Are Google Adwords right for you? We often have home inspectors that want to ramp up leads quickly, and they ask us to create a strategy that helps bring qualified traffic to their website. One of the best ways to do this is through Google Adwords. Adwords are something that many of the major home inspection companies use, and you can see home inspectors using it in almost every market in the US and Canada.
Type in any city and the words “home inspections” in Google and you will see home inspectors almost everywhere using Google Adwords. So if so many people use it, there has to be something to it.
Along with a strategy of increasing “organic traffic” to a site, Adwords can help your home inspection service reach the right audience and ultimately lead to more inspection clients. How so?
Why Start an Adwords Campaign?
Reason 1: It has immediate results. If you’ve built a website and have been working hard to improve your rankings with Google, you realize those efforts can take time to see results. With Adwords, as soon as your campaign is enabled you will start receiving impressions and clicks on your ads (i.e. inspection leads). Because of this ability, you can create campaigns to target specific inspection services and see results quickly.
Often, when potential clients see your ad on Google, they are unaware these are actually advertisements. You may consider yourself Google savvy and realize the first two to three results are paid spots, but many users do not discern the difference. Also, with screen sizes getting smaller with mobile search overtaking desktop searches, those ad placements may be all a prospective homebuyer sees when Googling for a local home inspector.
Reason 2: It is a PPC model. PPC is an acronym that you may have seen, it stands for Pay Per Click. Why this is an advantage is that you are only paying for ads where someone takes an action on that ad such as by clicking through to your website or clicking the ad to call on a mobile device. Contrast that with the model that media companies have long tried to sell you on, CPM (Cost per thousand) that is only based on impressions and not by motivated homebuyers.
Reason 3: It’s customizable. What makes you stand out as a business? Sometimes it is hard to make that point – the “why I am your best choice for a home inspector” point. With Adwords, that is easy. It is simple to craft adcopy with very specific messaging highlighting the value of your service. You can also create messaging to specific niche services such as specialty inspections as well as customize content to highlight your location in the community. So you can target radon testing in specifically high radon areas. Or you can push pool inspections in areas where people ten to have pools. Offer a discount on your home inspection? Veteran-owned? Are you a CMI? Creating ads that highlight these is easy.
Reason 4: It’s measurable. Adwords allows you to see what keywords or services drive traffic to your site. This can help you to prioritize what keywords to adjust bids on. Adwords also creates easy tools to easily do A/B testing adcopy to understand what variations resonate with your market (i.e. it allows you to test the waters to get the most bang for your buck). Also by linking your Google Analytics with Adwords you can track how visitors respond to your site content and track conversions. This allows you to benchmark the performance of campaigns compared to other marketing efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions About Adwords:
What if my competitor searches for my term and then clicks on my ads a hundred times?
First, hopefully, you don’t have someone that you compete against that is so underhanded, and we send our condolences if you do. Google actually is also very concerned about this sort of activity and has created sophisticated tools to detect this. There is an invalid click column in Adwords that allows users to track this, and Google often includes possible legitimate clicks into this category to be safe. In the unlikely case that someone is able to evade Google’s algorithmic tools, there is a policy where we can ask for a manual review from Google. So worst case scenario, Google will take care of it after the fact, but they are proactive to keep it from happening in the first place.
What if there are a lot of clicks in one day will this spend hundreds of dollars without me knowing?
When we set up an Adwords account for a client we may ask what your projected monthly budget should be, but we actually create a daily budget in Adwords. So Google will calculate based on the cost of the keywords, your daily budget, and your projected click-through rate, how often to show your ads during the day. Google will attempt to spread them out through the day, and depending on other bidding options will attempt to optimize based on that data. So in essence, the answer is no, unless you set a huge budget. If you set a budget of $310 per month, then likely you will not get charged more than $10 per day (give or take). But if your budget is $10,000 per month… then you may have that issue.
Can I set up my own Adwords account?
Yes, you can. But consider this first: As mentioned above, Google Adwords is a PPC model. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is based on two factors, 1) how much you are willing to pay for a visitor for a keyword or phrase, and 2) a quality score Google assigns your keyword based on your account. That quality score is based on factors such as your website’s landing page, the relevance of your keyword to ad content, and historical data how people are responding to your ads. Even if your bid is lower than a competitor, you could still show up above them in searches. That’s why it’s so important to have a partner in creating your Adwords campaigns.
Also, with a high-quality ad, you will get less “junk” leads. Most home inspectors don’t want to spend $100 on “FDA inspection” keywords. Do you do thermal imaging? Many do, but do you want your whole budget eaten up on people typing “medical thermography”? A professionally built ad actually saves money in the long run, as you waste less money on bad leads.
Conclusion
Adwords can be extremely effective, especially if you are in a densely populated area. Ultimately, the success of the ads that you have on Adwords depends on 1) the area you are in, 2) how professional your ads are. A non-professionally made ad will cost you money and not generate leads. Professionally made ads will cost more at first, but save you money in the long run and also generate leads.
