Digital Marketing for Contractors
A podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business.
Digital Marketing for Contractors
Avoiding Common PPC Pitfalls
In this episode, Janet and Caitlyn break down the 10 most common PPC advertising mistakes replacement contractors make—and how to avoid them. From weak ad copy and mismanaged budgets to overlooked geographic targeting and missing conversion tracking, this is a must-listen for contractors who want better ROI from their Google Ads campaigns.
Whether you're running ads yourself or working with an agency, you'll walk away with smarter questions to ask, critical fixes to implement, and the confidence to improve your paid ad results.
Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.
Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. This podcast is brought to you by Fat Cat Strategies, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Raleigh, North Carolina. We specialize in helping home improvement contractors just like you grow their businesses.
Janet:Today, you're listening to a series called Build, Grow, Dominate, marketing strategies for every stage of your home improvement business. Every Wednesday, we take a deep dive into the lessons that we've learned from supporting some amazing business owners. in the home improvement industry.
Caitlyn:In part one, we'll cover the essentials from startup to your first five million. In part two, we're shifting gears to focus on what it takes to scale your business to a successful exit and or how to dominate your market. Now let's get into it.
Janet:Hey, I'm Janet, the founder here at Fat Cat Strategies, and today I am joined by Caitlin Noble.
Caitlyn:Hey, I'm Caitlin, head of client services and partner here at Fat Cat Strategies. Janet, what are we diving into today?
Janet:So today is the last in our series, and we are diving into a topic that could be the difference between burning money and printing it, and it is PPC advertising. So
Caitlyn:PPC advertising, pay per click, or PPC, is one of the fastest ways to generate high quality leads for your business. But here's the thing, even the best campaigns can crash and burn if you don't avoid some very common mistakes. So let's talk about 10 PPC pitfalls that replacement contractors just like you can often fall into, and most importantly, how you can avoid them.
Janet:The first mistake, and this is true for PPC campaigns, but really I would argue it's true for any marketing campaign that you set out to tackle, is you need to clearly define your goals and your expectations. If you don't have clear goals, how will you know if you've achieved them? So if you're working with an agency partner and you're not having a conversation about what success looks like, then how could you possibly expect them to deliver it? And so defining goals and expectations in our world usually ends up translating to defining a certain number of leads that you need that campaign to generate in a month at a specific cost. So, you know, defining goals and expectations could be 50 leads in a month from this campaign at a cost per lead under $100.
Caitlyn:I love the more calls from a specific zip code. We get that a lot. Yes. You know, you're wanting to grow into this town that you haven't been in and you're just wanting to make sure you have the phone ringing in that town. That's a great goal. Yeah.
Janet:And so, you know, just saying, oh, I'm going to do a PPC campaign without taking it the next step to say, what do you want that campaign to do? Do you want the phone to ring from that affluent area that's north of a specific highway? I mean, that's how our clients talk to us about it. They're like, well, this highway is north of town. And we want these areas which comprise, you know, some bedroom communities and some outlying suburbs. And I've never sold up there and I want to sell up there. Then that could be a goal of a PPC campaign to break into a new geography. Another goal could be this very specific, you know, your existing tried and true geography. And you need to generate a certain number of leads for that. one of your services. Another goal could be something like, let's say you do roofing and siding, and you want more siding leads. And up to now, all of your PPC campaigns have been targeting roofing leads. Or if you add on gutters or decks or something like that. So that's kind of the big picture about a big picture conversation about starting with a clear goal and expectations in mind. So that's the mistake is not doing it and how to fix it is sit down with your agency and define those SMART goals. And everybody knows this acronym SMART. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So that's mistake number one and how to fix it. Caitlin, what is mistake number two? So
Caitlyn:mistake number two gets more into the weeds, but that's the point of this podcast. It's neglecting keyword strategy discussions. So PPC isn't about just being seen. It's about being seen by the right people. Too often contractors leave keywords, the keyword decisions entirely up to whoever's running the campaign. Sometimes you can set up a smart campaign yourself through Google Ads and it'll just pick keywords off of your website. And if you listen to the first episode in the series about SEO, you know how important having the right keywords on your website is.
