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Inspector Toolbelt Talk
A weekly home inspection podcast hosted by the founders of Inspector Toolbelt - the premier home inspection software. Get tips, insights, strategies, and more from our hosts and guests to help give your home inspection business a boost. Ian and Beon are property inspection and tech industry veterans with over 20 years of experience each. Sometimes they even stay on point :)
Inspector Toolbelt Talk
Don't Put All Your Eggs in the GLSA Basket
Digital marketing strategies need diversity beyond Google Local Service Ads to create sustainable business growth for home inspectors. Marketing expert Jason Bowings shares practical advice for building multiple lead sources when the "golden goose" of Google Guaranteed starts producing fewer eggs.
• Google Local Service Ads (GLSA) has changed from a golden opportunity to just one piece of a comprehensive strategy
• Never rely on a single marketing channel – diversification protects against algorithm changes and market shifts
• Optimize your Google Business Profile by maintaining consistent NAP, answering common questions, and uploading weekly photos
• Service-based businesses should not display their address on Google Business Profile to avoid account suspension
• Reviews dramatically impact visibility – competitors with hundreds of reviews will outrank those with only a few
• Free platforms like Yelp, Nextdoor and industry directories provide incremental gains that add up significantly
• Track your marketing data including cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and average sale value
• For struggling GLSA campaigns, adjust ad schedules, manually change bid amounts, and monitor impression percentages
• Use AI tools like ChatGPT to help interpret Google Analytics data and identify marketing opportunities
• Small consistent gains across multiple platforms ultimately create substantial business growth
If you have any marketing questions, reach out to us at info@inspectortoolbelt.com or check out Inspector Toolbelt's all-in-one scheduling and report writing app at inspectortoolbelt.com.
Check out our home inspection app at www.inspectortoolbelt.com
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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.
Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We have on a repeat guest again, one of my favorite guests, Jason Bowings. How are you, Jason?
Jason Bowings
Doing well, Ian.
Ian Robertson
So I say you're one of my favorite guests. You're actually one of our listeners' favorite guests, too. We were just talking before the podcast, you did a couple podcasts with us on Google Ads and Google Local Service Ads and some things like that, PPC (pay per click), and you still get, you told me before the show, at least a phone call or a message still each week from those podcasts a year or two ago asking questions, is that correct?
Jason Bowings
Sometimes multiple, yes, sir.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. And, I mean, it still amazes me that you still answer every single one, as far as I know. I mean, you just love helping people, and even this podcast was your idea. Ian, I have an idea. I want to help people, and you put this information out there, and, man, I love having you on. So just remind everybody who you are, Jason.
Jason Bowings
Yes, sir. I'm Jason Bowings. I am the marketing manager for an HVAC company, but I come from a marketing agency, and I specialize in helping small and mid-sized businesses with their digital marketing, and I have a decent footprint in the home inspection industry.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, for anybody who's been around, you're pretty well known in a lot of circles in the home inspection industry. So Jason, today, the subject is basically, I don't want to say Google Local Service Ads, GLSA. We're going to call it a couple of different things. Google Guaranteed, some people know it by that. I'm not going to say that it's dying or dead. It's definitely changed since we did our podcast together. It was the golden goose laying multiple golden eggs and recently, it's changed. And I've had clients of mine say, Ian, I've been doing Google Local Service ads, and it's dead. What's your opinion on that, Jason?
Jason Bowings
Well, I think your your podcast might have reached too many people. Now, everybody's doing the GLSA, that's what I think.
Ian Robertson
Yeah.
