The Biggest PPC Mistakes Costing Contractors Thousands
The Biggest PPC Mistakes Costing Contractors Thousands
Most contractors who run Google Ads open a report every month. The report shows impressions, clicks, cost per click and leads, and it usually looks fine. According to FatCat Strategies hosts Meredith Medlin and Caitlyn Noble, that is exactly the problem. A report built from the ad account will nearly always say the account is working. It is grading its own homework.
In episode 4.15, the two hosts walked through a five-stop punch list for finding wasted spend in a paid search account. It picks up where the previous episode left off. Once a contractor has decided how to split budget between Google Ads and Local Service Ads, the next question is what happens to that money afterward.
Almost Every Mistake Is a Settings Problem
Before getting into the list, Noble made a point of setting the tone. These episodes can turn into an excuse to blame someone, but nearly every mistake on the list is a configuration problem, not a competence problem. Someone set the account up once, probably correctly for the business as it existed three years ago. Then the business changed and the settings did not.
Medlin pointed out the upside. Settings are cheap to fix. Wasted spend in a paid account also tends to concentrate. In the audits FatCat runs, the waste is rarely spread evenly across a thousand small issues. It usually sits in two or three places, and finding them can take an afternoon.
The hosts added one firm rule. Every stop on the list requires a person to open something and read it. Exporting results into an AI tool and trusting the summary is tempting, but both hosts recommended skipping that shortcut here. Automated tools make mistakes, and an owner who knows the business will notice when something looks off long before software does.
Stop One: What Are You Actually Buying?
The first check is the search terms report. Set it to the last 30 days, sort by cost, and read the top 50 entries. These are not the keywords the advertiser chose. They are the words real people typed before clicking the ad.
Owners are often surprised by what they find: job seekers, DIY searchers, people asking about warranties on products they already bought, and searches for manufacturers the company does not carry. The underlying defect is usually broad match running with a negative keyword list nobody has touched in a long time. The hosts were clear that broad match itself is not the enemy. Broad match with nobody watching it is.
Two variations tend to be especially expensive:
- Repair traffic. A company that sells replacement windows but does not do repairs will still pay full price when someone searches “window repair near me.” That click almost never becomes a sale, and if the call center spends time on those calls, it is a paid search problem, not a call center problem.
- The price shopper trap. Searches with words like cheap, cheapest, discount and low cost convert to inquiries at a strong rate and to sold jobs at a poor one. They make cost per lead look great while making cost per issued appointment look bad.
The fix is a negative keyword list reviewed on a schedule, monthly for accounts with real spend, plus a standing rule that anyone reviewing search terms can add negatives without calling a meeting.
Stop Two: Where Are You Buying It?
Geography was the hosts’ nominee for the most overlooked setting in the average contractor account, mostly because it is invisible. Nothing on a monthly report says money is being wasted in a particular ZIP code.
There are two defects to check. The first is the radius. Many accounts still target a mileage circle around the office, set by whoever built the account years ago. A circle does not match how a business actually operates. Every company has ZIP codes where it installs profitably, ZIP codes where drive time erodes margin, and ZIP codes where it has never sold a job. The recommended fix is to pull sold jobs by ZIP code from the CRM for the last 12 months, bid up where jobs actually close, and cut the areas that produce nothing. Noble described doing this exercise with a client during onboarding and said it took about ten minutes.
The second defect is a buried Google setting that separates people who are in the service area from people who are merely interested in it. The default is usually the broader option, which means a contractor can end up paying for clicks from someone in another state researching a city where their mother lives. The hosts advised confirming that location targeting is set to presence, not presence or interest.
Two more geography notes came up. Accounts should be updated whenever a service area expands or shrinks, since campaigns still chasing a market the company left will fill the call center with inquiries it cannot serve. And on a limited budget, the hosts suggested that owning three ZIP codes completely beats being a faint presence across fifteen. Concentration also helps job site radius social campaigns, yard signs, review density and drive times compound together.
Stop Three: Where Do They Land?
The click happened and the money is spent. The most common landing spot is the homepage, which the hosts called the defect. Someone searches for a walk-in shower conversion, clicks an ad about walk-in showers, and arrives at a page about the company with six product lines and no clear next step.
The test takes about ten minutes. Click every ad on a phone, not a desktop, and confirm the page delivers what the ad promised on the first screen. Three details matter most:
- The offer matches. If the ad headline promises a specific promotion, the page must say the same thing. This breaks constantly when the monthly offer changes and only the ads get updated.
- The form is short. Every extra field costs submissions, particularly on a phone.
- The phone number is tappable. A homeowner should be able to tap once and call, without memorizing a number and switching apps.