Janet:But what if your website doesn't have those keywords and somebody just sets up this quote unquote smart campaign? Then it ain't that smart, is
Caitlyn:it? No, it's not. I mean, or your website could be flooded with content because at one point you were dealing with storm recovery or repairs and you no longer do that anymore. The smart campaigns will pick up on those keywords and then all of a sudden you're going to get a ton of repair leads. That's a really good example. Yeah, that you don't want. So I think having the discussion, and this is something we do as an agency, every time we meet with our client when we're making sure we're on the same page about what we're advertising is we're outlining, hey, you're good with citing, okay, great. You're good with specifically James Hardy citing, great. Repairs, no repairs, great. So having that keyword discussion is absolutely important. So the mistake is not having the keyword discussion and neglecting that strategy. How to fix it is obviously getting involved, like I said, making sure your agency is providing that conversation conversation with you as well. Talk about high intent phrases that your customers are actually using. If they're using long tail, you've probably heard that before, long tail keywords like vinyl window replacement in Cary, North Carolina, that's something worth bidding on instead of just bidding on windows. That's going to blow your budget, just bidding on windows. Be more specific. Use those long tail keywords. Have that discussion. What's mistake number three?
Janet:So the Mistake number three is to ignore discussions about budget and budget adjustments. We keep saying discussions. I guess we're kind of packaging this episode with the assumption that you have outsourced this, whether it's an independent contractor there in your town, it's your cousin, it's Google, a Google rep has talked you into something, or you're working with a small agency. if you're not having really good conversations around the budget and budget transparency and adjustments that can be a mistake so you know, we have seen clients come to us who've been working with another agency and they kind of blindly trusted that the budget would be managed well until it's not. And so, you know, what does that look like? You know, if the budget's not being managed well, you can blow through your entire budget, your month's budget in a week. Or on the flip side, we actually get quite a bit of calls where our clients or prospective clients ask, They've set aside an advertising budget and they want to spend a certain amount of money and they're just not able to spend it. Yeah. understanding budgets mistake is to make sure that your agency provides you real time access to dashboards that show what you're spending and how far you are through the month on that budget or at the very least they give you some weekly updates. So the fix to this budget mistake is just to have some sort of system in place where you can know that somebody's monitoring it and in an ideal world that the The agency or the person who's monitoring it will have a strategy in place or some ideas in place to reallocate the budget based on performance. So that reallocation could look like this. Right. Right. case the agency should contact you and say hey I know you do you know roofing windows and gutters we didn't know it but like for whatever reason this gutter campaign is taking off or this window campaign is taking off are you okay if we move some money around and so that reallocation It's got to be a two-way street. It can't be just to spend PPC dollars. It has to be aligned with what you need as a business. If you don't want more gutter leads, but that gutter campaign is doing great... then you don't necessarily want to optimize the campaign for leads that you don't want. So it's just this whole conversation around the transparency about how your budget is being managed and how it's being adjusted. So Caitlin, what's mistake number four?
Caitlyn:Yeah, mistake number four is weak ad copy. which goes along this mentality of just setting it and forgetting it. Generic ads, they're not going to convert. If your ad says something like, get Windows today, it's not doing you any favors. It's just not. I mean, This weak ad copy is something that, if you've outsourced this, you should be working with an agency or another partner who definitely understands the ad copy should align with the messaging on your website. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. But that being said, A lot of times, back to that keyword mistake that we were talking about a second ago, these smart campaigns on Google and even just the way Google Ads sets up campaigns now will automatically pull in headlines as you're building out these ads. And if you don't have somebody overseeing what that copy looks like, it could be some pretty generic, no call to action, headline that just is never going to get any clicks unless you by chance have no competitors at all.
Janet:Yeah, that ain't gonna happen.
Caitlyn:Yeah.
Janet:So Caitlin, you've mentioned a couple of times these smart campaigns. What is that? Let's not assume that our listeners know what Google smart campaigns are. So I'm
Caitlyn:trying to figure out the best way to explain it. So isn't it kind of like the easy button? It is an easy button. And honestly, if you've never set up Google ads before, it's probably going to give you that option first and foremost, and you may not even realize that you've clicked on it.
Janet:So like day one, I set up a new account and I'm clicking through all the welcome screens. And at some point I might accidentally click into setting up what's called a smart campaign.
Caitlyn:Yeah, yeah, exactly. It definitely happens like at the initial start of building out this account if you have already built out your account and you haven't activated it there's nothing to worry about but I'm you know I don't want to assume but a lot of you who may be considering PPC you may be brand new to it you may be brand new to it and just be hesitant
Janet:and let's be honest if you see something that says do you want to set up a smart account your answer is probably going to be like heck yeah do please please please please yeah well You want my account to be smart? Yeah. The mistake is, no, you don't.