Jason Bowings
GLSAs are attractive because you don't need a degree, or you don't need to be a marketer to run them. It's sort of, it's a pay-per-lead, as opposed to, say, a pay-per-click, which is my specialty, Google Ads. With pay-per-lead, you only pay for the leads that you receive, which just by the nature, makes it easier for a business owner to handle. You pretty much put in what you want to spend, toggle on or off what jobs you want to bid on, and when the leads come in, you do your best to close them, right? In the last podcast, we covered the importance of speed-to-lead, taking care of that lead as soon as it calls in, or else the conversion value goes down, conversion percentage would go down drastically, meaning you're not going to close it. Now, what we're experiencing is a lot more people using it, the cost going up, and in some cases, not just the cost going up beyond a reasonable cost per acquisition, but also just not getting enough leads because they're being distributed to so many different companies.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and just so that everybody understands, there's Google Ads, which is, you know, standard Google Ads, been around for what, 20 years or more.
Jason Bowings
Yeah, even more.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, even more. And then Google Local Service Ads was new a few years ago and especially for the home inspection industry. So whenever you search for your competitors in your area, and you type in Albany home inspectors, or whatever, you're gonna see a little picture of a company, and it's going to say Google Guaranteed, or however it says it now, and those generate leads, but it did create a bit of a gold rush. And we did say that. We did say that when we did our last podcast, get in on it now, because once everybody figures it out, it always gets more expensive, more complicated and less leads. There was, I was thinking about you, Jason too, because there was this guy who called me and he goes, Ian...he's out in California...He goes, all I did. I opened my business, and I did GLSA, Google Local Service Ads. And he goes, I hired inspectors. I had multiple vehicles by the end of the year or two, and he's just like, it was amazing, maybe not even a year or two, just a year. And he's like, and then all sudden, it dried up, and he goes, now, I'm happy if I show up once or twice in the rotation, every once in a while, and he didn't do any relationship building. He just knew that those leads were always going to be there, but he didn't know, there were definitely less.
Jason Bowings
That is such an important point, and it's something that I stress with anybody that I consult with, a healthy marketing plan revolves around a lot of slices of pie because of this right here, if your business is determined by one or two sources of leads, what happens? We use GLSA at the company I'm with now. We had a, when we resubmitted our insurance, it was a DBA, because we bought another business, and just that was enough to trigger Google. I haven't had GLSAs in almost three months. Luckily, we have a varied marketing program where we are on a lot of platforms, and we're able to sustain, we're still growing. So it didn't put us back that much. I miss them. I wish we had them back. And it looks like we finally got to the point where, if somebody at Google is doing something for us, and it looks like we're probably within, I'd say, anywhere from days to a month to actually being back up and running, but very important point, you don't want all your eggs in one basket.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and I think that's going to be the point of our podcast. Don't put your digital marketing all in one basket. That phone call that I told you about, he was an extreme example. But there were guys out there like, hey, I'd get like, five to 15 inspections a month. You know, some guys are like, two or three, and then it just drives up to maybe a couple leads a month. There's never, really, ever going to be the golden goose, and then never a gold rush afterwards. You know, it's kind of like when I first started my first company, SEO was new. It's like, whoa, what's SEO? Even I knew, I'm just like, okay, there's gonna be other people that are gonna figure this out. And that's what happened. Now it's more competitive field in the SEO industry, you know, two decades later or more. So what are some ways that we can diversify our online marketing, Jason, to not have to solely rely on GLSA or any one avenue?
Jason Bowings
I get this question all the time. The first thing I want to say is, utilize your free platforms. Okay, in the industry publications that I read, they're subject to hype and not necessarily hysteria, probably isn't the right word, but they're subject to getting caught up in fads as well. So lately, it's been the large language models, the AIs, the ChatGPTs, and even so much as the AI assistant that you can get through Google or DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever, and they were talking about optimizing to show up on it. I say Google still handles about 87% of all searches. So Google is your number one platform. I'm not a Google fan, but I recognize that it is profitable and you have to use it. So number one on the list is Google Business Profile. Most people have probably claimed their profile, but they probably haven't expanded it or optimized it the way it should be. There's a lot of good articles out there by people who are more knowledgeable than myself, but I'll run over some basic principles. One, make sure that the NAP is the same as it is everywhere else. NAP is name, address, and phone number, and it's critical to have that information across the Internet exactly the same, down to the period and capitalized letters. You and I have had in depth conversations, because I'm a lover of tracking numbers. So I love to have different numbers on different platforms, because I'm running so much marketing.
