Retargeting Ads: The Hidden Revenue Contractors Ignore

In this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin reframe ad retargeting from a "creepy shoe-following" gimmick into a high-converting digital follow-up system designed specifically for home improvement contractors. 

Moving past basic, single-ad setups, they introduce the Digital Call Center Framework, a 4-seat retargeting approach that targets bounced visitors, half-filled forms, canceled appointments, and demo no-sells with tailored messaging instead of generic pressure. Tune in to learn how to capture hidden pipeline revenue, avoid agency setup traps like missing geographic fences, and implement critical "stop rules" and suppression lists to protect your brand and budget.

Access the Digital Call Center Framework here: https://bit.ly/4iBVgj2

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.

Transcript

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Intro: Welcome to 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. Let's get started.

Caitlyn: Welcome back to Digital Marketing for Contractors. I am Caitlyn Noble.

Meredith: And I'm Meredith Medlin.

Caitlyn: Today we are talking about retargeting, and I want to say up front that I almost did not want to do this

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: because retargeting is one of those topics where everybody nods along like they already understand it.

Meredith: Everybody has heard the shoe story. You look at a pair of shoes, now the shoes follow you around the internet.

Caitlyn: That was a, like a hard transition. And that story has done some real damage, because it teaches contractors that retargeting is a creepy little gimmick that e-commerce companies use, so they ignore it or they let somebody switch it on for them, and they never look at it again.

Meredith: And meanwhile, there is revenue sitting in there.

Caitlyn: So you're telling me that the shoes follow me around, and

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: the story? Okay, cool. That's the end of this episode. Thanks, y'all. Okay, so we are going to reframe it completely. We are not going to talk about retargeting as an advertising tactic today, even though that's probably why you guys listened. We are going to talk about it as a follow-up system that happens to run on ad platforms, and once you see it that way, you already know how to build it because you already built it in the real world.

Meredith: You built a call center.

Caitlyn: You built a call center.

Meredith: All right. So let us set up the math. And I want to be clear that I'm making these numbers up completely. This is not a professional study. This is just arithmetic to make a point.

Caitlyn: Pick round numbers, please.

Meredith: Okay. Say a thousand people land on your website in a month, some from paid search, some from organic, some from your Google business profile, some from a job site radius campaign, some from a truck wrap and a yard sign. A thousand people arrive.

Caitlyn: It's amazing. And some percentage of them fill out a form or make a call.

Meredith: Exactly. So whatever that number is at your company, you know it because it's your conversion rate, and your agency reports on it to you every month. Or if they're not, they should be, so get that from them.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Meredith: But here's the part that never gets reported. 900 and something of those thousand people leave.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: And your entire marketing operation treats them as if they never even existed.

Caitlyn: And I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that is dishonest. A lot of those people are not buyers. Some of them are your competitors checking your prices. Some of them are your own employees. Some of them are homeowners who are 11 months out.

Meredith: And some of them just clicked on the wrong thing.

Caitlyn: Some of them clicked on the wrong thing. So I do not want anyone hearing this and thinking there are 900 lost sales there. There are not.

Meredith: But think about those people who are, you know, actually there compared to everybody else that you advertise to.

Caitlyn: Yep.

Meredith: When you run a prospecting campaign, you are paying to reach a homeowner in your service area who has never heard of you and may not need anything. When you retarget, you're paying to reach a homeowner who already came to your site in your service area and looked at your, let's say, bath remodel page.

Caitlyn: That is a completely different person.

Meredith: That is a person who is already in the funnel and stepped out of it. And in the physical world, when somebody steps out of your funnel, you don't just shrug. You call them.

Caitlyn: You call them a lot.

Meredith: Yes. You have three to 15 people maybe if your call center is large, and that's their entire job is calling them. That is the point. Contractors already believe in follow-up. They spend real money on follow-up. They just don't think of retargeting typically as follow-up. So it lives in a completely different mental category, and then it gets ignored.

Caitlyn: And that is why we call this the hidden revenue. It is not hidden because it is hard to find. It is hidden because it is filed in the wrong drawer.

Meredith: God, like most of the important paperwork in my home.

Caitlyn: In, probably your office.

Meredith: Yeah, I don't know about that. Come on, now.

Caitlyn: So here is the framework. We call it the digital call center.

Meredith: Yeah. The idea is simple here. Your call center does not have one script. Your call center has a script for a fresh inquiry, a different script for confirming an appointment, a different script for somebody who canceled, and a different script for somebody who sat through a demo and did not buy.

Caitlyn: Mm. Different person, different moment, different words.

Meredith: And yet almost every retargeting campaign that we inherit has one audience and one ad, all website visitors, one image, one offer that just runs forever.

