How Many Google Ads Leads Will My Contractor Business Get From a PPC Campaign?
Your Google Ads leads will depend on your budget and your Quality Score – as well as the quality of your website. If you don’t set a high enough monthly budget you won’t have the funds needed to capture keywords and earn clicks.
On the flipside, you’re in control of how many leads you want. The higher your monthly budget, the more opportunities to generate qualified leads.
When you spend your money it’s natural to want to know what you’ll get in return.
If you were paying an exterminator you’d want to know if there’s a chance your roach infestation will survive. If you’re paying a window glazier you’d want to know how much sound you’ll be protected from. And if you’re running a Google Ads campaign you want to know how many leads you can expect.
The truth is, you can’t control the exact number of leads you’ll get because there are too many variables in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign – specifically:
- How much your competition is also bidding on each keyword
- Your competition’s Quality Score
- Your Quality Score
But your competition doesn’t dictate your results entirely. You can push the ballpark figure of leads higher by increasing your monthly spend. The more ad clicks you can afford, the more traffic your website will get, and the more chances you’ll have to earn quote requests and call-backs.
We’re not saying you need to take out a second mortgage just to pay for ads, it’s only natural that more money unlocks more options and that’s true whether you’re running an ad campaign or remodelling the kitchen. There are ways to stretch your budget further and we’ll let you in on the secrets if you read on…
In this article we’ll also explain why Google Ads are perfect for contractors looking to generate new leads, explain how you can make your lead-gen campaigns more successful, and offer some simple tips on what to do next if you’re new to Google Ads.
Why Google Ads leads are easier to generate for home improvement businesses
Google Ads aren’t suitable for every business.
The type of business best suited to use paid advertising are those that require pre-qualification.
So, if you like to chat to your leads and figure out their needs before you decide to work with them, Google Ads is ideal for you. At the same time, if your customers are looking for quotes or call-backs, Google Ads is ideal for them.
This covers kitchen renovators, concreters, electricians, plumbers, landscape designers – pretty much any tradie who needs to learn a little about their customer’s home improvement needs prior to a sale.
By bidding on certain keywords you can target people in every stage of their buying cycle – which is just a fancy marketing term for the stages people go through between realising they have a problem and handing over cash to fix that problem.
This buying cycle starts with awareness that they have a problem, then they consider their options, and finally they make a decision. For example, let’s say you lay synthetic turf, your customer’s buying cycle might look like this:
- Awareness: “I have no grass in my yard and I want a lawn”
- Consideration: “I’m comparing reseeding the lawn and laying synthetic turf”
- Decision: “I’m going with this synthetic lawn company because of their prices, reviews and the fact the grass can’t die”
The keywords your customers use will vary at each stage of their own buying cycle. And with Google Ads you can target those keywords, find people at every step of their buying cycle, and increase your leads.
The result? Google Ads convert 50% better than organic search results because you’re finding people with a specific problem and offering them a specific solution.
How to get more leads through contractor Google Ads
There are two proven ways to get more Google Ads leads.
- Spend more
- Improve your Quality Score
We know how frustrating that first piece of advice is. An advertising agency telling you to increase your ad spend feels like a local casino encouraging you to spend more on the tables as an investment strategy.
But the truth is, every ad that gets a click puts money in Google’s pocket. 100% of the click to be exact. The reason we encourage our clients to increase their monthly spend is because it works. Tradies make an average of $2 for every $1 spent on Google Ads – or 100% return on investment (ROI).
If you want to grow your trades business your focus should be on ROI (return on investment), not cost.
The number of leads you’ll get from Google Ads will grow as your monthly spend grows. Higher spend means more ad clicks, that means more people exploring your site, and that means more people asking for quotes, call-outs and help.
And as scary as a higher spend can feel, start looking at the ROI instead of the cost. If you spend $1,000 a month on ads and those ads generate $5,000 in new business, you’ve come out on top.
Looking for an injection of confidence – learn how we target keywords that drive customers to your site with cash in hand
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Importance of improving your Quality Score
Improving your Quality Score is the lesser-known option to get more leads – but one that’s able to bring down how much you pay for each ad click and improve your rankings at the same time.
Your Quality Score is Google’s fancy way of testing your relevance.
When your ads are taking people to relevant landing pages, and the keywords you’re bidding on are relevant to your ads, you’re on the right track. At Tradie Digital we focus on your Quality Score at the heart of every ad campaign, because who wouldn’t want more leads by paying less?
Your Google Ads leads will also depend on the quality of your website or landing page
Every article about Google Ads tends to focus on how much you pay and how strong your Quality Score is – and those are two crucial factors, but the traffic you generate has to go SOMEWHERE.
If your website or landing pages suck, all that paid traffic is wasted.
Thankfully, you don’t need to build a new website from scratch to make sure traffic is turning into leads. At Tradie Digital we use our own ‘P-C-D Framework’ to guarantee an increase in leads, and it’s easy to apply.
PCD stands for:
- Psychology
- Content
- Design
When you nail these three aspects of marketing, you’ll have people climbing over themselves to pay for your services.
Can you spend less and still generate Google Ads leads?
The truth is, Google Ads are always going to be competitive for tradies.
Short-term gigs send people to Google looking for fast help (think burst pipes, dead car batteries, cracked windows).
And the long-term gigs – your home renovations or major projects – typically involve a lot of research on Google (which makes an SEO campaign and a paid ad campaign running together so effective).
That’s why spending more each month is going to increase your visibility, keep your ads appearing for longer, and drive more traffic to your site.
BUT…it’s not all about spending more. You can boost your chance of generating new leads by applying some simple tips and tricks to LOWER THE COST of your paid ad campaign too, these include:
- Using negative keywords (that won’t trigger your ads) to rule out DIY’ers and time wasters
- Blocking your competitor’s name as a keyword to avoid wasting clicks on people looking for another business
- Targeting specific suburbs to attract local leads (and paying less for clicks that the big boys aren’t targeting)
- Nailing your ad text by understanding your customer’s problems
- Tweaking your ads to suit after-hour searches and weekend searches
How to estimate how many Google Ads leads your trade business will get
To estimate your likely leads, we take into account:
- Your ad budget
- An estimate of your cost-per-click
- An estimate of your conversion rate (of your website)
And we can make an educated guess about the number of leads you’ll receive from your own Google Ads campaign.
Check out the example below for a bathroom renovator. As long as we know the marketing spend, the cost-per-click, and a few conversion rate stats, we can predict the number of leads coming to your business.
| Factors | Example: Bathroom Renovator |
|---|---|
| Marketing Investment | $36,000 |
| Cost Per Click | $10 |
| Clicks | 3,600 |
| Leads (Website Conversion Rate). | 7.5% |
| Leads | 270 |
| Conversion Rate To Sale | 30% |
| Total Sales | 81 |
| Average Sale Amount | $15,000 |
| Revenue | $1,215,000 |
PLEASE NOTE: These figures are examples only.
How to predict your leads and ROI across a Google Ads campaign
If you want to use Google Ads to grow your trade, contractor or home improvement business, it helps to learn that you’re not shooting in the dark and hoping for results.
As long as you know (roughly) your website conversion rates, we can figure out how many leads you should expect before you ever spend a cent. Even better, when you can predict your leads it’s possible to increase your spend to increase your ROI.
Keep in mind you’ll need to improve your Quality Score (we can help with that) and make sure your website conversion rate is as high as possible (we can help with that too) but if you’re ready to turn on a tap of qualified leads with a roadmap of expected ROI, we can help.
Keen to learn more about how Google Ads can help grow your business?