Caitlyn:You
Janet:don't. They're automating a bunch of stuff. They're using AI. They're crawling your website. And as you said earlier, Caitlin, like, let's say, for example, you had information about some storm cleanup or something that was very timely, very seasonal, kind of a one-off content. I mean, we have seen... We have seen things get picked up from maybe an owner's about us page. Exactly. You don't necessarily want that to be your Google ad copy. So those smart campaigns are trying to take some work off of your plate and automate it. But what you end up with are either generic ads or weird ads. Weird ads, totally. And so
Caitlyn:a way to fix, you know, let's say you haven't done the smart campaign, you may have, whatever. Don't settle for weak copy. Don't set it and forget it. What you should be doing instead is making sure you have calls to action that are very strong. Like instead of get windows today, why don't you say something along the lines of lifetime warranty on your window replacement, free window quote in 24 hours, time sensitive, offer something a little more attractive than just get your windows today. So don't make the mistake for weak ad copy.
Janet:Number five, Janet. Okay, so mistake number five is overlooking landing page optimization So these mistakes kind of go hand in hand. You know, Caitlin was just talking about weak ad copy. You know, the ad that someone sees needs to match the content and the intent of the landing page. So, you know, it's a journey. Someone sits down to search. to find a solution to a problem. So they're gonna use whatever words they use to search on it. Then they're gonna be presented ads. Those ads need to be compelling. And then if they click on the ad, then it needs to go to a landing page that delivers on that promise. And so if the landing page is slow to load, it's cluttered, it's not mobile responsive, it doesn't match the ad's promise or intent or copy, then users are gonna see it for just a second They're going to bounce right out of there. You know, something I've seen a lot of times when we inherit an account, a Google Ads account, that is, from... Usually this happens when people have been kind of DIYing it.
Caitlyn:Right.
Janet:They've set up a bunch of ads. They spend a bunch of time looking at keywords. They might have done a pretty good job of geographic targeting. But then they send every single ad to the homepage. Wrong. So... If you're doing, like, let's say you're building decks, you're installing fences, and maybe you do painting. Yeah. then you should have a bunch of pages on your website about decks. You should have separate pages about painting and separate pages about your fence options. So your fence ad should go to your main fence page. Your deck ad should go to your main deck page and so forth. But when we're talking about landing pages, you don't want to just send all your ads to your homepage. And again, I'll repeat it. You want to make sure that the page loads really fast. It's not cluttered. It matches the ad um and it performs really well and looks really good on mobile devices so that's the fix to that one awesome number
Caitlyn:six um not using negative keywords what do you mean huge mistake what are negative keywords like well it's a silent killer ugly like you ugly
Janet:is that negative
Caitlyn:exactly no um Negative keywords could be things like free. It could be things like cleaning. So let me go into more detail. Yeah, explain what
Janet:you mean by negative keywords.
Caitlyn:You keep interrupting me.
Janet:I'll
Caitlyn:stop interrupting
Janet:you.
Caitlyn:You've defined this beautiful list of keywords that you're gonna advertise and focus on for that month or whatever that you need in terms of your services. That being said, that's just not where the buck stops because you may have said you want to go after window replacement or vinyl windows in Cary, North Carolina, or you wanna go after roof replacement near me. If you don't have a negative keyword list in place, Google is going to still, depending on your budget, pull up your ads for because you just have the word roof in your ad or your keyword. It's going to pull up things like DIY roof repair. Yes. So because you may have like how you have a weird match type, which we'll get more into later. But because of that, if you have roof replacement near me and you don't have a negative keyword set up for DIY or repair, you're gonna be getting clicks that you're paying for for people who are trying to learn how to DIY their roof repair and God bless those people. Another common one that we also see is like cleaning. So like siding cleaning, window cleaning. Anytime you're going to advertise sighting replacement or window replacement or something along those lines, please make sure you've excluded the word cleaning. Add that to your negative keyword list. Otherwise, you are also going to be getting clicks that you're paying for for people who want to learn how to clean
Janet:their windows. So that negative keyword list, correct me if I'm wrong, it's telling Google, hey, don't show my ad for these words.
Caitlyn:Exactly.
Janet:Okay. Exactly.
Caitlyn:Jobs is another common one. Careers. Sometimes, you know, you'll have somebody who might be searching, you know, for a sighting career or like a sighting installer and sighting job. Estimator. Estimator. Like they might be doing a really specific job. Exclude careers. Otherwise, you're going to be getting clicks onto your PPC landing pages for people who are trying to apply for jobs. So how to fix this? Review your search term report regularly. That is an actual report within Google Ads. If you're not reviewing it, your agency definitely should be and building out a negative keyword list regularly. based off of some of those random searches that you will... It can be funny. I mean...
Janet:Oh, yeah. The list of things that we exclude end up being kind of comical.
Caitlyn:I mean,
Janet:babies in a bathtub.
