Contractor PPC Agency

What is PPC Ads Management for Contractors?

PPC management for contractors refers to creating and optimizing paid ads campaigns. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide expert PPC ads management, a paid advertising agency for contractors should get to know you and your goals. You can use this information to determine the next steps, since paid advertising for a localized contractor differs from PPC advertising for an ecommerce-focused contractor.

For example, local contractors are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. Through paid advertising, traffic can be driven to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce-minded contractors tend to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid ads that drives traffic to an optimized product page or category page. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns in your strategy. Our team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.

The next step in contractor PPC ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some contractors, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your contractor should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. Some of the best paid advertising packages for contractors include tactics to:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social media channels, and third-party websites.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your contractor.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Contractors

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for contractors and other industries, we are a team of paid advertising professionals.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

Keyword research for contractors is mostly used for Google Ads and Bing Ads search network campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what your contractor targets on Google or Bing.

If you are searching for a contractor in your city, you might search "nearby contractor" on Google. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the contractor wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? The solution would require keyword research.

The next steps might involve the paid ads manager discussing with the contractor about what types of products / services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "nearby contractors" or even "contractor services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing in search queries that you know won't convert to more homeowners.

For example, someone searching for "free services from contractors" or "how to advertise to contractors" isn't likely to convert with your contractor. Your paid advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

For contractor paid ads campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Contractor PPC advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which contractors lined up to exploit.

The rise of data privacy and machine learning had a significant impact on custom audiences over time.

When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad agencies for contractors. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

While there will still be plenty of contractor paid advertising firms relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. Don't take our word for it though. If you've been involved in the creation of Facebook ads, you've probably noticed the removal of interest-based targeting options here and there. Maybe you've even seen changes to how "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is recommended during the setup process.

Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner's blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. Contractor ad campaigns will likely always have targeting options that can be manipulated for extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for contractors.

When we take on the management of a PPC advertising campaign for contractors, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Does the headline focus on benefits?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Does the content engage the reader?
• Do you have a lead form I can use right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• How fast does the page load?
• Is there social proof?
• Does the page load on mobile devices?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your contractor isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your site.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in PPC advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most contractors, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for contractors, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out good looking ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Contractor PPC Management

The cost of our PPC management services is calculated based on the monthly time allocation you request for your campaigns. Our PPC management packages start at the price listed below, however, we are open to discussing an increased budget if your ad spend or service requirements are higher.

Types of Paid Ads for Contractors

The options for running paid advertising for your contractor are numerous. Let's discuss some of the most common PPC advertising being run for contractors.

1.) Local Advertising

If you have a contractor, you can run local area ads on almost any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local contractor, you may find better success in one platform versus another. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Let's talk about a few localized advertising choices.

From Google, you'll have two options.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. This is a very dynamic ad campaign type which utilizes multiple headlines, images, videos, and service locations to allow the Google algorithm to find the best combination of assets to bring you customers. Local professionals such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians frequently use Performance Max campaigns.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local area. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to certain geographic areas. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of contractors.

2.) Social Media Marketing

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.

The trick to social media ads is keeping the ad creatives fresh. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative changes.

One of the best things about social media marketing is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. It's quite the opposite when you run search engine marketing since you only get to show them when someone searches for what your contractor offers.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Ads

If you know people are searching online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.

In some circles, this is referred to as contractor Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine above the SEO placements.

If you've been running search advertising on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

Many different message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (even nearby news stations), gossip sites, and more run display advertisements.

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. Additionally, you should have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have algorithms that help you produce results.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your contractor website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

If you want to promote your contractor through Google Shopping, you'll need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), and a Google Merchant Center account.

With these tools, you can provide Google Ads with an accurate list of all your product data, including title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networking websites.

Using Google Ads, you can run YouTube Ads by creating a video ads campaign or performance max campaign.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.