Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most ideal ways to draw potential customers to your tree service website. When using PPC campaigns, most tree service companies make a few crucial mistakes that usually cost them tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend. Correcting these mistakes won’t just make your pay-per-click campaigns more profitable and effective – it will also ensure that your company dominates the tree service market.
Unfortunately, most tree service companies lack the resources or time to figure out and fix these mistakes. After all, your major focus is on taking care of the tree owner estimates and managing your tree climbers, not to worry about Pay Per Click issues of your campaign not performing the best.
To make things much easier for your tree service company, here are the 3 major PPC mistakes that tree service providers make with PPC campaigns, and more importantly we show you how to fix these mistakes.
Top Per-Pay-Click Mistakes Tree Service Companies Make and How to Fix Them
1. Sending Your Pay-Per-Click Traffic to the Homepage
PPC clicks need to go somewhere, so the majority of the tree service companies send the pay-per-click traffic to the company website. After all, the people who clicked your ad are looking for tree services and that is your tree service website, right?
The big problem is, your company offers numerous services and the person who clicked on the “pruning” ad won’t want to know whether your company can remove an entire tree. Similarly, if someone clicked on the “tree removal” ad, he/she won’t care about your company’s tree pruning services.
Your homepage has to please everyone who visits your website, meaning that it will include a list of all the services that the company offers. This is not an issue until your company starts driving paid traffic to the website.
Anyone who clicks on your ad will be expecting to have his/her specific needs addressed. If the page they land on after they click your ad does not match the need they want your company to address, they will just leave.
This means that you have to list everything on the homepage so that every expensive PPC click finds the solution they came looking for. However, listing everything may end up confusing people – this can reduce their chances of using your business.
The Solution
The fix to this issue is pretty simple. While it may take both extra effort and time, the results you end up getting are worth it.
Instead of taking your traffic to your homepage, point them to a landing page dedicated to meeting their specific needs. For example, if someone clicks on an ad that is advertising “tree trimming” and lands on a page that talks about “tree trimming”, the potential customer will feel that they are in the right place – this increases their chances of using your service.
The above example should at least give you an idea of why landing pages are extremely important. Sending traffic to landing pages dedicated to their specific needs can double (and in some cases, triple) the PPC campaign effectiveness.
By the way, that is just the beginning. Once you have your landing pages ready, you can start to optimize the pages to ensure that they produce the maximum number of new leads.
2. Poor Keyword Strategy
To get the most value from your PPC tree service ads, you have to use the right keyword strategy. While this may seem obvious, most tree service companies never get this crucial part right.
For example, most tree service companies will use the same ad sets for all their keywords. Now, if a homeowner is searching for “tree service provider”, an ad that indicates your company offers the best tree service may be a good match. It will instantly tell the potential customer that you focus on taking care of trees – this might be a good match for the customer’s needs.
However, if the same ad pops up when someone searches for “stump removal”, you will leave the potential customer with a lot of questions. While the customer will instantly know that you do offer tree services, he/she won’t know whether you do focus on removing tree stumps. While the ad could say you are the best tree service professionals, it still won’t tell the customer whether the team of professionals specializes in the grinding of stumps.
A compelling ad copy should tie the searcher’s intent (the keywords) to the ad (what the potential customer is searching for). This means that the more closely aligned your ad copy is to the search keywords that triggered its display, the more likely the searcher will think, “yes that is the service I am looking for!” and click on the advertisement.
The Solution
The key to fixing this problem is determining which keywords (search terms) are most ideal for your tree service business. Once you determine which terms feature the highest potential of driving the most customers to your tree service business, you can easily use this information to create single keyword ad groups.
Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs) combine the exact phrases and/or match keywords for a specific search term with an advert targeted to the phrase. This strategy ensures that your ad only triggers when someone searches for something that is relevant to the advert – when the ad appears, the searcher will most likely click on it.
Using the SKAGs-based keyword strategy can easily double your click-through rate. This makes it an ideal way of driving more traffic to your landing pages.
3. Lacking Call Tracking
When running a successful tree service company, you will probably be getting numerous calls. Calls are the lifeblood of any business and knowing how someone got your company’s number is important.
Unfortunately, most people won’t call and say, “Hey, my wife saw your billboard 3 months ago and – when our tree started showing signs of falling on our house – we thought of your tree service company.”
This makes it extremely tough for you to figure out the value of the various marketing activities you have been using. Was the billboard worth the money you had paid for it 3 months ago? You won’t know.
Call tracking is extremely important when it comes to pay-per-click advertising. PPC is one of the best ways to get tree service leads and it is no surprise that the cost for this marketing method has increased dramatically over time. To ensure that you are getting the most out of your PPC budget, you need to know which clicks end up producing high-quality leads.
However, because the majority of the pay-per-click leads are phone calls, how can you know which PPC ad resulted in which call?
The Solution
There are various call tracking programs that you can use quite easily. Taking your time to implement the best call tracking programs will be worth both the effort and the time.
Google has a call forward feature that is free – you can use this feature to track which PPC tree service ads produced which calls. Alternatively, your company can consider using other options, like Call Fire or Call Tracking Metrics, which offer additional features like CRM integration or call recording. Weighing different programs can help you figure out which program will offer your company the most value.
Once put in place, call tracking should transform the way your company looks at the pay-per-click campaigns. You will get to know how every campaign performs and how changes in the ad copy, bidding, and other things affect the effectiveness of the campaign. The call tracking will help you improve your lead volume while ensuring that the cost-per-lead is sustainable.
Overview
Fixing the 3 mistakes we have described in this article should make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your tree service company PPC campaigns. Allowing you to double your click-through-rate and also double the conversion rate, this could mean up to 4x more leads for the same ad spend.
The extra time and effort needed to set up your per-pay-click campaigns for success are worth it. More successful campaigns will help you rise above your competition, allowing you to generate more revenue without having to spend more money on advertisements.