HVAC AdWords – Does Your Account Manager Have a Grip? Here’s 5 Ways to Tell
So you’ve got an HVAC AdWords account or, perhaps you are considering trying it out.
But does your management firm have a solid grip on providing you with an ROI?
If you are having a difficult time understanding the answer, you’re not alone. Many times you will get only the data the management firm wants you to see and, without full account access, you just have to hope the reports are complete.
I’m going to share 5 simple questions you should ask. And, how to verify the answers they provide.
1) Where is your AdWords traffic being driven to?
The only correct answer here is custom landing pages created solely for your HVAC AdWords campaigns. If they are driving traffic to your existing website, failure is practically guaranteed.
There is no way to test results without offering up landing pages that compete against each to determine which convert best. Properly designed landing pages are the single greatest contributor to AdWords success. Lack of properly designed landing pages is also the single greatest contributor of failure.
The perfect landing page is highly targeted, and eliminates all other distractions in favor of a compelling service or replacement offer attached to a lead capture form. This format will convert 200%,
300%, up to 600% more of your visitors into leads that will funnel into revenue.
Each landing page should contain an attention-grabbing headline centered around the visitor’s keyword search. Follow this with a sub-head that further explains the benefits you offer.
Like this:
_____________________________________
Is Your Air Conditioner in Need of Repair?
If You Are Tired of Stifling Heat and Humidity and Long for Dependable Comfort Again, Here’s How the (Your company) Rescue Team Can Help You – FAST!
_____________________________________
What makes this an effective headline?
1) It gets right to the need of the visitor without hesitation or distraction.
2) It introduces the viewer’s “pain” so they feel you understand
3) It introduces a potential solution to their pain with just a little more reading
4) The headline is all about the reader, not you or your company. The words “your” and “you” are used 3 times. “We”, “our”, and “us” are not used at all.
There are 3 more steps each landing page must provide to your visitors if they are going to convert at rates of 15% to 35%. Get each step correct and success is almost guaranteed.
2) Are they tracking all in-bound leads?
Each and every phone call should be tracked and recorded. Each email inquiry should contain a record of the landing page that generated the conversion. We use a phone tracking method known as “dynamic phone number insertion”. Each visitor to your HVAC landing page is served up a unique number that only they see.
This not only tells us which landing page the call came from, but also the keyword searched. This is brand new technology that practically no one else is using.
We are able to record and listen to the call, track which landing page generated the call, and have access to the keyword that the caller searched to find our ad. Within seconds we have access toall of this valuable information that allows us to monitor and track which elements are working best.
AdWords has many valuable tracking elements within the interface, but this data is beyond the scope of what Google can provide. It is the job of your AdWords manager to ensure that every available tool is being put to use.
Click Here To Get Advanced HVAC Landing Pages
3) Did they help you determine how much you can afford to spend on each conversion?
In my way of thinking, it is an HVAC AdWords manager’s job to make sure you are not blindly spending money with no sense of direction. Of course, this also forces them to commit to a set of results that some are uncomfortable engaging in.
But their primary job is to not just send you traffic, but to create conversions that are affordable and make financial sense. They can quickly help you arrive at conversion cost goals by asking a few simple questions. We will assume we are trying to arrive at the maximum conversion cost for each of your service and repair leads.
Here are the questions:
a) How much revenue does your average service call generate?
b) What is your average gross margin from service calls?
c) From these 2 questions, how much is your average gross profit per service call?
d) How much of this profit are you comfortable spending to generate the call?
The rest is relatively easy. If your average gross profit from each service call is $300, I would say your maximum AdWords cost for each service call should be about 30%, or $90. Remember, each new customer you obtain has an annual revenue value of about $700 if you convert them to a service agreement.
So, in a way, you are investing in potential future revenue as well.
If you agree on this realistic number, this becomes a metric they MUST meet. Lower is better of course, but once you agree, they become obligated to meet this metric. If they won’t commit, keep looking. Of course, you can’t expect them to commit to a much lower number if it is unobtainable in your market. But don’t agree to something that doesn’t make financial sense either.
Hold them to $90 and hope they can do better. In many markets, conversion costs of $30-$50 each are possible.
4) Are they focusing on mobile visitors?
According to Google’s own data, mobile is on the move. Mobile visitors have exceeded those of desktops and this trend is only increasing. You must treat these searches much differently than those of desktop visitors. Failure here will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and you’ll never even know it.
The good news is, practically none of your HVAC competition is getting this right. So, by taking advantage now of this weakness that exists in almost all markets for HVAC websites, you can turn the tide in your favor while your competition fails to capitalize.
This means each of your ad groups must have 2 sets of ads, desktop and mobile. This also means each of your landing pages must be mobile device responsive so that the experience is tailored to the very different needs of mobile searches.
The page must be short and to the point and only focus on a single consumer need, such as air conditioning repair.
There should be no page navigation (no links that take the visitor from the page) and no competing offers such as system replacements, duct cleaning, etc. Here are some explicit examples of our highest converting mobile pages. They are clean, concise, and to the point with very strong calls to action and contact details.
5) Does management go beyond just driving traffic?
I believe one of the most valuable services we offer as part of our HVAC AdWords management for every client is recording, monitoring, and critiquing the way in-bound calls are handled by staff. Getting calls is one thing; properly converting them into revenue is another.
When I ask a new client how well they handle in-bound phone calls, I always get the same answer:
“Oh, my staff does a great job and customers love us”.
While this may be true for some calls, it is almost never true for most or all calls. When I first began recording my in-bound calls about 6-7 years ago, I thought the same thing. Prior to recording the calls, I spent a lot of time training and coaching my staff.
I’ve had the honor of personally handling thousands of in-bound phone calls myself, and I considered my techniques to be practically flawless. But the first time I began listening to recorded calls I was shocked!
I quickly learned that my advice and training was not always soaking in and it brought me back to reality. And that reality was, I was losing calls because reps were sometimes careless or simply didn’t understand how to handle certain inquiries.
When we monitor calls for our clients, we can email the actual recording to the client so they can listen to the call with one simple click.
Each time we record a lost opportunity, 2 things happen: we have the client listen to the call and then we offer suggestions on how it could have been handled differently. These are insightful and experienced suggestions that can turn the event around so that it doesn’t happen in the future.