Our Blog

AdWords for Plumbing Services: How to Manage a Campaign

Adwords and PPC marketing campaigns are useful for any business which has a significant online, presence, but it can be particularly useful for plumbing services in terms of giving them entirely new markets to work with. AdWords for a plumbing company is useful on several levels: it can widen the potential sphere of influence that the company has, it can draw in new clients who may not have been aware of the company beforehand, and it can introduce them to an entirely new method of marketing.

Using PPC as an essential part of internet marketing for plumbers will help the plumbing company come up an entirely new flow of leads (a lead will cost $10), one which will hopefully remain constant until the business either comes to an end or switches marketing tactics. These tactics can benefit the customer as well – googling for an emergency plumber can mean that the AdWords advert comes up, and gives them the contact details they need. The tips which are given in the following article all concern AdWords for plumbing services, and are all based on existing campaigns.

How to Manage a Campaign Properly?

More Details

An AdWords campaign is something which tries to give more information to the customer than would be possible with another marketing campaign. Now it is much easier to do with ad extensions which are offered by Google for free. However, about 90 % of companies do not take benefits of this.

When deciding how to grow a plumbing business, the basic information in your ad is a necessity. Here come obvious reasons – customers need to know the name of the service, how to get in contact with them, and where they are located.

For instance, a plumbing company offers a number of services:

Pressure reducing valves
Domestic water system balancing
Domestic booster pump installation and repair
Domestic hot water boiler system installation and repair
Piping repair and replacement
Cold and hot water pipe isolation freezing

Here comes the question how to advertise a plumbing business correctly and present these services properly.

Any and all services which are highlighted in your advert needs to be grouped in such a way as to be immediately visible and identifiable. They can be further identified by the type of service which they are part of, which in a plumbing company would most likely be: install, repair, replace, upgrade.

It can be also done in another way: plumbing, heating repair, emergency services.

Another vital part of an advertisement for plumbing services is the headlines, as these are what people see first. There can be several headlines in any given advert, but the first headline should be treated with the most importance for two separate reasons: one, the first headline is used to grab people’s attention, so it needs to be direct and to the point; and two, the first headline is the only one which Google AdWords PPC management will allow any direct control over.

Brand Identification

In terms of marketing for plumbers, branded terms and modified broad keywords are both useful parts of the PPC campaign, as they can both act to direct more customers to the advert and then to the site itself.

Brand identity is so important when it comes to PPC for plumbing services because brands are often the first and only thing people remember about the various adverts they are inundated with throughout the day. The brand of a company is the defining way in which they are seen, so brand identifiers are highly important additions to adverts. It is important to remember that brand identity (something which shows how a company wants to be seen) is different from brand image (how the company is actually seen).

Brand identification in an AdWords campaign for plumbing services is important precisely because the method of marketing which uses AdWords depends so much on what is seen. A marketing campaign which uses keywords can focus slightly less on who sees the message (more on keywords below), and therefore slightly more on what message is sent. Even if people who see the advert do not click on it, they have still seen it – this means that in the future when they do need the goods or services which were offered in the advert, there is the chance that the plumbing business might have a new customer.

Because brand identity is so important when it comes to managing PPC campaigns, many businesses take the step of using their own name as a keyword, essentially bidding on their own name.

For example, “Canadian Plumber plumbing service” where Canadian Plumber is a brand name and plumbing service is a non-branded term.

Though at first, it does seem illogical to pay money for people who are actively searching for your own company, there are a number of reasons for doing this:

It’s cheap. Having a high search return lowers the price a plumbing business has to pay for all the keywords it uses.

You are the right answer. Customers and prospects are more likely to click on an advert if they see the name repeated more than once.

Take over search results. Bidding on brand names means that more searches are taken up with the results that you want.

Avoid competition. Sometimes rival businesses can bid on the brand names of their competitors in a bid to keep them from using it and gain an edge. Bidding on the brand name keeps rivals from doing this.

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is useful for plumbing services which are located in a very strict geographical area. Companies which do not rely on their clients being close by may be content with Google AdWords Canada being as specific as they care to get, but other companies are more limited.

Geo-targeting can be done in two separate ways: the first way is by using the location tracker which is coded into every search engine that supports AdWords campaigns. By turning the location tracker to a specific location, a plumbing business can ensure that their adverts only turn up on searches which are made by people in the same geographical area as they are, therefore saving money on potential clicks which will go nowhere.

