Task Force Entrepreneur
Task Force Entrepreneur (TFE) is a podcast for entrepreneurs interested in the service industry. It began as a way to document the creation of a new service-oriented business, and aims to provide a no-fluff narrative on all things entrepreneur!
Task Force Entrepreneur
Google Ads Tips From The Trenches To Supercharge Your Business
Figuring out Google Ads can be a difficult thing. Figuring out where to spend money, what to tweak, and when to give up - can also be challenging. In today's show, I share some tips I've picked up after spending more money than I'd like to admit on Google Ads, in the hopes it helps you with your cleaning business, or service business! Originally aired on 9/21/23.
Hey everybody, mike, here, and welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur. The podcast I started went from being a tech engineer to starting a house cleaning business. Yep, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, what's up? Everybody Mike here, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:In today's episode I'm going to talk about some tips and tricks, things that I've learned on the advertising front specifically, that can save you a lot of headache if you're thinking about starting to advertise, and it can be for pretty much anything, but obviously it's probably mostly applicable to service businesses, and I want to caveat this with saying I am no expert in what I'm about to tell you. I'm simply sharing things that have worked and things that have not worked for me, and you know you can do with that what you will. So, moving forward, just getting into it, the things that we've been doing with my cleaning business in terms of advertising, I would say, fall into a few categories. One, probably the simplest, would be direct mail. We have started direct mail campaigns, including flyers and actually even letters written by me and handwriting envelopes and that sort of thing to my neighborhood and other neighborhoods as well, and I can't really report in on the effectiveness of this yet because we just started it, so I don't expect it to be hugely effective. But you know we'll see, I'm open to it. So we're just trying kind of one run of I think we're sending out like three or four hundred pieces to see what happens. Now, also on that front, I ordered a couple hundred refrigerator magnets and I saw this idea online and I thought it was a great idea because someone basically said a lot of people seem to just not throw away fridge magnets, right, they just throw them up on the refrigerator and keep them. So I really like that idea. So we are going to try that in some of these direct mail pieces. But I'm probably going to lean on using that more for what I would view as kind of higher value targets, that would be like commercial businesses and that sort of thing. And our approach with commercial is very, very laser focused Lots of direct reaching out on LinkedIn, lots of direct mail, phone calls, very, very laser focused, trying to really understand our customer that we're reaching out to, and I've even tried batching commercial customers into some groups. So the one that comes to mind is medical offices, so any kind of medical office. We treat those as largely the same and we try to have the same consistent messaging to those types of customers.
Speaker 1:Now, getting to the meat of this advertising, I will say again, I'm not an expert, but I know enough to be dangerous. So if you're not doing any advertising today, I want to share some stuff with you guys. So a lot of people think that they're going to start a business and they're going to do Facebook ads and they're going to do, you know, tiktok ads or whatever right you know, it doesn't really matter what platform, but some kind of advertising. The truth is that the type of business and what you're selling should ultimately determine where you are advertising and how you're advertising. So, traditionally speaking, facebook advertising is really really good for purchases that I would say are a little bit more impulse. You know the really cool T-shirt with a funny message or the hat that you know I love hats, so you know some kind of cool hat. If I see it, I'm like, oh, that's awesome, I'm going to buy it. Those are the kind of things that do really well on Facebook.
Speaker 1:What does not traditionally do well and I say traditionally because there are definitely exceptions are things like I don't know. I've seen, like a dryer vent cleaning service where they come clean out your dryer vents, which, you know, not doing that can lead to fires and all kinds of things. It's very important, but it's probably pretty rare that someone opens Facebook looking for that. A lot of times people, you know they might ask for recommendations in a group or something like that, but a lot of people won't necessarily, you know, open it up and be like, oh, that's great, I never thought about doing that. I'm going to give them a call. That's just not the biggest use case.
Speaker 1:Now, on the flip side, we have Google Ads, and Google Ads is something that my cleaning business is using very, very heavily. In fact, that's the main advertising channel that I've been working with, and Google Ads is traditionally good for businesses where clients or customers have to search something. So that dryer event cleaning business is a great example. If that was me, I would probably ditch Facebook ads for the most part. I might still post there in groups and try to do things like that, but I would probably put a lot more effort into Google Ads, where I can say, if someone Googles dryer event cleaning near me, my ad pops up. So that's really, really important. That is. That distinction is quite, you know, quite important if you're getting into advertising where you should advertise. And then, on the flip side, you know there's LinkedIn advertising, which seems to be best for very high ticket items and, to be honest with you, linkedin advertising is very expensive. It is something I've looked at in the past but ultimately decided to pass up on it due to the price and you know you've got to have a kind of a high ticket item to justify the cost of those ads. But they definitely could be effective.