Caitlyn: Which is the equivalent of hiring 15 people and giving them all the same script, no matter who picks up.

Meredith: Yeah. Nobody would do that. And if you are doing that, rethink that.

Caitlyn: Sorry.

Meredith: the framework is four seats, four audiences, four scripts, four jobs, and they map directly onto language that you're already using every day.

Caitlyn: Start with seat one.

Meredith: Okay. Seat one is the hang up. This is the person who came to your website and left without doing anything, no form, no call, nothing.

Caitlyn: And this is the biggest audience by far, and it, it is the one people get the most wrong because they immediately want to hit that person with a hard offer.

Meredith: Free estimate, book now, limited time.

Caitlyn: And think about what that person actually did. They arrived, they looked around, and they were not convinced. Hitting them harder with the same ask is not a strategy. Something did not land.

Meredith: Okay, so what does that ad do instead?

Caitlyn: It answers the objection they left with. And for replacement contractors, the objections are remarkably consistent. Am I going to get pressured? Is this going to take three weeks? Are these people real? Are they going to actually show up when they say they will?

Meredith: So the creative is the proof in this instance. It's not the pressure.

Caitlyn: I love this episode. Proof, not pressure, real installs in real neighborhoods they recognize, your crews, your reviews, your actual timeline, and I want to be specific about this because contractors have a lot of this content already and they think it is worthless

Meredith: The job site photos

Caitlyn: The job site photos. We did an entire episode on capturing those, and the reason it matters here is that a photo of a finished bath or siding or roof or windows or doors or whatever it may be, kitchen, you name it, in a neighborhood eight minutes from that homeowner does something a stock photo cannot do. And on the geography point, this is the part where I get the most twitchy. Your retargeting has to be fenced to your service area.

Meredith: Yeah. We're gonna come back to that, and a horror story that we're gonna tell.

Caitlyn: I don't know why I'm continued to repeat you.

Meredith: I

Caitlyn: I know. So, okay.

Meredith: love me

Caitlyn: So, we're gonna come back to that in a horror story. Seat two. Seat two is half form.

Meredith: Yes. This is my favorite. This is the person who started to raise their hand and stopped. They opened your estimate form, but they didn't submit it. They tapped the phone number on mobile and didn't complete the call. They spent four minutes on your financing page.

Caitlyn: These are people who were actively trying to become an inquiry.

Meredith: And your CRM, according to your CRM, they don't exist, 'cause there's no record. They're not even a raw lead. Nobody in the call center will ever dial them because there is no number to dial.

Caitlyn: And this is where I think the reframe really plays off. If a homeowner called your office, started talking to an intake rep, and hung up halfway through, you would consider that a big deal. Somebody would go looking at that record.

Meredith: Yeah. Somebody would be getting some coaching and a talking to.

Caitlyn: But the digital version of that exact event happens every single day, and it produces no reaction at all because it does not show up in a report anybody reads.

Meredith: All right. So what's the script for seat number two?

Caitlyn: Okay, so short window and remove the friction. That person was close, within a few days, not a few weeks, and the ad should acknowledge whatever made them stop. If they bailed on the form, the ad points them to the shorter path. Call this number, or two-field version of the form. If they bailed on financing, the ad speaks to the payments and the terms.

Meredith: Okay, and so that's a build issue, right? Not a creative issue?

Caitlyn: Yeah, correct. And I wanna say this plainly. Building two-seat requires actual configuration. Somebody has to set up events on your site so the platform knows what a form start is versus a form submit. If your agency has never had that conversation with you, two-seat is almost certainly empty.

Meredith: And it's a good question to ask your agency on your next call.

Caitlyn: Absolutely. I'm, I'm loving this remarketing episode. I mean, if we wanna take a quick segue and talk about shoes, what types remarketing ads do you get, Meredith?

Meredith: As of late, I've started to look at fall shoes, so I'm getting boots.

Caitlyn: Oh, you're getting boots?

Meredith: I'm getting boots already.

Caitlyn: Oh. Well, I haven't been looking at shoes, but now because we're talking about shoes, I'm definitely gonna be getting shoes.

Meredith: 100% for listening.

Caitlyn: Yeah, so usually mine is just,

Meredith: Baby stuff?

Caitlyn: Yeah, well, like, yeah, potty training tips. Which are ads, which is great.

Meredith: It's great. My

Caitlyn: everybody's... Yeah, everybody's made this. All right, let's get into seats three and four.

Meredith: All right. Seats three and four are where this gets interesting for our audience specifically, because these are not website audiences. They come out of your CRM, actually.