Caitlyn:Like... I forgot about that one. Dog... Dog... Dog, dog washing, dog, um, something like, like showers for dogs, like really off the wall searches. Don't pay for those clicks.
Janet:Can I, can I add to your mistake? Number six, you're calling it not using negative keywords, but I just want to tag onto what you're saying. I think we could expand this mistake to say, well, first of all, mistake number one is not using negative keyword. And then like, The follow-on mistake would be to not keep that negative keyword list up to date. And so you're laughing about seeing people search on showers for dogs. Well, if you're a bathroom remodeling contractor and you're doing one-day bath installs, you don't want to pay for your ad to show up when somebody's trying to figure out how to wash their big old dog. Right. And
Caitlyn:so- Free shower. Oh my God, free showers. That's a really common one. Like free public
Janet:showers. Oh, for like people living in their car? Totally. Oh my God. Yeah, so, you know, if you're listening to this and you're trying to run your own Google ad campaign, yes, sit down and use your own brain and try to come up with a list of negative keywords. But I'm telling you, your brain is not enough.
Caitlyn:We may have a list of negative keywords- somewhere a download bait. I will try to link that in the show notes. Yeah. If you're interested in a list of commonly used negative keywords, negative keywords,
Janet:I will find that. But, um, but if you are running your own campaign or you're working with an agency, make sure that they are periodically going in to look at all of the search terms that people put into Google that ended up triggering your ads. Because if you regularly, it's almost like, um, list hygiene. You go in and you're like, oh, I would have never thought that someone would search on XYZ. Well, let me make that a negative keyword. Because there's no way you're going to come up with that full list keyword. Just off the top of your head. Never. So you've got to go in there and maintain it.
Caitlyn:And you won't. Don't be scared. You're not going to spend an egregious amount of money on some of these dumb searches that have nothing to do with your business. So just keep an eye on it. Mistake number seven.
Janet:Okay, I got this one. It is underutilizing or not utilizing ad extensions. So ad extensions are a feature of the Google Ads search platform and they're like site links or call outs or structured snippets which may not mean that much to you if you've never really dug through a Google ad account or thought about it but what an ad extension is is let's say and I know you're familiar with this let's say you're I can describe it better on a desktop you're on a desktop you search for something on Google and you see the main ad or business name and kind of in indented under that will be a list of other things like our locations, contact us. If they've got a product or service that is the thing that most people need when they go to that website, that will be an ad extension. So ad extensions, you can kind of handcraft those sublinks under your main ad and they can be really powerful and really optimize your account. So the mistake is not using them or under utilizing them and how to fix it is just work with your agency to make sure that you're using every available ad extension that's relative to the service that you provide.
Caitlyn:And I would say on the non-desktop version that's absolutely critical and it does not happen automatically is that the phone number, the call, like the call now extension, which I think, you know, we just talked about, but like, Oh yeah. On a mobile, on a mobile, like please make sure you have the call now extension with a phone number configured, a working call center phone or wherever configured. Um, okay. So Caitlin hit us with mistake number eight. Number eight is just neglecting your data, like not looking at it and not looking at the reporting. Um, Running blind isn't a strategy. If you're not reviewing reports, you have no idea what's working and what's wasting your spend. This is loaded. We could have a whole episode about this. I guess the main point here is you need to make sure that you have somebody, like we've talked about earlier, keeping an eye on your budget, reporting on how that spend is going. Also, see if those conversions, as you get into the weeds, as those conversions start to roll in, make sure you are able to match those conversions back to whether it's a phone call or a form submission and let your agency or whoever's running your ads know, yeah, that was a bad lead. That was somebody looking for window cleaning. Or let them know, oh my gosh, that was a great lead. So close the loop. Yeah, close the loop. They should be able to then find that, okay, that lead came through a campaign that I had run on window replacement, et cetera. This was the ad copy that worked, and this is what converted. You can get all of that through really good reporting. So conversions, conversion rates, lead quality, and more should just be some of the things that are in your reports. Always, always, always feel free to ask why behind the numbers that you're seeing. There are no dumb questions. Whoever's managing your account should be able to answer those questions. Mistake number nine. Number nine. It