Ian Robertson
Phone numbers, yeah.
Jason Bowings
It hurts us a little bit. So the Google Business Profile, the best way to optimize that is there's a question and answer section. When I look at a lot of home inspectors, they haven't even touched it. What are some of the most common questions that people ask you? Do you do commercial? Do you do this? Your ancillary offerings that you have? Well inspections, deck inspections, down here we do four point. You want to answer those questions on there. Not only does it give you a keyword rich environment that could attract searchers to your listing and give Google more of a reason to put it up, but you're also building trust and authority with your audience because you're answering questions that they may have. So optimizing your Google Business Profile, in real estate, they say location, location, location. You were talking earlier, when I type something into Google — home inspection in Sarasota, Florida, which is where I live, the first result I'll get is the GLSAs, or Google Guarantee, they always get the top spot. Most of the time, the next thing underneath of that is the Google Ads. Usually, with the exception of about a month ago when they were testing putting the Map Pack on the bottom, the Map Pack is the next thing. Your Google Business Profile is what has you show up in the Map Pack. Just as a side note, if you're running Google Ads and you attach your location, you can also show up in the Map Pack, typically as the first listing, which is handy if you show up organically and paid because then you get the first two spaces.
Ian Robertson
One real quick thing that I do want to mention here, Jason, is according to, this is a big issue in our industry too, with home inspection listings, because we are a service based business that does not provide services at our location. There is no way to get around adding our address, unless you put in the business description. So according to Google's rules, and it's a one page, I mean, it's a long page, but if you look up, you can Google, Google My Business page, regulations or rules or whatever, and it gives you one page, and it takes a little bit of reading, but about two thirds of the way down it says, unless you provide your actual service at your place of business, and you have somebody sitting at the desk to answer phones during regular business hours that you have posted, you are to not display your address, but put in that you are service based business. There are so many home inspectors getting their pages shut down. And then I hear a guy say, well, in New Jersey, for instance, we have to display our address. Good. Put it in the business description, keep it out of the actual address section. And then some people are like, but everybody else in my area, they do it, and they've been doing it for years or I've been doing this for years. It's just Google hasn't caught them, and it finally caught up to you. It's usually either a randomized audit, or you did something like add a manager, or change your website address, anything like that, and all sudden, you trigger what's called a manual action. Some guy sits down and goes, he's displaying his address. He's not supposed to, and they shut you down. Sometimes it's a week or two. Sometimes it's months. We have one guy who came to us. He said, hey, Ian, I'm coming to you, but I don't have a Google business page anymore. They took it down. He wasn't our client. We weren't managing his Google business page, so we took him on and trying to help him restore it. It's been months, and because the longer it's down without you noticing, and they don't always send an email. His was down for I don't know how long. So however long it was down, anecdotally speaking, it's going to be down for that long or longer.
Jason Bowings
So, it's interesting. I did not know that about not being able to put your address in, that is a helpful piece of information, if it is mandatory, I agree with you, totally put it in your business description. But here's the thing with Google, they laid off over 1000 support personnel. Used to be that Google Business Profile or back then it was Google My Business or maybe even, I don't even remember what it was called before then, but that was an American based support system. So when you called there, you got American people, as opposed to Google Ads, which was handled in India. They laid off a massive layoff, over 1000 support personnel. I don't know, I have haven't been able to call anyone at Google for a long time. I have to chat, and sometimes chat feature is disabled. You have to email. It is the worst place to be, when I said we're in the same boat, it's not with our Google Business Profile, but it's with our Google Local Service Ads, same pot. I'm trying to contact the same people. And once you're in that, it can be a horrible cycle of, we need you to do this. You do that, they don't recognize it. So it's we need you to do this, and it's just this hair pulling cycle that can make you want to throw your hands up. But again, for free, you're not going to get a better entity than Google Business Profile.