Page speed belongs on this list too. If a page takes several seconds to load on a mediocre mobile connection, a meaningful share of paid visitors will leave before seeing it.
Contractors who sell five product lines may balk at building five landing pages. The hosts suggested starting with the product line that gets the most ad spend, building one focused page, and running it against the homepage for a month. The comparison that matters is the set rate, not just form fills. Revenue from that page can then fund the next one. Expired promotions deserve a mention as well. An outdated offer is a trust problem as much as a conversion problem, so whoever updates the ads each month should update the landing pages the same day.
Stop Four: Who Catches Them?
This stop focuses on paid search settings that break the handoff to the sales team, not on call center management in general. Three defects came up:
- Ads run around the clock, but answering does not. Paying for calls that ring into voicemail is wasted spend, since a homeowner who reaches voicemail simply calls the next result. The fix is either an ad schedule that matches answering hours or answering coverage that matches the ads, and several affordable answering services now exist so a 24-hour call center is not required. The hosts also advised looking at when calls actually arrive before trimming the schedule. For many contractors, evenings are when homeowners have time to call, so the right move is often to extend coverage, not shrink it.
- Calls are not tracked. Without dynamic number insertion, there is no way to tell which calls came from paid search, which makes the whole channel unmeasurable. A call tracking service solves this, and WhatConverts was the tool the hosts mentioned.
- Missed calls never get returned. Every missed call from a paid ad is a lead the contractor already paid for. The hosts recommended requesting a missed call report weekly. It is usually shorter than people fear, and they called it the cheapest lead source in the building.
Stop Five: What Did You Tell the System to Chase?
The hosts named this the most expensive mistake, and the one nobody finds without help. Modern campaigns rely heavily on automated bidding, so advertisers are less choosing which clicks to buy and more teaching a system what a good outcome looks like.
In most contractor accounts, that outcome is any form fill, with every submission counting as one equal conversion. That is not true to life. A form from a homeowner in a top ZIP code who wants a full window package is very different from a form from someone outside the area asking about a repair. If both count the same, the system goes after the cheaper one, because it is easier to find.
This explains a familiar experience: a campaign that looks better every month on the report and feels worse every month in the sales meeting. Cost per lead drops while the sales team complains, and both things come from the same cause.
The fix has two levels. First, stop counting everything as a conversion. Count qualified form submissions and calls over a meaningful length, such as 45 to 60 seconds. Second, feed outcomes from the CRM back into the ad platform so the system learns from issued appointments and sold jobs instead of raw inquiries. The hosts called that second step the highest-leverage change in the episode, though it requires clean lead source data and someone who knows how to wire it up.
To illustrate, the hosts described a fictional company called Ridgeline Windows. The figures in the example are illustrative, not benchmarks. Ridgeline’s campaign optimized to all form fills, and over two quarters cost per lead fell and lead volume rose. Meanwhile the set rate dropped and cancel prior to issue climbed, so the sales floor worked harder for the same number of demos. After Ridgeline changed what counted as a conversion and fed issued appointments back in, lead volume fell and cost per lead rose, which looked like a step backward for about six weeks. Cost per issued appointment then came down and stayed down.
An Agency Horror Story
The episode closed with a true story, timed for spooky season. A contractor with real ad spend came to FatCat for a second opinion after about three years with a previous agency. During the search terms review, the team found that a meaningful chunk of monthly spend was going to searches for a product line the company had discontinued two years earlier. The company had updated its website and told its staff, but nobody told the ad account, so the call center spent two years politely turning those homeowners away.
The monthly reports looked great throughout, with lower cost per click and rising impressions. The hosts stressed that nobody was lying to the contractor. The account was simply on autopilot, and autopilot keeps flying straight long after the destination has changed. The takeaway was not to fire your agency. An ad account knows nothing about a business unless someone tells it, and contractors should confirm their agency asks regularly about changes to service areas and products.
The Five-Stop Quarterly Checklist
- Open the search terms report for the last 30 days, sort by cost, read the top 50, and add negatives for anything you cannot sell.
- Pull sold jobs by ZIP code for 12 months, compare that to where ads run, and confirm location targeting is set to presence.
- Click your own ads on your phone and check the offer match, form length and tappable phone number.
- Compare the ad schedule to actual answering hours, and request last week’s missed call list.
- Find out what counts as a conversion in your Google Ads account. If the answer is every form fill, that is the project for this quarter.
Medlin advised that anyone who tackles only one item should start with number five, since it has the most money behind it. Walking the list once a quarter, the hosts said, will surface savings every time.
Get a Free PPC Audit
FatCat Strategies is offering a free Google Ads account audit that walks through all five stops and shows exactly where waste is sitting. The findings are yours whether or not you ever work with the agency. Visit fatcatstrategies.com, open the Resources menu, and choose Free Tools and Analysis to find the audit, or call 919-341-4190.