Speaker 1:So, that said, I want to kind of talk about Google Ads a little bit more in depth, just to share, kind of, what we're doing. So in Google Ads, I have set up a campaign and you know, a campaign. You can think of it as kind of a logical grouping of ads is probably the best way to put it. So I have I actually have two campaigns. I have one for residential ads and one for commercial ads and the residential one. Within it I have several ads and they essentially rotate. So and I won't go into the nuts and bolts of Google Ads because, again, I am not a, you know, I'm not the foremost expert in it but essentially you can create multiple ads and Google will show each of them and that way you can see which one is performing best. So you can actually see, for example, if you have one ad with one word in the ad and the other with a different word, you could see which one was doing better, which one got more clicks, that sort of thing, and this is something that I would definitely recommend doing. This is something I do and I have seen it. Quite a difference between two ads which are almost identical, but one it clearly outperforms the other. So it's pretty interesting how it can come down to literally just a couple of words.
Speaker 1:Now, as far as budget goes, a lot of times I think kind of the standard. You know, minimum recommended budget for Google Ads is like 20 bucks a day, which comes out to roughly 600 bucks a month. And here's where I think a lot of people run into problems, and I even fell victim to this. When you start on Google Ads, you are not going to see a result in your first week, maybe your first second week and maybe not even your first month. In my opinion, you have to treat the first month as a learning phase and you have to eat the cost of it, unfortunately, now. That said, I think we are a full two weeks maybe two and a half weeks in on the one campaign for residential, and I am beginning to see results that I like. It's not where I want it to be, but it is promising and it is becoming a little more consistent in terms of conversions, which is something I'll talk about in a minute. Now, what do you do during this month? Do you create an amazing ad and then just like set it, forget it and hope? No, not at all.
Speaker 1:See, there is this concept in Google Ads of negative keywords and keywords. A keyword is something that you want to match when someone searches for that word or that phrase. Then you want your ad to be triggered so that they will see it. That's really important. You've got to have the keywords there. You've got to have plenty of keywords for cleaning. It might be house cleaning near me Might be one. Another one might be all natural cleaning. Another one might be eco-friendly cleaning, best cleaners near me. Those are all examples of keywords. That's pretty straightforward. You want to have something that people can search and find you. Ultimately, you have to put yourself in the shoes of someone looking for your service.
Speaker 1:Where the tuning comes in, and what I think you need to focus on a lot when you're brand new to Google Ads is the negative keywords piece. By the way, there is so much you can do with Google Ads. There's so much that I probably am barely touching the surface. This is coming from the perspective of you are a business owner doing this on your own. These are easy things you can do. Negative keywords are really important. Those are basically saying if they search this, I do not want my ad to trigger. The way Google Ads works. It's flexible.
Speaker 1:There's different match types for your regular keywords. For example, if you said best house cleaners was one of your keywords, depending on your match type, if they search top home cleaners, google Ads could say, well, yeah, that's close enough and it could fire your ad. What if they search for elite home cleaners and that happened to be the name of one of your competitors? You may not want that ad to fire because they've already made up their mind. You're looking for your competitor. This is just an example. By the way, maybe you do want the ad to fire Either way. In this scenario, you would actually want to have a negative keyword for elite home cleaners to match that specific phrase so that if someone searched that business again, your ad would not fire, which means ultimately you would not pay for that impression, which means an impression is when someone sees the ad in their Google search results. Ultimately, what this means is if you come in every day and you check what people are searching for, when you're ad fired, you can go in there and you can continue to add those negative keywords to a list. Basically, this list will say it's all of the things you don't want people to search when your ad pops up. The more that you do that, you're teaching the Google search algorithm what you want to see, or when you want your ad to fire. It's this learning process, my research in talking with people that are a lot smarter than me. Again, that seems to be a month, could be a couple months, could be a few months, just depending on what you're doing. In my case, I would say when we passed the two week mark, that's when I started seeing more consistent results.
Speaker 1:All right, the last thing I want to talk about with Google Ads is the idea of conversions, and this is huge. So a conversion is some kind of action that someone took when they saw your ad that you count as basically a success. So you have to kind of sit back and think what is my objective from this ad campaign? Do I want to get phone calls? Do I want someone to fill out a form? Do I want them to buy a product on my website? Those are all examples of things that can become conversions, and this is really important because, basically, this will allow you to track the effectiveness of your campaign, but also it will teach Google what you're really looking for so that it can optimize things and try to get more conversions. So it's very, very, very important that you set up conversions as part of your campaign and if you don't know how you got to Google it, you got to look it up. You got to do some learning to learn how to set that up. There are a few different ways to do it, but it is very important. Don't skip that step. All right, so that's all I got for you guys in this show.
Speaker 1:This one was a little different. I just wanted to do a little kind of lessons learned specifically for Google Ads, because I have learned a lot and I continue to learn a lot, and I think it's something that especially service business owners are lacking. It's very hard to run a service business and figure out Google Ads and just advertising in general, and you know we have a long way to go. I may explore things other than Google Ads at some point, but for now, you know we're trying to really just kind of nail one channel, which is Google Ads, before we move on to others. Hey, if you enjoyed the podcast and if you want to follow along to see how I do in this endeavor, it would mean a lot if you just leave me a review so that the podcast can reach more people. Like I said, it would mean the world. Thank you and have a great day.