Ian Robertson
To go along with that too, we talk about it a lot, and some people listening are like, when I say this, gonna be like, yeah, of course. I work to get reviews. A lot of us work to get reviews, but then a lot of us don't. There was a client of mine that said, Ian, I want to get up in maps. I'm like, okay, so we're working on things. Months go by and we're working on things. He has two reviews. He has competitors in his market with almost 1000 reviews, at least one and one in the eight hundreds. And he's just like, I'm not showing up a lot higher. I'm showing up a little higher. I'm like, dude, get a review. I can't get reviews for you, is the only thing. And he's just like, ah, it's a lot of work. I feel bad asking people. And he has other inspectors, but they just don't do anything to get reviews. We need to go out there and pump out reviews. No matter how good you and I market, we cannot get people reviews. And while Google officially says it doesn't necessarily affect your ranking on maps, the more interactions people have and the more reviews you have, the more appealing your results look and then it's a happy cycle upward.
Jason Bowings
Here's a funny little tip, uploading a picture a week. Number one, consistency rules the roost in marketing and your Google Business Profile as well. One of the things, one of the techniques I use is, I upload a picture or video at least one per week. I don't overdo it. I don't put one up per day. I don't really have that kind of picture base to do that. And what I do is I, you know, the pictures, when I upload them to my computer labeled, you know, image047.jpg or whatever, so I change the name, keyword rich. So in this industry, it would be home inspection one, home inspector one, home Inspection two. If you have other things that you want to advertise that you're not showing for, infrared, thermal, you know, those kind of things, you can do that as well. For years, Google said that doesn't affect it. However, every client that I ever did that for seemed to really improve the amount that they were shown for searches and that directly related to revenue. I was able to track that at the last company I was with, and we went from making $0 through Google Business, the first year we did 14,000, then 44,000 and then the third year, we did 88,000 through Google business, and it was just simply filling it all out, being consistent with the updates. Don't put you're open 24 hours if you're not open 24 hours, there is no bonus or benefit to that at all. Put the hours that you are open. If you're closed on a holiday, and they send you a little email saying, are you open on Easter? Go in and do that, because if you spend an hour a week, well, let me ask the people who are listening, if I told you that you could spend an hour a week working on this platform, doing very little actual work and very simple work, and that would result in, say, $40,000 annually. To you, that's not make or break money, but that's a good little bonus, right? And if you tell me that I could work an hour a week and you're going to pay me 40,000 a year, where do I sign, right? So for someone who thinks that it might be too much work or it's too hard to get the reviews, do you look at reviews before you buy something? I do. My wife does. So I would say, if it's too much work now, boy, you ain't going to want to see what it looks like in another year or two. That's for sure. People are becoming more and more savvy. The people who are incentivized or motivated to learn more and do more for themselves to grow, they will overtake the people who say, oh, that's just too much for me. That's too much work. I don't want to do that. I'm a home inspector. That's fantastic. Then higher a marketing company.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. And also too, some other things that add to that, because everything is, it's a game of inches, you know, an inch here, an inch there. It's not going to be like, hey, I did this one thing and it blew up. But, um, posting updates, so it does two things, adds an image, and Google directly says that posting updates on your Google Business Page is not only free, but it will get you better rankings, because they want to be almost a social media platform. Remember Google Plus One? Oh, man, those are, those are weird times. Google's always wanted to have a social platform but could never really get it. So they bought things like YouTube and stuff like that. But besides Google Business Pages, because I think most of us, I would say 60 to 80% of home inspectors, realize that that's an important part. I don't think enough of us put enough effort into it. But what are some other things that we can be doing, do you think?