Audio only version of the podcast here.
Podcast Transcript
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.
Meredith: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. I’m Meredith Medlin.
Caitlyn: And I’m Caitlin Noble. This is the show brought to you by Fat Cat Strategies, where we build exclusive lead generation programs for replacement contractors selling windows, roofing, doors, siding, baths, gutters, you name it. If you replace it on a
Meredith: We help market it for you.
Caitlyn: We absolutely do.
Meredith: Yeah, so a quick note on where this is sitting in the grand scheme of our episodes. Last episode, we talked about how to split your budget between Google Ads and local service ads, or LSA ads, as you might know them. Today, we are past that decision, so if you need to listen, go back and give it a listen, and then come back here. So the money is committed to search. That is where we have landed, and this is about what happens after that.
Caitlyn: Mm, and I want to say something up front, because these episodes can turn into an excuse to go yell at somebody.
Meredith: Oh, no.
Caitlyn: Almost every mistake on this list is a configuration problem, not a competence problem. These are settings. Somebody set them once, probably correctly for the business you were three years ago, and then your business changed, and the settings did not.
Meredith: And this is good news, because settings are cheap to fix.
Caitlyn: Yes. All right. So before we walk, I want to name the mistake that makes all five of the others possible. Nobody looks.
Meredith: Ugh, and I don’t mean that nobody looks at the report, because everybody looks at the report.
Caitlyn: Right. The report comes every month, impressions, clicks, cost per click, leads, and it usually looks fine, because a report built out of the account will always tell you the account is working. It is grading its own homework.
Meredith: And what almost nobody does is actually open the account and look at what they were actually purchasing.
Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.
Meredith: The individual search terms, the specific zip codes, the pages that people landed on, the calls that came in at 9:00 at night.
Caitlyn: So the punch list is not a reporting exercise. Every stop on it actually requires somebody to go open something and read it with their own eyes.
Meredith: Yeah, and here is the reason that it’s worth the hour of your time. Waste in a paid account isn’t random. It concentrates.
Caitlyn: Yep.
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Meredith: When we audit accounts, the wasted spend is almost never spread evenly across 1,000 small problems. It’s sitting in two or three places, and once you find them, it only takes the afternoon to fix it.
Caitlyn: I totally agree, and I, I want to reemphasize read it with your own eyes. We are finding this more and more and more and more and more, that it’s so easy to export out results, upload them into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, you name it, and let the robots tell you what, you know, what they’re looking at.
Meredith: What’s right.
Caitlyn: I think scratch that for this.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: Like, not I think. I know scratch that. Robots are not perfect. Humans are also are not perfect. But follow this list with your own eyes. Do
Meredith: Trust your human instincts.
Caitlyn: Yes.
Meredith: You’re gonna recognize if something is off for your
Caitlyn: Correct
Meredith: before a robot will ever notice.
Caitlyn: And they make so many mistakes.
Meredith: 100%.
Caitlyn: So easy button, exporting out your results from your Google Ads
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: uploading it into AI, and just assuming that that’s accurate.
Meredith: Yeah. Let’s throw that in the trash for today’s episode.
Caitlyn: We’re gonna throw that into the trash. We’re gonna take five stops on this journey. Let’s start with the first one, Meredith. Stop one is the is the intake. What are you actually buying with these clicks? The test is simple. Open the search terms report, set it to the last 30 days, sort by cost, and read the top 50. Not the keywords you chose, the actual things human beings typed before they clicked your ad. That’s the search terms report.
Meredith: Exactly, and this is the moment where a lot of owners are gonna get quiet.
Caitlyn: Yeah, because of what is in there. Somebody looking for a job, not a bathroom. Somebody who wants a repair when you only do replacement. Somebody searching for a manufacturer you do not carry. DIY searches, how to fix, how much does it cost, warranty questions from people who already bought.
Meredith: Yeah, and every single one of those search terms that isn’t gonna turn into a lead for you is going to cost you money.
Caitlyn: Absolutely. So the defect here is broad match running without a negative keyword list that has been touched recently. Broad match is not the enemy. Broad match with nobody watching it is the enemy.
Meredith: There are two variants of this that I wanna call out specifically for everybody listening, because they are expensive, and they are common. The first is repair traffic. So some of you do repairs.
Caitlyn: Yeah.
Meredith: And that is great. But if you sell replacement windows and you don’t do repairs, and then somebody goes and searches for, “Window repair near me,” that click is gonna cost the same as a good one where somebody is searching, “Replacement window,” and it will almost never turn into a sale for you. If your call center is spending real time on those repair calls that you don’t serve, that’s a paid search problem, not your call center’s problem.