The second way to use geo-targeting is in the keywords of the search itself: if the plumbing business which is running the campaign has entered specific locations into the keywords that they want their adverts to show up with, then anybody who runs a search using that location will see the advert.

E.g. Plumbing company in Vancouver

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are just as important as positive ones when it comes to setting up a marketing campaign to be the best it can be. Negative keywords refer to the keywords which are to be excluded from searches.

PPC for a plumbing company has to take the content of the adverts into account – if the advert is not advertising free services or discounts for users, for example, then it makes no sense to have the adverts show up on searches which are done purely for free or discount services. This is where negative keywords come in – using them to block the words free and discount can prevent disappointment in potential clients, and the need to pay for failed advertising in the business.

Adding to the control over keywords which comes with using negative keywords, plumbing businesses may find it useful to group keywords together with similar ones used to describe similar services.

Piping: Piping repair, pipe replacement, pipe installation, etc.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are a specific feature within an AdWords campaign which allows the business behind that campaign to include more than one landing page on each advert, thus giving customers and prospects more choice in where they choose to go when they click on an advert.

Normally, an advert is something which is clicked on, and the takes the client to a specific page on the business website, but sitelinks allow for more freedom. The most basic form of sitelinks is an advert which has a number of hyperlinks in it for the customer, so that they can choose where they want to go.

Plumbing companies, when thinking about how to use sitelinks to their fullest extent, need to take two things into account – how they can best use this to show information about their site, and what parts of the site potential customers might want to go to.

Thus, you can use a sitelink “Vancouver piping repair” as well as more informative sitelinks like “Hot water heaters” and “24/7 Emergency Plumbing.”

Review Extensions

The latest idea to come out of Google is review extensions – this is a way to give people who use advertising campaigns such as AdWords and PPC the means to share positive reviews for their potential customers to read. Using these types of extensions can help to bring in more business, as people find it easier to trust the company, and because the reviews automatically make adverts more visible.

Anybody who uses the internet knows that reviews and review sites are changing the way people shop. People can now look around online before they buy, to see what other people are saying about the goods and services. AdWords review extensions is an effective answer to the question of how to advertise plumbing services effectively. Adding a review extension onto the advert itself is a good idea for an AdWords campaign for a plumbing business for several reasons: it allows the business to show that it has good reviews, and it shows that it understands the needs of customers.

Call to Action

A call to action is, at its most basic, a sentence or slogan which entices the person looking at the advert to click on it.

Properly using a call to action within an advert is crucial for PPC for a plumbing business in terms of optimization. The best adverts promise clients and prospects great things if they click on the adverts – there is the possibility of even offering incentives to people who do follow through.

Below are three variants of effective calls to action:

1. Call-to-action words combined with targeted keywords

Give a call to the best plumbing services now!

2. Call-to-action words combined with an offer

Buy Our Services Today and Save 25%!

3. Call-to-action words combined with words that reveal urgency:

Give Us a Call Now! Best Plumbing Offer Ending Soon.

Mobile Searches

Mobile devices are becoming more and more popular in recent years, and research has shown that people act differently when using them than they would on a desktop device. There is, of course, the option to simply create adverts which can change depending on what device they sense themselves to be on, but those are complicated to produce and can be expensive to boot. It is much easier to simply create a group of adverts (perhaps one for each keyword group) which are used specifically for mobile searches.

Mobile searches is a vital part of an AdWords campaign for a plumbing company because customers often need emergency plumbing services. Thus, using their devices they can instantly find your company.

Conversions and Call Tracking

Call tracking and conversions are useful for any AdWords campaign because they allow for the tracking of all adverts, to show how successful they are. Conversions are a reference to how many prospects became customers by following the adverts. Call tracking is similar, except it tracks the phone calls which are made as a result of AdWords plumbing services adverts.

Using both of these allows companies to keep an eye on their budget, as they can use both methods of tracking to determine if an advert is not performing as hoped. The fund for that advert can then be diverted to a more successful part of the advertising campaign.

Campaign Testing

Campaign testing is wildly important because it allows companies to see how their AdWords for plumbing business campaigns will fare in the wild before actually putting them into action. To truly test a campaign, run around five different advertising styles to see which is the most effective while testing out different headlines.

Campaign testing also allows businesses to check the overall look of their adverts, their sites, whether all connections are working, and whether everything is easy to navigate.