Jason Bowings
Well, I take advantage of everything free that I can, any listing that I can get out free. You know, well, from the SEO world that if you can get listed somewhere that is credible, and you know, they link your website, that's a backlink, or, depending on where it is, a citation, that's good for your SEO. But for some popular platforms, Yelp, as much as I dislike Yelp, taking advantage of the free Yelp platform in some markets, let me say this, let me caveat that, in some markets, in the markets I've seen where the Dallas Fort Worth, probably a lot of Texas, California for sure, New York, there's another market that's slipping my mind right now. Yelp is big. People use Yelp a lot. Here in Florida, not so much, but we use the free Yelp platform. I track it with a tracking number, because I'm that guy. And you know, maybe it brings in eight or $10,000 a year to a multi-million dollar company. Eight or $10,000 a year is not a lot, but what you said about the inches, that's it, man. I came from a market where every company was a private equity firm. They were spending per month, more per month, than I spent in a year. Man, it's hard to grab ground in a market like that, so I had to be creative, but I had to be happy with small gains. And what I showed the company that I worked for is small gains here, small gains here, small gains here, in our, you know, in our top line, revenue started making a difference. So to answer your question, Yelp is another good one. And if you're in a market where there is Yelp, you probably have to pay the money. You know, you got to kick out the money. But just like anything else, you got to track it. What's your cost per lead, what's your cost per acquisition, what's your average sale through Yelp? And then that'll let you know whether it's a net positive or a net negative. But I did a convention last year with home inspectors. We were talking about marketing, obviously, and one of the things I told them, halfway through the through the presentation they all were talking about hiring me, and I'm not really on the market like that. I don't, I'm happy to consult, but I'm not really trying to, I got a full-time job. I'm good. But one of the things I said was, if you're going to find a good marketing company and you want to succeed, you have to know your numbers. So I can't tell you what a good acquisition number is for your market, unless I'm in it, you know. But you should know. How much can you pay to acquire a new client and still keep the margins that keep the doors open and keep, you know, bonuses flowing, and insurance on the trucks and everything else, right? You know that number. You should. I don't. You know, what's your cost per lead, what's your cost per call, what's your average inspection worth to you? I can't tell you how many times I've asked these simple questions and to people who have told me, I'm data driven. I love data, I'm data driven. Okay, so these are the basics. What are these? The reason they're important is, if your average inspection, you know, grosses you $450 and as a marketer, I know I want to come in somewhere between eight and 12%, lower if I can. But often, when you try to get too low, you're talking about sacrificing lead quality. I would rather send you 10 good leads than 100 crappy leads. You know what I'm saying? So you have to know your numbers, and then you got to track it. You have to watch. If you spend 350 a month on Yelp, what are you getting for that? You know, if you get one inspection, and your average inspection is 350, it's a net loss. You know, when you add in the overhead and dollar per hour, you know, to go out and work and everything, it's a net loss. But if you're spending 350 on Yelp, and you're doing 1500, 2000 in a month, you know, then I'd say, well, maybe I can put a little bit more money into it. I'm trying to think of some of the free ones like, you know, there's Nextdoor. I don't know if that works for home inspection.
Ian Robertson
It does. Yeah, it's a good one. Again, it's another inch or two.