Caitlyn: 100%. The second is the price shopper trap. Cheap, cheapest, discount, low cost, those searches convert to inquiries at a great rate, and they convert to sold jobs at a terrible rate. So they make your cost per lead look wonderful and your cost per issued appointment look awful.
Meredith: Which is a preview of stop five, honestly.
Caitlyn: It is, but you don’t even know what stop five is yet. But we’re gonna get there. The fix at stop one is a negative keyword list that gets reviewed on a schedule. Monthly if you are Are spending real money, and a standing rule that anybody reviewing search terms can add negatives without a meeting about it.
Meredith: So this is not a set it and set it and forget
Caitlyn: No
Meredith: kind of situation. No. We did a whole episode on whether to bid on your own brand name.
Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.
Meredith: So not gonna harp on that right now, but while you’re in the search terms report, just go ahead and notice how much of your spend is going to people who typed your company name.
Caitlyn: Ooh.
Meredith: Whatever you decide about that, make sure you decide it on purpose and intentionally.
Caitlyn: Yep, and I think that’s a good point, Meredith. We have done so many episodes on Google Ads.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: Like I, I think we just maybe released our 100th episode a few weeks ago, but,
Meredith: Whoop, whoop
Caitlyn: there are tons and tons and tons of educational episodes. I know we’re using terms right now like broad match and search terms
Meredith: Negative keywords
Caitlyn: and negative keywords. Like, the, this is like the, the, the… What is it? The the level 300
Meredith: Course
Caitlyn: course.
Meredith: Yes, yeah.
Caitlyn: We do have level 100 courses, but again, enjoy this. Sit back. We’re gonna keep on rocking and rolling. I
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlyn: I know this is heavy, though.
Meredith: Yeah, so okay.
Caitlyn: two.
Meredith: Stop number two, we’re talking about geography.
Caitlyn: Yes.
Meredith: And this is my nominee for the most
Caitlyn: Uh-huh
Meredith: setting in the average contractor’s account.
Caitlyn: Oh, it kills me, because it is invisible. Nothing on a monthly report says you are wasting money in a ZIP Code.
Meredith: Yeah. There’s two potential defects here. The first one is your radius. So most accounts are set to a mileage radius around your office, so 50 miles, 60, whatever it was when whoever it was set it up back in the day, and a circle is not how your business works. Your business has ZIP Codes where you install profitably, ZIP Codes where the drive time eats into your margin, and ZIP Codes where you have never sold a job in your life.
Caitlyn: And the crew has known this for years. Ask any install manager which side of the county they going to and they will tell you instantly.
Meredith: So the fix is stop bidding equally across that arbitrary circle.
Caitlyn: Correct.
Meredith: Pull sold jobs by ZIP Code from your CRM for the last 12 months, find those ZIP Codes that produce, and bid up on those.
Caitlyn: love that I love that tip.
Meredith: Yeah, so find those ZIP Codes that produce nothing as well and go ahead and cut them. Like, we don’t
Caitlyn: Yeah
Meredith: spending money there.
Caitlyn: I’m onboarding a client right now, and we just went through this practice. We haven’t started running ads yet, but we have pulled where the biggest and the best jobs have sold
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: and we’ve eliminated the locations. I mean, it was just… It was a
Meredith: Yeah, exercise
Caitlyn: like 10-minute exercise. Okay, the second defect is a setting most contractors have never opened and it is buried. Of course it is. Thank you, Google. It is the difference between targeting people who are
Meredith: Mm
Caitlyn: in your service area and targeting people who are merely interested in your service area. Sneaky bastards.
Meredith: Sneaky, and honestly, the default is usually the broader one.
Caitlyn: Always, which means you can be paying for clicks from somebody four states away who is searching about your city because their mother lives there or because they’re thinking about moving. They are never buying windows from you, at least not right now.
Meredith: Right, and so if you go into that location setting and confirm that you’re targeting presence, not presence of interest, that setting has paid for a ton of audits that we’ve done, honestly.
Caitlyn: Definitely, and Google is actually… One, one big plus for Google right now is you can truly search. Once you’re in the Google Ads platform, you can search for some of these phrases that we’re saying, like location
Meredith: Thank God
Caitlyn: search term report. yeah. So yes, that’s exactly right. So look for not presence or interest.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: Confirm that you are
Meredith: The physical location
Caitlyn: correct. Exactly.
Meredith: Right.
Caitlyn: And one more geography note, if you have expanded your service area in the last two years, which many of you
Meredith: Mm.
Caitlyn: go verify that in the ads and, and just make sure that they know that. We find accounts all the time where the company opened a second market in the spring, and the campaigns never got updated.