Janet:is ignoring geographic targeting. So, you know... This is so important. It is important. Google Ads and Bing Ads and many other platforms will allow you to be really specific with the geography that you target. So... if you think about how far you want your guys to drive to do a job. So you can set up a radius around your shop. You can target specific, they're called DMAs in Google. You can target specific town names, city names, zip codes, and you can exclude town names, city names, and zip codes. So a lot of times our clients will come to us and they will say, you know and when we're on the call with them we'll pull up a google map on our computer and we'll look at it together and and they'll say okay you see this this highway that circles the city well you know north of that highway is a great it's a great target area for us and southwest but any sign anything inside of that this urban area maybe that's not a great target or maybe it is a great target but look at a map together with your agency and set that geo geographic targeting for where you know you want to be installing jobs. And that way you're running ads to those areas that you want to target and not running ads that are 100 miles away from you or 200 miles away from you. Yeah, that's a really, really, really good point. So
Caitlyn:bring it on home. What is mistake number 10? I mean, this is the most fancy one of all of them. Maybe. Not setting up conversion tracking. Oh my gosh. I mean, so I I just mentioned conversions as a way to go back and see if you have leads and so forth, and looking at that as one of the stats. It's easy, man, you can just click, you know, on enable your ads and you're running ads and you're off to the races and you have no idea if like you may see an increase in traffic to your website but without conversion tracking being set up you're not going to be able to find out if you have specific form fills phone calls booked appointments you're truly flying blind there is a whole i'm going to call it a module um in the google ads platform where you can set up conversion tracking. It sounds more complicated than it is. It's really not. Please, please, please, please, please do it. It's so you'll be able to go back and find those data points that you should be referring to, which are conversions. If somebody only reports to y'all on clicks and cost per click, you're missing a huge data point. So please make sure conversion tracking is set up. So as I said, how to do it, how to not do it, don't set it up, but how to do it, make sure you have it fully set up, whether it's through Google Ads, Google Analytics, or your CRM, even some of our own, we use WhatConverts to do call tracking form submission tracking, it all integrates with Google Ads. So just make sure anything you're doing through Google Ads is set up in terms of conversions. Track what actually matters, don't track clicks. was a lot of tips. There are a lot of mistakes you can make.
Janet:There are a lot of mistakes and we just hit on 10 of them. Only 10. There are more mistakes that people can make. We're joking. Okay. So there you have it. Those are 10 of the most common PPC mistakes that we have seen home improvement contractors make when they come to us and we get inside their account. And we've given you some tips on how you can steer clear of each and every one of them. If you have made some of these errors in the past, do not worry. You are not alone. Others have made similar mistakes. It's how we know about them. But now you've got the knowledge to fix them and you've got the knowledge to ask your agency partner or the freelancer or maybe your office manager is helping you manage your Google ads. You've now got better questions to ask so that you can make sure your campaign stays on track.
Caitlyn:Yes, okay y'all, this is concluding part one of our part two series, Build, Grow, Dominate, Marketing Strategies for Every Stage of Your Home Improvement Business. For the last six episodes, we focused entirely on that first phase, the build step in your build, scale, dominate journey. We broke down the essentials of digital marketing in a way that's clear, actionable, and built for where you are right now. If you are ready to get started, Visit fatcatstrategies.com backslash level hyphen one to learn more about our level one digital marketing foundations package pricing. And we have a ton of other amazing content, including other episodes that are related to this, blog posts. I mean, the list is endless. The main thing, though, like if you're interested and ready to get started, we have an amazing package. Go to fatcatstrategies.com backslash level one. to learn more.
Janet:Okay, cool. So next week, we are going to be starting part two of this series that we're calling Build, Grow, and Dominate. We just finished the build. Now we're moving into the grow stage. So we've got tons of great stuff for that scale phase of your journey. At that point, you're in that sweet spot between, say, $6 and $18 million, and you are scaling fast. In our experience, this is when we see business owners switch gears to play a new and different game. At some point, if you haven't already, you will realize that you have to stop working in the business and get serious about working on the business. So you shift from thinking about the leads that you need today to thinking about how to build your own lead generation system. This is the stage where we've seen clients do things like hire their first sales manager. Maybe they switch from one CRM to another or they beef up their call center this is also the phase where you diversify your lead sources so that you can stop being quite so dependent on lead aggregators so again thank you so much if you've listened to every episode of this first part the build part we're so thankful if you haven't caught every episode we encourage you to go back and go through all of those all of that level one content and This is the end of the level one content. The next episode you're going to hear from us is the beginning of that part of that grow section. We're just so excited to bring it to you. So Caitlin, take us on out.
Caitlyn:Thank you so much for tuning into this podcast series. If you have found this content helpful, don't forget to share it with other contractors who could use a digital edge. And we would love, love, love, love if you could leave us a review on whichever platform you are streaming this podcast on. Thank you guys so much. Have a great one.
Janet:Digital marketing for contractors is created by fat cat strategies. For more information, visit fat cat strategies.com.