Jason Bowings
Right. Exactly, if it's free, and it's going to take you a little time just to put up a profile, do it. If you aren't very good at writing about yourself. I know a lot of business owners that, one of their biggest downfalls is they're too humble. They don't want to say that we're great. Well, if you don't want to say you're great, then me, as the consumer, I'm not going to see you as that great. Fantastic. You're humble. I'm going to the person that tells me why I should do business with them. I use ChatGPT, not for the information that I'm going to post, but for the ideas to help me. I'm not strongest in writing. I've been writing these Google Ads for so long, I write in 30 and 90 characters, 30 character headlines and 90 character descriptions. But you know, you have to sell yourself. You have to give the consumer, you know what you need to address. It's on your website. It's in your advertisements. I do what you're looking for. This is why you should do it with me. And this is how easy it is to do it with me. And that's how I build landing pages. That's how I build campaigns. You know, I have a motto. I didn't make it or anything, but it's keep it simple, stupid. I like to just speak directly and simply. This is why you do business with us and on behalf of a lot of clients that have been successful, that works often more than, number one home inspection in San Antonio or something like that. I mean, we use those headlines sometimes too, but give the customer, your customer, a real reason to do business with you. Doesn't matter what platform, whether you're on Yelp, whether you're on Nextdoor, whether you're using Google Ads, you got to tell them why they should do business with you. And then you know, on top of that, you gotta answer the phone. If I'm looking for a home inspection, I'm on a deadline, probably right. If I call you and you don't answer because you're in an attic, because you're talking to another client, because you're on the phone with your insurance company, whatever it is, the next thing I do is just go to the next number and call them. When you call me back, I'm on the phone with them, they're selling me on why I should do business with them. You never even got the chance because you didn't answer the phone. So I didn't mean to go off topic there, but it kind of led me down that road. I would take advantage of any free platform that you can think of. I would stay away from directories that say, for 300 hours we'll list you in our directory all year long. Just because the price is right doesn't mean it's a good buy. Tabletop advertisements, you can't get people off their phone long enough to talk to each other, let alone look at the tabletop advertisement. You know what I mean?
Ian Robertson
I like those ads that a lot of my clients get that'll say, oh, you're missing in over 300 directories. So there are literally billions of directories. You could spend a lifetime, and you could still get that email saying you're missing in 300 directories. Because, you know what? There's billions of them. It's the ones that matter. There can always be more. But like you said, work on some free ones. And, you know, it's interesting you talked about data. That's one of my big pet peeves. I actually lost a client recently, he called me, I'd never had him, to lose him, and he said, hey, my website guys that do SEO now are doing a terrible job, and I don't get any work from them. And I'm like, okay, well, let's take a look at what they have. And I looked, and it was actually really good. They had it pretty tight. They were outside the industry, so there's some things, I'm like, there's a little bit of ick factor there. But I'm like, well, okay, where are your leads? Well, I don't know. I'm like, well, how many hits do you get a month? I don't know. And everything was, I don't know, and then my favorite was, okay, well, how do you keep track of where your work comes from? And he goes, well, I always try to ask when I'm on the phone. And I'm like, okay, dude, that just killed him for me, that's no way to keep track of where things come from, because what one person says where they came from is very different than where the customer journey brought them from. So for instance, it may have started with their agent handing them three business cards, but now the customer journey may be, they went to our website, then they read our reviews, then they went to our competitor's website and read their reviews, then they went to Nextdoor, because they're one person that uses that in the neighborhood, and then they see us there, and there's this giant customer journey. And then finally they call us, and they're like, where did you find me? Oh, from my agent. That is useless information, because SEO and your website and all the stuff that we're talking about, conversion is just as important as origination. So would it have mattered if we turned off all our SEO, those three business cards went out, and they chose our competitor because they had the better online environment and more angles to touch that client on their customer journey.
