Funeral Home PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Funeral Homes?

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

To provide premium paid ads management, a paid advertising firm for funeral homes should get to know you and your goals. You can use this information to determine the next steps, since PPC advertising for a local funeral home differs from paid ads for an ecommerce-focused funeral home.

For example, local funeral homes 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 funeral homes tend to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through PPC advertising that increases 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.

To optimize and scale funeral home paid ads campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some funeral homes, 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 funeral home needs to use multiple plans and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for funeral homes should include strategies like:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social channels, and third-party websites.
• Make your funeral home more profitable by acquiring qualified leads or selling online.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Tips for Managing PPC for Funeral Homes

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for funeral homes and other industries, we are a team of PPC advertising consultants.

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 funeral homes is mostly used for Google Ads and Bing Ads search network campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what your funeral home targets on Google or Bing.

If you are looking for a funeral home in your city, you might search "nearby funeral home" 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 funeral home wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? The solution would require keyword research.

The next steps might involve the paid advertising manager discussing with the funeral home 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.

Suppose the paid ads manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby funeral homes" or even "funeral home services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. The second phrase is targeting a service, which might result in a more lucrative conversion.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use negative keywords to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more families and individuals.

For example, someone looking for "free services from funeral homes" or "how to advertise to funeral homes" isn't likely to convert with your funeral home. They might see your paid ads if you use broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "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

When you hear audience research talked about for funeral home paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.

Funeral home paid advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. As a matter of fact, one of the most appealing features of Facebook Ads was its ability to collect data on users, which advertisers flocked to take advantage of.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

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

Following that, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most advertising companies for funeral homes. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

Although many funeral home paid advertising agencies still rely on custom audiences, the trend is shifting toward broad targeting. You can see it in every upgrade within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. The targeting options within funeral home ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Tips for Optimizing Landing Pages

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your funeral home paid ads campaigns.

Let's begin by examining the landing pages for your funeral home to make sure they follow best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Do you have any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Do you have a lead form I can use right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Does social proof exist?
• Does the page load on mobile devices?

Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors. Here is a great blog post about what makes a quality landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! If you want to create an effective landing page, you should never consider it finished. For continuous improvement, run A/B testing every few months.

4.) Funnel Tips

You might consider building out one or more sales funnels instead of a landing page. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

One of our clients promotes an online fitness challenge that you can even join from your home. While managing their internet advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• By using squeeze pages, we captured email addresses and raised awareness for the program.
• Lead magnets provided health and fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peeks in exchange for email addresses.
• 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 funeral home 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 website.
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 ads, 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 paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most funeral homes, 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 PPC 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 paid 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 funeral homes, 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 attractive 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 great 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 Funeral Home PPC Management

The cost of our paid ads management services is calculated based on the monthly time allocation you request for your campaigns. Our PPC ads 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 Funeral Homes

The options for running paid ads for your funeral home are numerous. Let's discuss some of the most common paid advertising being run for funeral homes.

1.) Local Business Ads

If you have a funeral home, you can run local ads on almost any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local funeral home, 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 nearby 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.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of funeral homes.

2.) Social Media Ads

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

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social ads. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative edits.

Using social media advertising allows you to reach audiences who have never thought of your product or service, or aren't thinking about it right now. It's quite the opposite when you run search advertising since you only get to show them when someone searches for what your funeral home offers.

It can also be a curse, as conversion rates often drop when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Advertising

You'll want to invest in search ads if you know people are looking online for the products you offer.

In some circles, this is referred to as funeral home 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.

You might consider copying your Google Ads campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform if you've had success with Google Ads. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you improve results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your funeral home website, landing page, or sales funnel.

To help people return to your website after they've thought through various options, retargeting ads are almost always recommended.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

Google Shopping Campaigns popularized this type of search ad.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your funeral home.

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

Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites allow you to run video ads.

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

It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. It's not unusual for us to use video ads for product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

You should consider incorporating video ads into your paid ads campaigns if you have the budget to do so.