kind of down towards the bottom I use a third party tracking number because I don't always trust Google's numbers so I like to compare them usually they're pretty accurate within a few calls here or there don't forget keep it simple show that you provide the service they're looking for I get frustrated when I see search ads that say I think it's a lot of travel ones the most amazing, spectacular wonderful, beautiful vacation ever but that's not specific to what I'm looking for I'm looking for a beach I'm looking for something with a hot tub I'm looking for something that has full amenities keep it simple list your services the guarantees or hours what's specific to you think about what people are searching for and use that it's kind of the old way of doing ad works back in the day I got kind of away from that and started doing more dynamic search ads but it works, we're quick to call it works, keeping it simple this is our number one call ad, quick to call ad it just has our phone number our name our website $24 service I always suggest try wording your ad in various ways I have about three different versions of this ad in different ad groups and I keep my eye on it I pause and enable them as they perform up and down AdWords usually shows a better performing ad over a lesser one but you can increase your costs and increase your call volume by staying on top of it to do the ad yourself and again let things run for a couple weeks before you make major changes I don't have questions about that I fight with Bob every week I fight with Bob every week and then he kind of blinks out after a while that's true, your personal branding your branding does have a lot to do with his clicking on your ad but that's when it's important to go back and look at the search terms and your option insights because then you can prove that the people that you're capturing had no idea who to call they'd literally just take the plumber because they're new homeowners and they've never paid attention to a Bob Hamilton ad in their lifetime because it wasn't relevant to them people have so much going on in their lives and good at blocking out stuff is not relevant to us in our time of need so keeping an eye on that is important if you're seeing that you're spending money on all branding ads it might not be the right but it might mean that there's not enough competition out there that's taking away from your organic it might be that you're not having problems with your organic does that make sense? yeah, you stole them so that's why I switched so we capture a lot of our competitors from our click to call another way you can think about it is that our click to call is like $6 a call that's a $6 guarantee that our competitors are not going to take our business away so putting your own brand name in as a negative keyword is a really horrible personal thing you have to see how it works for you I did I don't have our competitors in negative keywords and I do watch the bounce rate on our other search campaigns and they are a little bit higher but the cost per click is so low that it's not really worth you never know, you might catch someone but if your cost per click is really high it's costing you a ton of money and your bounce rate is like in the 80s or plus if you want to do that you could do that so you would have an ad group that's all click to call and then you would have an ad group that's a regular search ad you could put negative keywords in that specific ad group but keep them in your click to call and see how that works for you when people are in an emergency they don't like submit a web form to 911 hoping that they're going to message them back they call, right? so, yeah, I'm speaking, I'm calling this number is right here I know they're open, look they have a $500 key font, free consultation I'm calling even though they've heard this other one any other questions about that? so click to call click to call is a direct line to you there's no bouncy you can watch your call duration to see if people are like hanging up right away if you're seeing that people are like ringing and then it's not converting maybe you're having a problem with whoever's answering your phone there was a smaller test control company that I was helping and from their campaign they learned that their call center people were spending way too long on the phone with customers they were losing like a dozen calls a day because their phone call to the customer was 14 minutes long and that's way too long so they lost out all that money so keeping an eye on that I mean you can really learn a lot about your business as well as that I like click to call because it doesn't give customers a chance to get frustrated not being able to find the information that they need and you can just answer their questions 7,742 phone calls since I switched if you click to call that's a lot of phone calls in a few months we've had over 3,000 there's a lot of phone calls 865 non-click to call conversion even though I've moved mostly to click to call I have not seen a decrease in fact we're still increasing in our web forms our request appointment schedule so it's not stealing not stealing any customers these are customers that we might not have gotten there's been no decrease in our web traffic or our leads from our web traffic I know you guys probably shouldn't see this Bob Hamilton was recently bought last September by a company that owns 72 other locations and I've kind of been geeking out because now I have access to home service information from 72 other locations and these locations are working with some big agencies and I've always been curious to see how we staffed up compared to the big agencies so big agency, number one I can't tell you a number but they spend well over a million dollars a year on their AdWords campaign she's been able to break it down through our AdWords spend and then to our lead and then taking those leads to what are the actual opportunities for your calls or your web traffic web forms are junk current customers wanting to know about their bill telemarketers trying to sell you something so not all leads are actual opportunities and then we break it down even further by how many of those appointments those leads we actually book and that comes from our call center it's on their conversion rate and then we take it down to their conversion rate because not every actual lead is a customer service person going to be able to book so big company, number one their actual cost per book of payment is $90 in 99 cents for last year big company, number three $132 in 11 cents per booked appointment the total for the company is 95 $25 $14 per booked appointment that we ran this is this year $21.81 for Bob Hamilton that's amazing I can't believe it and it is really exciting for me because I don't come from a marketing background I am a self-taught junkie who learn from reading their blogs trial and error honestly a lot of error and just talking to other great people who are in the business every day and it's just really it's encouraging I think because I am so willing to learn and I don't consider myself to be an AdWords authority expert it's given me the opportunity to try new things and one of the biggest differences between my campaigns and their campaigns is that they're not doing quick to call they're not they don't use extensions which is crazy they're just doing very simple very generic family owned business feel good happy jargon jargon jargon jargon really cute and friendly it's not working but it's not working like it could be and so I found keeping it simple being straightforward giving