Caitlyn: Yeah. These are the ones almost nobody runs.

Meredith: Seat three is your cancel prior to issue. Somebody agreed to let a rep come out, and then they called and canceled before it was ever issued to a salesperson.

Caitlyn: And every contractor listening has a bucket of these, every single one.

Meredith: Yeah, and what's fascinating about that person is what they actually did. They wanted it enough to give you their information and hold a time slot on the calendar, but something happened after that.

Caitlyn: Spouse said, "Not right now," got a number from somebody else, water heater died, and the money went there instead.

Meredith: Yeah, and your call center probably worked that list for, like, a week or two, but then they moved on, because they have to move on. They have new appointments to set.

Caitlyn: And this is where retargeting does something a call center cannot do, which is stay present without being annoying. There is a limit to how many times a human being can call a homeowner before it damages the brand.

Meredith: Exactly, but there is no limit that low when it comes to being

Caitlyn: What's your

Meredith: customer. With phone calls?

Caitlyn: Zero.

Meredith: Zero.

Caitlyn: I know.

Meredith: The limit does not because you may not.

Caitlyn: What I do love about voicemail is I can read it now on my phone.

Meredith: 100%.

Caitlyn: And so that's nice. I'm like, "Oh yeah, I did inquire about that. I forgot."

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: "Thank you for trying to call back and reschedule." But if somebody's gonna call me 36 times, I'm going to

Meredith: Immediately, no

Caitlyn: my actual mind.

Meredith: Immediately, no.

Caitlyn: So, you can be quietly in front of that person for months at a low frequency, and when their situation changes, you are the name they already know. Now, the mechanics here matter. You are uploading a customer list to the ad platform. I was just on a call right before we recorded this asking the client about a customer list, and there are rules about that, so.

Meredith: Yeah. There're consent and data handling specifically to note.

Caitlyn: Absolutely. Consent, data handling, what the platforms will and will not let you match, and what your own privacy policy says you do with information homeowners give you. That is a real conversation to have with your agency, and depending on your state, your attorney, all of that matters. We are not going to pretend that that part is trivial.

Meredith: No, but it's, it's doable, and it is being done.

Caitlyn: Oh I mean, I... Within the last two years, I think every single client has come to

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: and said... Or we've gone to them and said, "We have to have a privacy

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: because we wanna use y'all's info."

Meredith: Exactly.

Caitlyn: Okay. So, it's doable, and let's move on to seat four.

Meredith: All right. Number four is the demo, no sell seat. They sat. Your rep spent an hour and a half in that living room or on that deck or wherever in the backyard And they took measurements, showed them the color options, gave them a number, and they still didn't sign.

Caitlyn: And a lot of owners write that person off emotionally, the rep comes back to the office frustrated, and the lead gets marked and forgotten.

Meredith: And that is the most expensive person on this entire list.

Caitlyn: Say more.

Meredith: Glad you asked. So you paid to generate the lead, first of all. You paid the call center to set it and to confirm it and to issue it.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.

Meredith: You paid a salesperson to drive there and spend two hours of their time. That homeowner has more of your money in them than anything else in the four seats that we're talking about, and they're the ones we most consistently see with zero follow-up marketing behind them.

Caitlyn: And what does that ad say? Because you cannot run a generic brand ad at somebody who watched your full presentation.

Meredith: No. That person does not need to learn who you are all over again. They know exactly who you are, and that ad has to do one of two things. Either it

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Meredith: specific reason people in your market did not sign, which your sales manager can tell you about in about nine seconds probably.

Caitlyn: It's usually price or it is usually timing.

Meredith: Yeah, price or timing. Simply, it's gonna keep you visible until their timing changes is the way to say it. Because the thing about a demo no-sell is that a lot of them eventually do buy.

Caitlyn: Yep.

Meredith: They just buy in four months, or they buy from whoever's in front of them in four months' time.

Caitlyn: Yep. And talk about messaging. I mean, pain. Continue to give the offer of

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: Continue to advertise you can install this in less than a day.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: mean, go, like, reviews. I

Meredith: testimonials

Caitlyn: testimonials. All of that would be really positive. I'm sitting here, you know, and I know we're not gonna talk about this probably in this episode, but, like, running those retargeting ads is expensive, too. So I mean, this is a luxury. I'm

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: we're obviously giving you guys a lot of great advice here in terms of how to run

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: four different types of segments, but it

Meredith: You to

Caitlyn: money, and you have to have the budget do it.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Because I'm obsessed with all of these.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: I know we've done this for clients with large budgets,

Meredith: Sure

Caitlyn: yeah. All right. So that being said, we're now here at the part of the episode that I would put on a poster if I could, because everything we just described can be built correctly and still be a disaster if you skip this.

