Clean Candle Brand
7.5×Return on ad spend$1.36Cost per click10.22%Conversion rate$13.29Cost per saleScaled to seven figures in year one, and opened a warehouse
Someone Is Searching for What You Do Right Now. The Only Question Is Who They Find.
Facebook puts you in front of people who might want what you sell. Google puts you in front of the ones already typing it in. That is a different kind of enquiry: they have the problem today, they are looking for somebody to fix it, and they will call whoever is at the top.
Based in London, Ontario · your ad account stays yours · month to month after the first three
What a Google search for your business looks like
An illustration: a search is typed into Google, the ordinary results appear, and then a sponsored placement opens above all of them and pushes the rest off the bottom of the screen. Paid results sit above the organic ones, which is what buying them gets you.
Paid placements sit above everything else, on the day you turn them on. No waiting a year to climb, and nobody scrolling past four competitors to reach you.
Client results
Nine accounts, and what a lead costs in each.
Every card opens the dashboard it came off. Some of these leads are cheap and some of them really are not — a masonry lead in Toronto costs what a masonry lead in Toronto costs — and we would rather put all nine up than only the flattering ones.
Luxury Self Tanning Salon
3.5×Return on ad spend$2.16Cost per click7.74%Conversion rate$27.88Cost per saleOpened two physical stores, one on Rodeo Drive
London Beauty & Nail Salon
$7.39per booking enquiry$1.17Cost per click15.79%Conversion rate5.93%Click through400% increase in new customers, and looking to expand
Real Estate Photographer
$8.81per enquiry in London, Ontario$2.69Cost per click30.53%Conversion rate8.54%Click throughEstablished as the local leader
Commercial Snow Plower
$12.27per lead in London, Ontario$1.90Cost per click15.49%Conversion rate6.01%Click throughFirst fully booked season, and looking to expand
Real estate brokerage
$18.27per lead in London, Ontario$1.08Cost per click5.92%Conversion rate10.27%Click through300% increase in yearly sales, and a growing team
Holiday lighting
$34.10per lead in London, Ontario$2.18Cost per click6.40%Conversion rate7.12%Click throughThree times lower cost per lead
Deck repair
$38.21per lead in London, Ontario$1.67Cost per click4.37%Conversion rate7.30%Click throughGrew the team and the service area, at 350% lower cost per lead
Toronto Masonry
$51.80per lead in Toronto$4.60Cost per click8.89%Conversion rate3.74%Click throughFour times lower cost per lead
Swipe to read across
Why Google
People searching for you are ready to buy.
That is the whole difference. On social you are interrupting somebody's evening and hoping the timing is right. On Google the timing is already right, and you are simply deciding whether to be on the shortlist.
They have the problem today
Somebody searching has already decided they need this doing. They are not being persuaded, they are picking, and most of them pick from the first two or three they see.
Only where you actually go
Down to the areas you serve and the hours somebody answers the phone. There is no sense paying to reach a person two hours outside your radius, or at eleven at night when nobody will call back.
Half the job is what you exclude
“Free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “how to”, the name of a product you do not sell. Wasted spend nearly always hides in the searches nobody thought to block, and that list needs going through every week rather than once at the start.
How it runs
Four weeks in, you stop guessing.
- 01Week one
We look before we spend
Which searches actually turn into work, what your competitors are bidding on, and whether calls and forms are being tracked at all. If the tracking is wrong, everything after it is guesswork.
- 02Week two
Built around the jobs you want
Campaigns structured by the work rather than by the keyword tool, with the searches you do not want blocked from day one, and a landing page that asks for the job.
- 03Week three
We read what people typed
The search terms report is the only one that matters early on. It shows what you actually paid for, which is never quite what you bid on. We prune it, block the waste, and move the budget.
- 04Ongoing
We back what pays
More behind what produces work, less behind what produces clicks. One report a month in plain English with what changed and what we are doing next.
What is included
If we quote it, it is included.
Nothing that quietly turns into an extra once you have signed.
Research before the build
What gets searched in your area, what it costs, and what your competitors are already paying for. Done before the account is built rather than after.