Meredith: Oh, that’s painful. Or the reverse, which is worse, the company pulled out of a
Caitlyn: Yeah
Meredith: because it wasn’t profitable, and the ads are still trying to buy leads
Caitlyn: that
Meredith: which you don’t serve. So you’re now paying for inquiries that go to your call center that they have to get on the phone and say, “Oh, no. Sorry, we actually don’t service that neighborhood or that county.”
Caitlyn: Light that money on fire.
Meredith: Yep.
Caitlyn: There is a strategic version of this too, and it’s worth saying out loud for anybody running a tight budget, which most of you are.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: I money is not free.
Meredith: Right.
Caitlyn: Most contractors spread their paid budget evenly across the whole territory, because it feels fair. It is not fair, it is just even. If you have a limited budget, you are better off owning three zip codes completely than being a faint presence across 15.
Meredith: Say that for the people in the back.
Caitlyn: Yes.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: Hallelujah.
Meredith: Concentration also helps everything else that you do. Your job site radius on social, your yard signs, your review density, your drive times, they all compound together when they work in clusters.
Caitlyn: I completely agree. And when you pull that sold jobs by zip code report, again, that’s out of your CRM, do not just use it to cut, use it to decide where you want to be dominant.
Meredith: Amen.
Caitlyn: Okay, so stop number three, the click happened, you paid for it, but where did the person land?
Meredith: Oh my gosh, this is my personal favorite.
Caitlyn: Yeah.
Meredith: Honestly, the most common answer is your homepage.
Caitlyn: Ugh, ugh, ugh. Barf. Which is the defect. Somebody searched for a walk-in shower conversion, saw an ad about walk-in showers, clicked it, and landed on a homepage that talks about the company, shows six product lines, and then asks them to figure out where to go next.
Meredith: Yeah, you paid for that click, and then handed them a try to find their way out of
Caitlyn: talked about this 1,000 times. The test here takes 10 minutes or less as well. Click your own ads, every one of them, on your phone, not your desktop. Whatever the ad promised, the page had better delivered it in the first screen without scrolling.
Meredith: And go ahead and check three specific things while you’re there. Number one, does the offer match? If your ad headline says something about a specific promotion, and then the page says something else, or it doesn’t say anything, that’s a broken promise, and people leave. This one gets broken constantly, especially when the monthly promotional offer changes, and somebody updates the ads, but then the landing page never gets updated.
Caitlyn: Absolutely. Two, how long is the form? Every extra field costs you submissions if you… especially if you’re asking people to submit via the phone.
Meredith: Exactly.
Caitlyn: If you are asking for the year the house was built, and the type of siding currently on it before you will talk to somebody, then you are going to have just already built a fortress behind trying to
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlyn: that lead.
Meredith: Yeah, so number three, and this is one that people miss, and that is the phone number.
Caitlyn: Oh my gosh, this
Meredith: People are on their phones looking for you, finding you. If the phone number is not clickable on your
Caitlyn: Tappable, yeah
Meredith: you know, you can’t tap it and immediately call, no bueno. A homeowner is on a phone, and now they have to try to memorize your phone number, and then switch the apps, and then they have it, it’s just a mess.
Caitlyn: tappable… Y’all have done it. You just, you click on the phone number, and something pops up on your screen.
Meredith: Exactly.
Caitlyn: Would you like to call? Just boom, yes.
Meredith: Yeah, so double check and make sure that on your phone, on your landing page, you can just click to call your phone number.
Caitlyn: 100%, and I wanna add page speed on top of that, because it is genuinely a paid search issue, and not just a website issue. If your page takes six seconds, that’s
Meredith: Jeebus
Caitlyn: to load on a phone, on a mediocre connection, a meaningful share of the people you paid for will never see it at all, and you bought the click, and they left before the page even rendered.
Meredith: Yeah. You paid full price for a visitor who didn’t actually arrive.
Caitlyn: It’s terrible.
Meredith: Silly.
Caitlyn: I wanna handle the objection that always comes up here, because it is a fair one. Somebody’s thinking, “We sell five product lines. I am not building five landing pages.”
Meredith: I mean, the honest answer is, you probably should.
Caitlyn: Yeah, why not?
Meredith: And that is a silly objection. But you know, you don’t have to do all of those pages and all that work at once.
Caitlyn: Start with whichever product line gets the most ad spend.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: Build one real page for it. Ad promises a walk-in shower, page is about a walk-in shower, photos of walk-in showers, financing for walk-in showers. One short form. Run it against the homepage for a month, and look at what happens to your set rate, not just your form fills.
Meredith: Yeah, and then take that money that the page earns you, and build the next one.