Meredith: The stop rule.

Caitlyn: Every seat needs a rule for when the ad stops. Three of them, actually. When does the person exit the audience? How often can they see the ad? And how long does the campaign live before somebody looks at it again?

Meredith: Start with exiting.

Caitlyn: If a homeowner signs a contract with you on Tuesday, they should not be seeing your free estimate ad on Wednesday.

Meredith: And unfortunately, they do.

Caitlyn: They do constantly, and here's why it is worse than just wasted money. You have a homeowner who has just spent a significant amount with you, who is now in the anxious part of the process where they are waiting on the install. Honestly, even the demo

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: is nerve-wracking. And they are watching your company spend money advertising to strangers.

Meredith: Yeah, and I mean, they're gonna start doing the math about what they paid at that point.

Caitlyn: They start doing the math about what they paid. So you need suppression. Your buyers come out, your existing customers come out. Ideally, your own staff comes out and your agency comes out, because there is no reason to be paying to advertise to the people who built the campaign.

Meredith: Yeah, so second rule here is gonna be frequency.

Caitlyn: Frequency is the difference between follow-up and harassment. And it is the only reason the shoe story exists. There is a number of times per week that feels like presence, and a number that feels like being chased. Your agency should be able to tell you what cap is set on each campaign. If nobody has ever mentioned a cap to you, there probably is not one. Ugh.

Meredith: And the third one is the one that gets people.

Caitlyn: The third one is the shelf life of the creative. Hallelujah. Retargeting is the single easiest campaign type to set up and forget, because it is just quietly running in the background. It does not break. It does not throw an error. It just sits there spending a little bit of money every day.

Meredith: And usually it has a fun seasonal offer in

Caitlyn: Cringe

Meredith: past the season.

Caitlyn: Cringe. Which brings us to today's horror story.

Meredith: Okay. We have got a new segment for y'all today. This is called Agency Horror Story. Chad, can you insert some spooky music? So the rules are

Caitlyn: I'll just sing the spooky music.

Meredith: Perfect.

Caitlyn: Ooh.

Meredith: Wow. It is already October. You scared me. So the rules of this are that the story is true in substance, but the company is fake. We've given them a fake name. So everything you're about to hear actually happened.

Caitlyn: That's not fun.

Meredith: But come on. We just talked about privacy

Caitlyn: Yeah, sorry

Meredith: and terms.

Caitlyn: No, our clients haven't for us to shame them.

Meredith: But Copper Line Bath is a fictional company, and some details are blended in so nobody's going to be identified in this, okay?

Caitlyn: Take it away, sister.

Meredith: Okay. Copper Line is a one-day bath company. Good operation, multiple crews, real call center, sales team, the whole build. They come to us because their cost per lead has been climbing, and their agency of two years can't explain why.

Caitlyn: Familiar opening.

Meredith: Yeah, we've all been there. So we do what we always do. We get into the ad accounts, and we end up finding a retargeting campaign that has been running continuously. It's never been paused, and it's never been touched after it was published.

Caitlyn: How, like I just don't understand how.

Meredith: just It's long enough that the offer and the ad was for a holiday promotion from the previous year

Caitlyn: Oh, I actually remember this real-life client.

Meredith: Yep.

Caitlyn: That wasn't Copperline.

Meredith: Yep.

Caitlyn: And it wasn't a mistake we made.

Meredith: No.

Caitlyn: It was a mistake we found.

Meredith: Inherited.

Caitlyn: So homeowners are clicking on an expired offer.

Meredith: Exactly. They're clicking on an expired offer, landing page for a promotion that ended almost a year ago.

Caitlyn: Very Christmas.

Meredith: And then the call center is asked about the deals when the prospects call. They're confused. It's a whole bunch of mess, essentially.

Caitlyn: And so the call center is fielding confused calls and burning capacity.

Meredith: And they're being logged as inquiries, so the lead count looks fine on paper.

Caitlyn: Oh, no.

Meredith: But that is not the horror

Caitlyn: There's more?

Meredith: you could believe me. Yeah. So...

Caitlyn: Oh my gosh.

Meredith: I know, clutch your pearls, the audience had no geographic restriction on it. So anybody in the entire world who hit that website from any country was in the retargeting pool.

Caitlyn: What?

Meredith: And Copperline serves only a small handful of counties.

Caitlyn: There are, like, 27 four-letter words that I wanna shout.

Meredith: Yep. There's a lot of them.

Caitlyn: So they are helping to show bath remodel ads to people 2,000 miles outside of their service area.