Jason Bowings
I'd like to expand on that actually. If I call you and I say, I saw you on Google, and you're like I am, I have Google Local Service Ads, I have Google Ads, I have the Google Map Pack, and I'm working on our SEO so that one or maybe two of our pages might go in the first page of results. Now I'm doing all that work. Where did you come from? You came from Google, but there's four or five options there, you know? That doesn't help me. Now, I understand that the very the vast majority of business owners are not trying to track their marketing, or maybe don't have the time to do it quite that granular, but that's where my decision making comes from, right? If I'm weak somewhere, do I want to be stronger there? Or is this something we can kind of ignore, because it doesn't drive, all the work we do doesn't get us an inch, right? It only gives us a quarter an inch. I can put money and time somewhere else, right? But I don't know, unless I see it, and when people say, "I think," "I feel," "it looks like," you know, "I heard," none of that is data. None of that tells me anything. So when you deal with people like that, one the first things I have to do is say to them, we need to get to track it. We need to track your website hits and then the other part of that is, and this might be a little bit heavy, so I'm not gonna go too deep into it, but its attribution, where it comes from, which is what we're talking about. But what was your last click versus what was your first click? Did someone learn about my company first on a local group in social media, you know, where they said, does anybody know a good...and somebody answers. And then you do a Google search, and you find my website, and then you see that we have a Yelp. So you go look at my Yelp reviews, and you look at my Google reviews, and you finally click on my Google Ad, or my SEO, on my main page SEO, or something, which one was more responsible than the other, you know? And this is a problem in the industry, or not a problem, but something that we work on in the industry. I always tell everybody, if I ever solve the attribution problem, I'll be a billionaire. I'll never have to work again.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, there's a lot to it, and we can go to one extreme of nothing, of not tracking and just going on feelings, and none of us like to admit that, like you said earlier, everybody likes to say, oh, I'm a data person. But when you ask, you're like, yeah, no, you're not. You're going on feeling. Going back to that potential client that I lost. I'm like, go back to them. I'm like, I just did some outside numbers. Like, I'm just looking at outside numbers. I'm like, this looks pretty good. I think they're doing right by you. If they're not, after you look at real solid numbers, then come back to me. But I'm not gonna bash somebody who's doing a good job, because there are lots of easy ways to measure what they're doing. So for instance, go to your Google Business page, Google My Business page, and look it has performance. How many people saw your page. How do they interact? Did they call? Did they click on your website? Look at stuff like that. I showed one of our clients that recently. He goes, Ian, I don't think this Google Business page thing is working out. He said something different, but that's just paraphrasing it. And I'm like, all right, that was nine phone calls last month. I'm like, nine people called you because of that. And he's like, well, I get spam calls too. I'm like, okay, let's say half of those are spam calls.
Jason Bowings
For free.
Ian Robertson
For free, but still, that's four phone calls. That's two grands worth of inspections, eight agents that you met. I'm like, I don't see the problem here, but we could go to the other extreme and use AI too. Now once a month, like you said, take an hour and kind of play with our Google Business page and kind of add some things, but take another hour and go to ChatGPT, pay the $20 a month for the pro version. It's better, and start typing stuff in. I'd like you to analyze my online marketing campaign and let me know what's working and what isn't. So now hopefully you have Google Analytics on your website, all of our clients, we always say, use Google Analytics. A lot of these marketing firms, they use these reporting softwares that they can skew the numbers to make it look any way they want. Matter of fact, you've seen those, those companies market to companies like us, and they're like, oh, you can make yourself look great and the other guy look bad. I'm like, or I can give my clients real numbers. Google Analytics, completely free, and just say ChatGPT, start asking me for data. I'm a newbie. I don't know what any of it means. Tell me where to click, what to copy and paste and what to put in here, it'll walk you through every little bit, and in less than an hour, it's going to say, hey, listen, you're getting a lot from this source, but not that source. You might want to think about paid advertising here, but maybe not paid advertising there. Google Local Service Ads in your area are looking good right now. You'd be surprised what ChatGPT is going to give you when you give it actual, real data.
Jason Bowings
Yeah, the prompt, it's only as good, your output is only going to be as good, you're never going to get a better output than input. I shouldn't say never, but usually you will not get a better output than input, garbage in, garbage out, is what they used to say.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. But there's a lot of stuff in Google Analytics that will tell you where the person was before they came to your website. Did this person with this particular IP address, did they find you on a blog and then travel to your home page? And all this stuff you can copy, paste it into ChatGPT and say, take this gobbledygook and tell me something factual out of it.
Jason Bowings
I do want to, before we end the podcast, I do want to talk about how we can use GLSAs, even if your market's gotten tough, what you should look at and ways that you can combat it.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, please do.