Negative keywords, weekly
The unglamorous half of the job and the one that saves the most money. Gone through every week, not set once and forgotten.
Call and form tracking
So you can see which spend produced which enquiry, including the ones that came in as a phone call and would otherwise never appear anywhere.
The page it lands on
Reviewed with you before a dollar is spent, and built by us if it needs building. A good ad cannot rescue a page that never asks for the job.
Local and Maps
The pack at the top of a local search, and the profile behind it, tidied up so the two work together instead of pointing different ways.
Performance Max, only if it earns it
It suits some businesses and quietly wastes money for others. We will tell you which you are rather than switching it on because it is the default.
One report a month
Plain English. What we spent, what came back, and what we are changing. About three minutes to read.
Your account stays yours
Set up under your business, not ours. If we ever go separate ways, the account, the history and the conversion data stay with you.
Conversion tracking that works
Calls, forms and quote requests all counted properly, because a campaign optimising against the wrong signal will happily spend your money on the wrong people.
The maths
What would a budget actually come back as?
Spend buys clicks, some of those clicks ask you for a price, and some of those become work. Put your own numbers in and see where it lands.
We are assuming a click costs about $6.50 in your line of work, and that about 6 in 100 of those clicks turn into an enquiry.
Know your own numbers? Use those instead
We are assuming a click costs about $0.90 for what you sell, and that about2.2 in 100 of those clicks turn into an order.
Know your own numbers? Use those instead
Return on ad spend0×
$0 back on $0 spent.
- Enquiries a month
- 0
- Cost per enquiry
- $0
- Customers a month
- 0
- Cost per customer
- $0
Arithmetic, not a forecast. The click cost and the enquiry rate behind each trade are middle of the road figures from accounts we run, and yours will land either side of them, so treat anything above about four times return as optimistic until there is a real account behind it. If what you type in does not pay for itself, we would rather you saw that here than three months into a retainer.
Before you ask
The questions we get every time.
What should I be spending?
Most of the local businesses we do this for spend between $1,500 and $6,000 a month with Google, separate from our fee. Google is usually the more expensive of the two channels per click, because you are bidding against everybody else who wants the same job today. Below about $1,500 in a competitive trade you will show for part of the day and then run out, which is not a fair test of anything.
What about ranking without paying, and is that not better?
It is a different job with a different shape. Ads put you at the top on the day you switch them on and stop on the day you switch them off; ranking takes months and then keeps working. Most businesses want both eventually, and if you would rather start with the slower one we do that too, on our SEO page.
Google or Facebook? Which first?
If people already search for what you do, start with Google, because the demand is there and you are only deciding whether to appear. If you sell something people do not know to look for, start with Facebook, because there you are creating the interest rather than catching it. Plenty of businesses end up running both, and if that is you we would still rather begin with one and prove it.
How long before it works?
Faster than social, usually. Enquiries often arrive in the first week, because you are in front of people who already want the thing. What takes six to eight weeks is getting the cost per enquiry down to where it should be, and almost all of that is the search terms report telling us what to block.
Why are clicks so expensive in my trade?
Because a click is worth a lot to everybody bidding on it. If a roof is worth twelve thousand dollars and one in twenty enquiries books, a forty dollar click is still cheap. The number to watch is not what a click costs, it is what a booked job costs, and those two often move in opposite directions.
Do I need a separate landing page?
Not always, but a home page is usually the wrong place to send paid traffic, because it has to serve everybody and so it asks for nothing in particular. We will tell you honestly whether yours will do. If it needs building we build it, and if your site is fine we will happily leave it alone.
Will you use Performance Max?
Only where it earns its place. It works well for shops with a proper product feed and a decent volume of sales to learn from. For a local service business with a handful of enquiries a week it often just spends the budget in places you cannot see. We would rather run plain search well than hand the budget to something that will not show us where it went.
Who owns the ad account?
You do. We set it up under your business and give ourselves access, never the other way round. If we stop working together you keep the account, the conversion history and everything it has learned, which is worth more than most people realise.
Am I locked into a contract?
We ask for three months to begin with, because anything shorter is not a fair test of the work. After that it is month to month.
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