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I run ads for local service businesses, law firms and B2B SaaS. This might help you:
–1. Choose a single platform to start (ideally Google), unless you have additional revenue to experiment and put more $$ in advertising.
2. Do the math, what is an acceptable cost per lead, qualified lead & customer.
Also, Lead > qualified lead rate > customer rate (percentage), which will help you understand whether your ads are the problem or the intake (sales/closing call) because you’ll never close every lead, and, it’ll also inform you whether you’re profitable at all.
This may require baking in your customers lifetime value and short term revenue to ensure you’ve future profitability and also have enough cash flow to keep running ads in the short term. Reverse engineer the metrics from there.
3. Build a high converting landing page.
4. Ensure converting tracking is set up and firing events for calls/form. For calls pass high value calls to Google ads only.
5. Start with a regular search campaign and use phrase/exact at this stage. (Also opt out of display and search network).
6. Exclude irrelevant search terms daily for at least a month. Once search terms improve, you’ll likely spend less time excluding.
7. Upload high-value conversions (qualified leads/customers) to Google, which will help the campaign optimise towards them.
8. Gradually test broad and Pmax once you’ve a large sample size of quality conversions baked in your account, but it’ll take a few months depending on your budget, number of conversions etc.
Also, don’t worry about the CPC as long as you’ve a high conversion rate that justifies spending more per click, to get you a lower cost per lead. I’m currently seeing a 50% conversion rate with one of my local service clients, and 80% of those leads are qualified. But not every account will perform exceptionally well ( there are too many factors involved in PPC ).