Caitlyn: I love it. The other version of this problem is seasonal. You built good pages three years ago, and they are still live, getting paid traffic, and still advertising… Oh, this hurts. I’m, I’m reading ahead. You’re still advertising a promotion that expired in 2024, y’all, and this is the year of our Lord, 2026.
Meredith: It is. And this is honestly a trust
Caitlyn: Yes
Meredith: not just a conversion problem. A homeowner
Caitlyn: Is company still in business?
Meredith: Let’s hope. Or what if the promotional offer… I mean, it’s gonna be different, but what if it’s not as good? Or what if they don’t even run offers anymore? So, you know, a homeowner that clicks on an expired offer is gonna believe that your pricing isn’t real, and that’s a hard thing to recover from on a phone call.
Caitlyn: You can’t. So add landing pages to whatever process you already use for changing the monthly offer. We do this at the top
Meredith: Every month
Caitlyn: every month for all of our clients.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: Whoever updates the ads updates the pages, same day, same checklist.
Meredith: Yeah. All right. Stop number four, and this is the handoff. And I wanna be careful here, because we have done full episodes on speed to lead, and on running a call center.
Caitlyn: Many. Many
Meredith: this is not that episode. If you need that, go back and find it. If you can’t, shoot us an email, we’ll help. Is specifically about paid search settings that break the handoff.
Caitlyn: Defect one: Your ads run 24 hours a day, and your call center does not.
Meredith: Womp, womp.
Caitlyn: If ads are serving at 11:00 at night and nobody is answering, you are paying for calls that ring into a voicemail box. And a homeowner who reaches voicemail is not waiting for you. They are hitting back and calling the next result.
Meredith: And the fix is either an ad schedule that you set that matches the hours that somebody actually answers your
Caitlyn: Correct
Meredith: or answering cover, answering coverage that matches the ads. Both are legitimate choices, and having neither, that is where you make the mistake. And we have done multiple podcasts on some great vendors and softwares and tools that have answering services, some of them AI. So don’t think that you have to be staffing a 24-hour call center.
Caitlyn: No, no. And somebody who’s calling at 11:00 PM, let’s be
Meredith: First of all, you’re wild for that
Caitlyn: yeah, are you,
Meredith: You good?
Caitlyn: First… Yeah. It must be a, an emergency.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: So hopefully you’re not, I mean, running ads if you’re not staffed to answer them.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: And if it’s a form submission, just try to get back to it first thing the morning. But anyways, before anybody turns everything off at 5:00, look at when your call center actually come in, comes in. Does that even make sense?
Meredith: Look at, look at when the calls come
Caitlyn: correct
Meredith: before you decide when to turn your schedule,
Caitlyn: Thank you. For a lot of our clients, evening is when
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlyn: have time to make the call. I’ve said that 100 times. So the right answer is frequently to extend coverage, not to shrink the schedule.
Meredith: Exactly.
Caitlyn: Lunch and after hours.
Meredith: Mm-hmm. All right.
Caitlyn: Drive into the office. Okay, number two.
Meredith: Number two, calls that you’re not tracking.
Caitlyn: Ugh.
Meredith: If your ads point to your main business line with no dynamic number insertion, you can’t tell which calls came from paid search, period.
Caitlyn: Nope.
Meredith: You have made the entire channel unmeasurable, which means that every decision about it after that, simply a guess.
Caitlyn: And I’ve… I get this often, “Well, that’s not a phone number that they recognize.” At that point, if somebody’s clicking to call your phone number, it doesn’t matter.
Meredith: It does not matter.
Caitlyn: It doesn’t matter. You need to be able to track that phone number, and you do that with a call tracking service.
Meredith: Oh, 100%.
Caitlyn: So defect number three, which is the quietest one. Oh, man. Missed calls that never get called back.
Meredith: Yeah. Every missed call from a paid search ad is a lead that you already bought and paid for. The click cost is spent whether anybody calls that person back or not. You’ve already paid. So a missed call report is not just a customer service report, it’s a report of prepaid leads that are sitting on the floor.
Caitlyn: I know through call tracking services, like WhatConverts, you can absolutely see the missed calls report.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: I, bet there’s something in Google Ads too, to see maybe missed after-hour calls, but
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlyn: I don’t know. I have no… But you probably still can’t see the specific phone numbers. So use call tracking services if you’re gonna run ads.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: You have to. Ask for that list weekly, that missed call report.
Meredith: Yep.
Caitlyn: It is usually shorter than people fear, and it’s the cheapest lead source in the building.
Meredith: Amen.
Caitlyn: Okay, last but not least, y’all. So number five this is the most expensive one, and it is the one nobody finds without help.
Meredith: Okay, set this up for us.
Caitlyn: Okay. Modern campaigns are largely automated. I, I hate it. It’s just the fact of life right now. What isn’t automated?