Meredith: For months. And when we brought it to the agency, the answer was that retargeting is cheap, so it doesn't really matter.

Caitlyn: Oh my gosh. That is the line that gets me, because it is technically true per impression, and completely false in every other sense.

Meredith: Yeah, and here's the last piece, which is that the owner actually cared about it. There was no suppression list, so every homeowner who had signed a contract was still in that fricking audience.

Caitlyn: And including the people in the middle of their install.

Meredith: Yeah, that's super uncomfortable. We found out that a customer... Or we found out because a customer called and complained about it. She had signed, she was waiting on her install date, and she was seeing a discount ad from the company she just wrote a check to over and over again.

Caitlyn: Okay. Well, one, that person has a lot of time on their hands.

Meredith: They sure do.

Caitlyn: But, two, thank you.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: And she obviously assumed that she was being overcharged.

Meredith: Yeah. She was assuming that, and that complaint went to the call center. Call center didn't have any idea that it was even connected to advertising, because why would they?

Caitlyn: So the lesson is not that retargeting is dangerous.

Meredith: No. It's that, it's that retargeting is the only campaign type that will run unattended for a year without anybody noticing, which means it is the one that needs the most care and somebody attached to it, essentially.

Caitlyn: Yeah. It is critical though. And if you're listening to this and you have a retargeting campaign running right now, and you do not know who touched it last, there, there is your action item. I was gonna say

Meredith: There it is

Caitlyn: I was gonna say that and there. There is your action item.

Meredith: is.

Caitlyn: All right, y'all

Meredith: five things, and all of them are things that you can do yourself before lunch or dinner or whenever your next meal is.

Caitlyn: So ambitious.

Meredith: So hungry.

Caitlyn: No, I'm always hungry. Number one, your open your retargeting campaign, or ask your agency to screen share it, and look at the ad that is actually running. Not the report, the ad. Read the offer in it out loud. And if it references a season or promotion that has passed, you found money. I swear I do this with a client that I meet with monthly. We look at all the live running ads.

Meredith: It's worth it. All right. Number two, ask one question. What is the geographic restriction on this audience? There should be an immediate and specific answer.

Caitlyn: Number three, ask whether there is a suppression list, and whether your closed customers are on it. If the answer is a pause, you have your answer.

Meredith: Number four, count your seats. Of the four we talked about today, the hang up, the half form, the cancel prior to issue, and the demo no sell, how many are actually built? Most contractors will find they have one. If you have two, you're honestly ahead.

Caitlyn: Definitely. And number five, and this is one this is... Oh my gosh. This one is a conversation rather than a task. Go to your sales manager and ask for the top two reasons homeowners are not signing after a demo. Then go look at whether either of those reasons is addressed anywhere in any of your advertising. I love that one.

Meredith: Yeah. It's usually not.

Caitlyn: I love that one. Okay. So that is the biggest gap and it's the best creative brief that you're going to ever get, and it's completely free. So I think, one, open your retargeting. I think you could... If nothing else, you can even email your agency, "What's our retargeting campaign look like? Can you share it with us? Who are you targeting? What's the geographic restriction? And three, is there a suppression list?" I think, I mean, whether you screen share or not, you could at least email that immediately.

Meredith: Yeah, exactly.

Caitlyn: All right.

Meredith: So that, my friends, is what we call the digital call center.

Caitlyn: That's cute.

Meredith: Four seats, four scripts, and stop rule on every single one of them.

Caitlyn: And if there is one thing to carry out of this episode, it is that you already know how to do this. You have been running a follow-up operation for years. This is the same discipline pointed to people your CRM cannot see.

Meredith: We built a one-page worksheet for this one. It is called the digital call center build sheet, and it's gonna walk you through all four seats with the audience definition, the window, the message, and the suppression rule for each. The link is gonna be here in the show notes.

Caitlyn: I can't wait to see it.

Meredith: I can't either. I heard it looks great.

Caitlyn: Challenge us. When you guys hear this episode drop, go look for that build sheet.

Meredith: Yep.

Caitlyn: It will be there. Have we seen it yet? We sure have. Not. And if you want us to look at what is actually happening in your accounts, we do that. You can book a strategy call, obviously with our agency, fatcatstrategies.com, and ask... You'll, there's a direct 30-minute free consultation, usually with me. How lucky are you?

Meredith: The luckiest. And we work only with home improvement replacement contractors. So you are not going to have to explain to us what a cancel prior to issue means.

Caitlyn: Never ever.

Meredith: your language.

Caitlyn: Never ever, ever. We appreciate y'all. Thank you for listening. I loved this one. And as always, thank you for listening to Digital Marketing for Contractors. We will see you next time.

Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.