After building and managing several appliance repair PPC campaigns over the last several years at Bloom, we’ve managed to gain a little experience under our tool belt in the space (pun intended).
In this post, I’ll share with you, some of the best practices for building PPC campaigns that we’ve developed to help our appliance repair clients gain a competitive edge in their markets.
Ad Scheduling – Show Up When You Need To
If you’re an appliance repair company, you already know that there are peak and slow demand periods as often as on a weekly basis. In addition, service technician availability is often an ongoing challenge, so being able to control the flow of service requests needs to be a key component of your campaigns. To address this need, at Bloom, we tend to build out several campaigns that cover the following:
- Most lucrative appliance repair brands, types and services vs. the less lucrative ones
- Most important locations (Ex: Counties, neighbourhoods or zip codes that are the easiest or most profitable for the appliance repair provider to service)
- Same-Day service campaigns that automatically run only during select times of the day, when the appliance repair provider can support same-day service. Later in the day when it’s no longer possible to deliver on a same-day service promise, identical campaigns run that don’t offer same day service. This cycle repeats daily and is fully controllable by our clients
- Remarketing campaigns to drive recurring appliance servicing and maintenance contracts
By segmenting the campaigns this way, you’ll have more levers to pull or push depending on the lead volume. So when things are busy and you can’t take any more service requests, you can turn off some of the campaigns and leave only the more targeted and lucrative ones on until you can handle more demand.
Geographic Targeting – Show Up Where Your Customer Are
On top of these levers, it’s critical to filter out unwanted locations from surrounding states by adding negative geographical regions. This will help make sure that you’re only reaching people that you can service and not people three states away who are looking for appliance repair services in their area.
Making sure that you’re only targeting “People in my targeted location” under your AdWords campaign settings rather than “People in, searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location” will help you reach only those people that are in the areas you’ve specifically targeted.
As a side note here, you might want to have a separate campaign targeting “People searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location” since this will allow you to reach out of towners that own property in the areas you service and who are looking for your local appliance repair services.
Track Phone Calls
Having a service request form on your site makes a lot of sense since there are a good number of people that will take the time to fill it out if their appliance repair need is not urgent. But most people will pick up the phone and call you, especially if their fridge is on the fritz or their dishwasher just conked out.
So you’ll want to track phone calls through a phone tracking provider that will give you a dedicated phone number you can use to see how many phone calls your AdWords or PPC campaigns are bringing you. There are several call tracking providers out there, but one that offers great value, service and reliability is CallRail.
Consider Custom Landing Pages
Having a custom landing page that’s specific to certain appliance brands or types as well as locations can have a huge impact on service request volumes. Not to mention, that the more relevant your page is to the keywords and ads you’re targeting, the less you’ll end up paying per click.
You can either put together your own landing pages with the necessary conversion elements if you have access to a solid web design team, or you can go with a service such as Unbounce which provides users with conversion optimized landing page templates that you can customize yourself.
Never Set it and Forget it
The worst thing you can do is put all this time and effort to build your campaigns and then let them run on their own with no further monitoring or optimization on your part. We once had an appliance repair client that did exactly that.
They decided to let their campaigns run without having us optimize them for several months (against our advice of course) and the results were that over time more of their competitors began advertising and even started copying their ads while outbidding them on important keywords. So the their campaigns became a lot less profitable as they were no longer getting the same amount of service requests from them.
They only realized this after we pointed it out to them once they resumed working with us to gear up for their peak season. Because they weren’t monitoring their campaigns or the leads coming from them, they had no idea that they had lost so much ground. We were able to turn things around for them, but not without a considerable amount of work on our part and budget investment on their part.
Keep your PPC campaigns humming like a well maintained appliance:
- Keep checking how the campaigns are performing – ideally on a weekly basis at the very least
- Make sure that your tracking is working (Conversion tracking, call tracking, etc.)
- Check your ads to see which are performing and which aren’t. Ideally you should have 2 to 3 ads per adgroup and always be setting up challenger ads to beat out your best performing one to maximize service requests.
- Dig into your search term reports to find great keywords to add to your campaigns and irrelevant keywords to include as negatives
- Analyze your geographic performance. Set up and adjust bid modifiers ongoing to get your ads in better positions in the locations that are performing better and do the opposite on the poorer performing geographical areas
- Keep an eye on your competitors – the Auction Insights report in AdWords is a great way to see who’s competing with you and what the overlap rate is between your ads and theirs. Also monitor their ads and write better ones than they have
- Sitelinks – Make sure you are using every available and relevant sitelink you can. Sitelinks not only make your ads stand out over your competition’s but they also can help improve your quality score, which will help you pay less for every click you receive.
Sound like a lot of work? It is, but following these tips and strategies will help you get the most out of your investment in AdWords and PPC in general and will help keep you one step ahead of the competition.
Need some expert help?
Get in touch – we’d love to help you out:
1-888-225-7932 ext. 110
hello@makeitbloom.com