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: The bidding is automated, which means you are not really choosing which clicks to buy. more, you are teaching a system, a system that likes collecting your
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: what a good outcome looks like, and then it goes and buys more of that.
Meredith: So the question that decides everything is what did you tell the
Caitlyn: Ugh
Meredith: a good outcome is? Did you tell it?
Caitlyn: We’re having some issues with robots, if you can’t tell.
Meredith: Freaking robots.
Caitlyn: And in most contractor accounts, the answer is a form fill. Any form fill, every form submission counts as one conversion, and they are all worth the same.
Meredith: Which is not true.
Caitlyn: Nope.
Meredith: And everybody listening right now knows that all form fills are not created equally.
Caitlyn: No, they are not. A form fill from a homeowner in your best ZIP code who wants a full window package, hallelujah, is not the same as a form fill from somebody outside your area asking about a repair. Why are you even bidding on that? But anyways, but all of that would be resolved if you followed the steps that we just listed
Meredith: Yep
Caitlyn: in the previous… But anyways, but if both of them count as one equal conversion, the system is going to happily go get more of that cheap one, because the cheap one is much easier to find. Even… And this is, again, all through that
Meredith: Automated bidding
Caitlyn: setting, that automated setting, that if you’ve done steps one through four that we just spoke about, this should not be an issue.
Meredith: Exactly. So you are telling the system, the Google Ads robot, to go and chase volume.
Caitlyn: Mm.
Meredith: So it’s chasing volume, and it’s doing exactly what you asked it to do by getting more leads.
Caitlyn: And this is why so many contractors have the experience of a campaign that looks better every month on the report and feels worse every month in the sales meeting.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: The cost per lead is dropping. The sales team is complaining. Both things are true at the same time, and they are the same problem.
Meredith: And the fix has two different levels to it. So level one is stop counting everything as a conversion.
Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.
Meredith: A qualified form submission and call is what you should be looking at. Like, if a call is over a certain amount of time, that, you know, set a threshold. What is a good call? 10 seconds?
Caitlyn: No.
Meredith: Do not count that. Somebody outside your service area, that should not count. So make sure you are counting the right conversions.
Caitlyn: The only person who I talk to for 10 seconds is my husband.
Meredith: Exactly.
Caitlyn: Maybe.
Meredith: I’m like, “Get down here.” “Let the dog out”
Caitlyn: Coming home. Bye.
Meredith: Bye.
Caitlyn: Okay. So level one, we’re going to stop counting everything as equal. Set up and make sure any calls that are coming in are actually probably over 45
Meredith: Yeah, reasonably
Caitlyn: if not over 60 seconds.
Meredith: Over a minute, yeah.
Caitlyn: You can do those settings in conversion
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: within Google Ads. We also use a fabulous tool called WhatConverts that helps with that as well. Level two is to get outcomes back out of your CRM and into the ad platform so the system learns from issued appointments and sold jobs instead of from raw inquiries. That requires clean lead source data and somebody who knows how to wire it up. We do. But it is single highest leverage thing in this episode.
Meredith: Exactly. So let’s put some numbers on it, and I want to flag clearly that this example that we’re about to talk about is
Caitlyn: We love a fictional company
Meredith: company. We’re calling them Ridgeline Windows. So these are all illustrative. They are not benchmarks. Okay, Ridgeline has a campaign optimizing to all form fills. Over two quarters, the cost per lead came down nicely, and the lead volume went up. Yay.
Caitlyn: Woo.
Meredith: That seems like everybody should be happy, right? Meanwhile, the set rate was falling, and the cancel prior to issue number was climbing, so the sales floor was working harder for just the same number of demos.
Caitlyn: More leads, same demos.
Meredith: No bueno. So when they changed what counted as a conversion and started feeding issued appointments back in instead of just form fills, lead volume dropped and cost per lead went up, which looked like a step backwards just on the face of it on the report for about six weeks, but cost per issued appointment came down and stayed down.
Caitlyn: Which is the same lesson as last episode from a completely different direction. The scoreboard you optimize towards is the thing you will get more of. Pick it carefully.
Meredith: Amen. Okay, time for a spooky agency horror story.
Caitlyn: I think this is releasing in the middle of October.
Meredith: I hope so. Spooky season.
Caitlyn: We’re gonna keep doing horror stories regardless
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: the time of year. This one is short, and it makes me a little angry every time. So a contractor came to us for a second opinion, as they always do. Good company, real spend, been with their previous agency about three years. We asked for access, and we did the same walkthrough we just described.
Meredith: Yeah. Stop one, we looked at search terms. A meaningful chunk of the monthly spend was going to searches for a product line that the company had discontinued.