people something to do right away immediately don't make them big for it when they're ready to buy from you give them your phone number we also do a quick message text message people what you want hi, great, really great year I'm looking forward to see where it goes I am freaking out because local services by Google rolls out next month in the Kansas City Metro I'm all signed up I'm all ready I've got my accounts created but I'm really discouraged because their cost per bead this isn't even book appointment ranges from $25 to $30 and it's going to completely push us even further down the page local services by Google local services by Google and it's for right now it's just for home service companies it'll eventually spread to other services and other businesses I think that's like years down the road you are working with any home service companies you might want to talk to them about it it's going to change how they have to spend on their paper-click budget I don't have an increase in my budget I'm just going to have to figure it out guys but it's going to completely increase my cost and my cost per book of payment it's going to help a lot of people but for people like me it's going to be terrible we'll see, maybe not, I don't know but it is actually pushing down all of our organic information so our website won't even be above the fold it probably won't even be on the first page anymore when someone is actually looking for a box of open it's going to be local services by Google three ads the map home advisor thumbtacks Angie's list more ads organic sick page I don't know what we're going to do I think our SEO guy is going to have a lot of unhappy clients on his hand we pay them every month to make sure that we're on the first page SEO wise or that we're at least up there and relevant I don't know how they're going to combat it but things change all the time and I guess I'm not too worried about it but if you're on mobile, it's even worse at home service people it's really curious it comes to deciding what kind of ad word or paper quick campaign is right for you it's really trial and error you have to keep your eye on it don't freak out, you can always change it back maybe search isn't right for you at all, maybe it's just play right, so that's even less costly than search campaigns are but you have to be able to know how you can solve the customer's problem that they're having right there in that micro moment with like less than 140 characters knowing your keywords setting your audiences you can even dive deeper and set your affinity audiences which I do, I use those you can get too narrow and then you start excluding too many people you're trying it but it's set for two weeks what question do you have ad word something that's important to keep in mind is that maybe you have a service that doesn't have as much of a profitability as another service so if you're trying to just get calls in then maybe you don't want to keep such a close eye on that we offer a $99 mainline special all the time so my offer book of commitment averages $21 you have to think about the overhead that it takes to send out the technician and to run the call and all the marketing money spent to even like brand ourselves so that people knew about us to begin with maybe that's not worth it to advertise on ad word but if they're looking at, you know, furnace replacement or water heater replacement and some of those bigger items that's a good place to start I do it based on me because we want to keep our guys busy so we want to keep them running so there's always an opportunity once you convert a customer to be your customer there's an opportunity to sell them something else keep a guy's busy you might lose them in my industry I get that question a lot imagine that you are retirement age you have 12 children 7 grandchildren have been involved in the business in one way or the other how do you look that up Bob made the right choice he did it for his family and he wanted to make sure that his people were taken care of by companies who take care of their families ARS is a great company they really take care of their employees and it was a long time coming it's America's American rescue service Gerardo Pimentis but they take care of their people and he didn't want his family fighting over his right to be I think people should relate to that any other questions? our pay-per-click budget is larger than our SEL because their website has been established for quite some time now but I can tell you that our pay-per-click budget is nowhere near to other home services we're spending right now there have been a lot of people that have done a lot of money in the AdWords market lately it's been competitive and really hard which means you have to be even better at your job to make sure that you're not losing out so even though we're losing out on some of our question share on display our clicks are still upward trending and our conversion rate our bounce rate for our display ads are 29% which is super low so people are engaged that's where that money for SEL is important because our cost per conversion increases run of the day so one of the companies that is a part of ARS that's probably even more established than us is called AJ Perry and they're enormous they're like three times the size of us they've been around longer they have better brand recognition because they've been there, they spent a lot more money on branding our cost is still lower it's all about strategy what works in your market we do all the social media in-house and we do a ton of social media like social media all day I don't very often tie an AdWords campaign specifically into social media because the social media isn't driving people to search for your Google it's driving people to your website so you don't really need to but there is crossover and if we have a special going on we promote it on our billboards so there is crossover we offer plumbing, heating, cooling water and electrical automated bidding I used to do it manually but it was time consuming and it wasn't as effective as automated so when it's set to automated for us then it's working even harder to find people who are the most likely to convert when you're just doing a cost per click when you're bidding manually you're bidding on what you think people are going to convert on you can set a max amount yeah yep you can put a max amount but you might be shorting yourself probability of conversion yeah so I do have like like I said I cap my play clicks to oh my gosh no more than 9 cents a click so you can cap it for things like that wanting people who are like ready to buy right now and you know that your cost per lead is far less than your cost per opportunity you know like your opportunity to make money then why would you I mean our cost per call that's actually that's paying to be there that's not her opportunity that's like book appointment like we're in their house we actually serve them so feeding geofurnaces water heaters plus when we're in the house then you know we if they see if they're working on a water heater and they see that the furnace is old too it's an opportunity any more questions tweet at me at mama keep on you can email me I brought some cards I'm always happy to sit down and talk to people and pick a look at your campaign and offer suggestions on what I think might help you some more calls or clicks or whatever it is that you're wanting to do for less money it's always nice just to have a second eye take a look and I like talking about it so I didn't think I'd talk to this one but I did so thank you guys I appreciate your time