Case Study: Google Ads for Landscape Company in the Midwest
Background:
A landscaping company that does only design/build (no maintenance of any kind) came to us during the spring of 2018 to get help with attracting better quality and higher quantity leads. With a limited budget of approximately $2,000 in ad spend, for a six-month span, we helped this landscaping company stretch their budget as far as possible.
How we helped:
We don’t try to reach standard Google Ads metric standards that are considered “good.” We strive to go above and beyond those standards since we know we can create ads that resonate and really communicate this industry’s messages. The trick is, creating Google ads that perform really well involves much more than just writing ads. For this company, we researched high volume, low cost keywords that correlated to the design/build services they wanted to promote. So it’s not about choosing all the relevant keywords, but the lowest cost, best performing ones. For each root keyword, we created a group of ads that spoke directly to that keyword. In the Google ad world, this approach is called Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS). And then we build landing pages that are optimized for the keyword that is in the ad — all of this translated into lower cost click and higher performing ads.
A good CTR (click through rate) in the Google Ad world is 2.5% or higher. We started these ads with about a 3.25% in the first month and ended with about 4.25% CTR toward the last couple of months.
We started with 66 SKAGS — so essentially, 66 root keywords, and then worked down to 10 by the end of the second month. This is a standard approach we take — narrowing in on the ads that have the best CTR, lowest CPC (cost per click) and highest conversion numbers.
Speaking of conversions — the purpose of these ads — over the six-month period, this company received 66 “conversions.” In nontechnical terms, this includes people who submitted a form on the website and also clicked on the telephone number to call in through the mobile-only ads. It does NOT include people who called after reaching the website as a result of the ads. Most design/build companies we speak with have about 2-3x as many phone calls as form submissions (often much more).
Other notable metrics:
Ads were shown 78,000 times.
863 people visited the site as a result of the ads.
Example Ad:
We blocked out the company name.