Caitlyn: What the hell? Discontinued two years earlier. They stopped selling it, told everybody internally, updated the website, and nobody ever told the ad account. So for two years, they paid for clicks from homeowners asking for something they could not sell, and the call center politely turned every one of those people away.
Meredith: And the monthly reports the whole time?
Caitlyn: Oh, they were fabulous. They were gorgeous. Green, green all around. Cost per click was down year over year. Impressions up. The report was accurate and completely because it was measuring how efficiently they bought the wrong thing.
Meredith: And here’s the part that I want everybody to sit with. Nobody was lying to them.
Caitlyn: No.
Meredith: The agency that was doing the ads was not stealing. The account was just on autopilot, and autopilot is very good at flying in a straight long after the destination has changed.
Caitlyn: I don’t know how to do anything on autopilot, to be honest with you.
Meredith: No.
Caitlyn: I don’t understand.
Meredith: My, husband would be like, “Do you not have cruise control on?” And I’m like, “Absolutely not.”
Caitlyn: I’d rather make this as difficult as
Meredith: Yes
Caitlyn: because I know at least I have control. So the lesson is not fire your agency. The lesson is that your ad account does not know anything about your business that somebody has not gone in and told it. We always train our account managers during pretty much every, like, just monthly check-in call, “Hey, have your service areas changed? Hey, are your products changing?”
Meredith: Products changing.
Caitlyn: Just if your agency doesn’t already ask you that, tell them.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: Okay. Five things, one per stop. Number one, we’re gonna kinda recap and then bring it on home. So number one, you are gonna open that search terms report for the last 30 days, sort by cost, read the top 50, and add negatives for everything you cannot sell.
Meredith: Number two, pull your sold jobs by ZIP code for the last 12 months. Compare that to where your ads are running, and then check whether your location targeting is set to presence rather than presence or interest.
Caitlyn: Yes. Oh my gosh. I pray that presence or interest is not clicked. Three, you’re going to click your own ads on your phone. I know it might cost a little bit of money, but it’ll be worth it. Check that the offer matches, the form is short, and the the phone number is tappable. If you don’t wanna click your own ads on your own phone, just ask for a link to the landing
Meredith: The landing pages that are being used.
Caitlyn: That’s probably a lot.
Meredith: Generate a landing page
Caitlyn: Yes, yes
Meredith: and
Caitlyn: Get a landing page report and go that way, but still look at it on your phone.
Meredith: Mm-hmm. Number four, compare your ad schedule to your actual call center answering hours.
Caitlyn: Please.
Meredith: And then ask for a list of the missed calls from the last week.
Caitlyn: That should be an auto-report.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: And last but not least, you need to find out what currently counts as a conversion in your Google Ads account.
Meredith: This a one.
Caitlyn: If the answer is every form fill, that is your project for this quarter.
Meredith: Yeah. If you only pick one of these things to do, maybe number five. Let’s, let’s start with that one. It’s the one that has the most money behind it.
Caitlyn: It’s the easiest way to skew a report.
Meredith: It is.
Caitlyn: So five stops. What you’re buying, where you are buying it, where you send them, who catches them, and what you told the system to chase.
Meredith: Walk it through once a quarter, and you’re gonna find money every single time.
Caitlyn: Absolutely. And if you would rather have somebody else walk it, AKA this gorgeous agency
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: Fat Cat
Meredith: You may have heard of them
Caitlyn: that is what we do. We are offering a PPC campaign audit for free. Go, we’ll go through all five stops in your account. We’ll just need to get access to it.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: And we’re gonna show you exactly where the waste is sitting. We’re happy to do this for you. Let’s do this before the end of the year so you are starting
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlyn: fresh. And you’re gonna get the findings whether you decide to ever work with us or not, so why would you not just do the PPC audit?
Meredith: I know. Just holler at us. So if you wanna do that, go to fatcatstrategies.com
Caitlyn: And you’ll see the PPC audit.
Meredith: You’ll see… Yeah, PPC audit page there. Or if you just go there, go to the contact us. Reach out, we’ll get it going for you. Or give us a call. I’m not gonna read it out because luckily, if you wanna call us, the phone number on our website will be clickable. So we should be good.
Caitlyn: Okay. I’m, and I’m just track check this. I went to fatcatstrategies.com. Underneath the beautiful tool or the,
Meredith: Resources?
Caitlyn: Yes. Underneath the beautiful menu item called Resources, you will see something called Free Tools and Analysis. Right there, Google Ads account audit. Sign up for it. We will go through these five steps for you.
Meredith: All right.
Caitlyn: I appreciate you guys. Send this to the person who actually has login access to your if you do not. And thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk next time.
Meredith: Later.
Caitlyn: Bye.
Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.