Jason Bowings
So I haven't seen Google Local Service Ads in a few months, so I'm going off memory, but you go to your report section and something they added last year or the year before was impression percentage, meaning how many searches did your ad show for? Typically, you'll have a very high number here, 188, something like that, somewhere in between there, means that your ad is showing. Now there's some question whether that means you're one of the two that they're showing right on those on the results page, or whether you're hitting more businesses in that and you're listed in there. But the important one is absolute top percentage. What that means is you are one of the first two. And what I noticed in the market that I was previously in with all the private equity firms was, we went from being 100% impression percentage, and let's say 75% absolute top being one of the first two, to I was in single, before I left, we were in single digits. And some of the ways you can combat that is, if you have limited budget, you change how long your ads run. If your business opens at nine o'clock, but at nine o'clock, you're getting your morning coffee, you're running around, you're talking to people, your employees, or maybe you don't have employees, but you're doing things and you're not available to answer the phone. Don't run the ads. Run for a shorter period of time. You can get more for your dollar. The second thing you can do is, you can manually adjust your bid. This goes back to knowing your numbers. I know what I can pay to acquire a new customer without losing because I know what a customer is worth to me. If I'm paying, you know, let's say $25-35 a lead, and my average inspection price is 500, I have room, I can up my bid, and then it's on the other companies to react to that. Can you start a bidding war? Can this price you out? Yes, it can. But unless you're up against a lot of heavy hitters and a lot of people who pay a lot of attention, oftentimes this will be a move by manually adjusting your bid or even adjusting your budget per week to money that you don't really want to spend. When I left the last company, my budget per week was set at $15,000, and my price per lead was 350, I was getting on average one lead per month. Even sending those signals to Google wasn't getting me anything really. And then the last but not least, one of the things that's really hurt GLSAs is that they took away the manual ability to dispute leads.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, that stinks.
Jason Bowings
They left it up to AI. And when I saw that happen, I saw the quality go down. HVAC company getting a call for a leaky shower head, and there's nothing I can do. I got to pay for it. And again, our leads were really expensive. So you know, if GLSAs are tough, you have other options. There are other paid options. There are other free options. You can adjust your GLSAs and keep playing with them. Now, look, keep an eye out, if you set your weekly budget to 2000 and you don't want to spend 2000, keep an eye on it. Don't go check on it three weeks later and find out, oh, geez, I've spent $5,000. If you did, it's presumable that you've gotten enough leads and closed them that you've gotten 15 or 20 out of them. At one point those GLSAs were bringing in like eight times the return. Now it seems like it's probably half that.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. They were fun times. They were easier times getting leads, especially in some markets. Companies were built with them. But you know, it's time to go back to basics. These fads come and go. We should never rely just on one thing. And I just took a couple of notes here, rely on real data, and AI is a great way to utilize that data, have it disseminated for us. I like to ask ChatGPT all the time, take this data and explain it to me like I'm 10 years old. I get some amazing stuff out of that. Focus on smaller platforms and gain inches, for instance, like Nextdoor. I hate that word. It sounds dirty coming out of my mouth, Yelp. Bleh, I hate saying that word. Yelp, if anybody from Yelp is listening, why are you listening to my podcast? But look, I hate that word, but it can help, at least have a profile there, and, you know, even smaller, older platforms, like going way back, you know, like MerchantCircle and just all these other little things here or there. Those things add up to feet and yards and miles.
Jason Bowings
With enough base hits, you score runs. You don't need to hit home runs all the time, with enough base hits, you score runs also.
Ian Robertson
Exactly. So Jason, thank you so much for joining us today. It's always incredible information. We really appreciate you taking your time.
Jason Bowings
I enjoyed my time here, Ian. You're awesome, man.
Ian Robertson
Aww, yeah. Thank you so much. And everybody, listen in to the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk.
Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at info@inspectortoolbelt.com.
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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.
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