Oluwadunmola Adefioye | Updated: June 12, 2023 | Home services advertisement
Electrician PPC is easily one of the most effective digital advertising channels for electrical companies because most potential customers use search engines when they need an electrical fix. The big question is, how do you make your business stand out among many electrical businesses targeting the search engine audience? Well, I’ve got good news for you!
You can make your electrical ads stand out by going the extra mile, especially as relatively new electrical companies need to be smart with their PPC budget and strategies to hit the ROI sweet spot. So, as I promised, the good news is that I’ll gloss over how you can conk-up a high-performing electrical PPC ad campaign in this article. Let’s get to it.
Getting the best out of any electrician PPC effort requires addressing a real problem that prospective customers experience in their homes. A solid foundation in your ad messaging and a concrete PPC strategy would lead to a good return on ad spend.
Your ad visibility and clickthrough rates largely depend on the ad messaging, whereas your budget, CPC, target market match, and keyword match all boil down to a good ad setup. So, pay attention to all the technical bits I’ll discuss in this piece and the small actionable tips I’ll share. I’ll dwell specifically on Google ads campaigns for electrical businesses, but you can apply the advice to other ad channels or home service verticals.
A clear picture of what you need from every electrician PPC campaign you run is essential to help you choose the strategies and creatives to use. Of course, as electrical contractor business owners, your overall goal for every electrical advertising idea you push is to improve your digital presence and skyrocket the acquisition of target customers. However, each campaign needs a specific goal to help add direction to your ad spend.
Your electrical PPC campaign goal could be to increase qualified traffic for your website or to get ten customers to take up a limited-time offer. To increase your website’s organic traffic, you must target a broad keyword with high search volume and low customer intent (e.g., electricians in NJ) to maximize your budget. But to promote a limited-time offer, you need to target a mid or low-search volume keyword with high customer intent (e.g., cost to fix ceiling fan), which helps you convert more qualified leads.
Keywords are your channel to your potential clients and their peculiar problems. Every bit of online marketing for electricians needs to target relevant keywords that would resonate with potential customers. This is great for building search engine optimization for your electrical contracting business website using blog posts. But tapping the business opportunities by placing ads on search engines requires a different type of keyword research from a regular content marketing strategy.
You need to ask yourself this, what essential questions will my Google ads answer? Will the potential client base using Google search trust my sponsored posts over organic search results? These are tough but necessary questions.
Although Google processes 5.6 billion searches per day, the billions of users using Google search aren’t out looking for your business. Hence, you need to choose electrician keywords that seek to provide solutions to relevant searches. There are four steps to creating an optimal keyword.
Use Google’s Keyword planner tool to search for terms relating to electrician services – examples are professional electrician, electrical services, electrical company, electrical maintenance services, electrical service business, electrical repairs, burnt cable repairs, etc.
Other ways of generating search terms include common customer complaints, satisfied customer reviews, solutions for ideal customer problems, and key phrases from customer testimonials. These are tips we use at Klutch Growth to find high-performing niched keywords.
Your search will reveal how often some terms are used over others. You should pay attention to the search volume for each keyword and the cost per click (CPC). Keywords with high search volume would have more expensive CPC. The sweet spot is to go for long-tail keywords with better search intent than generic ones. Keywords like “porch flood lamp electrician” show the searcher has a specific problem, indicating a high search intent and, therefore, a higher chance of hiring a service provider.
You can use Google Trends to make keyword comparisons based on time and location. Google Trends adds more color to your keyword research, highlighting relevant long-tail keywords for specific seasons and locations. For example, there are usually more online searches for “power outage fix” in FL areas during winter due to the area’s weather.
Add negative keywords in your Google ads dashboard. Negative keywords are phrases that aren’t within your service scope or outside your coverage area. For example, you can add “solar installation” if your services do not cover it. Your negative keywords list will likely grow as you run more search ad campaigns. Often, the list would include branded searches for your competitors.
The next step is to build ad campaigns around your chosen keywords. To get complete control of your electrical contracting business, Google PPC ads, you need to select the “switch to expert mode” and then “create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” options.
Your electrician business search ads campaign can be one of the search, display, and video campaign types. I recommend the search ad option for a start because it is simpler to set up and quite effective for increasing your website’s relevant traffic.
This refers to the Google network option you want your ad to appear on. Choosing the search network ensures your ads are only displayed in response to organic search requests, helping you maximize your budget. On the other hand, you cannot control where your ad appears with Google’s display network.
This is how long you want your campaign to run. Choose an end date if you likely need to remember about the ad to avoid unnecessary deductions from your credit card.
The ad schedule lets you choose when your ads should run during the week. It is better to leave it on 24/7 for a start and then adjust the timing as you monitor the purchase behavior of electrical leads in your target location.
With advanced location control limits on your Google Ads campaign, you can streamline your online presence to specific regions in your service area. When your electrical contractor ads target a specified location, you have a better chance of converting potential customers who have proximity to your business address.
PS: This is another reason you should regularly update your business contact details because a large chunk of qualified leads goes from filling out your online form to asking for a quote without wasting much time.
For a start, you must set an average daily spending budget. This daily spend covers your different ad campaigns and their cost per click. If you are starting your Google ads campaign, your daily budget should be able to drive good traffic to your website so that you can collect enough data to optimize your campaigns faster.
While Google provides options on bidding strategies, it is better to choose the “select a bidding strategy directly” and the “manual CPC” options to set the maximum cost per click for individual ad groups. This helps you optimize your spending on performing keywords.
Keyword bidding on Google ads depends on your ad’s quality score, while your ad’s quality score depends on landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected CTR.
Optimizing your landing page(s) to reflect your ad copy is vital, as it helps convert relevant website visitors into customers. Your landing page and website experience must match the efficiency of your ad so that your marketing efforts will be rewarded through good ad search engine rankings.
These are closely related groups of ads under a campaign type (search campaign in this case). Google Ad groups can contain up to 50 text ads. An example of an ad group is “electrical services Manhattan,” which can have individual ads that include electrical services and suggested phrases as keywords. For these keywords, you have to choose the match type. The match type refers to the degree of correctness a person’s search query must have with your keywords.
We have the exact, phrase, and broad match types. An exact match (put [] around your keywords) pops up your ads for queries strictly with your keywords. Phrase match (wrap each phrase match keyword in quotation mark) contains keywords and minor keyword variations, while broad match contains wide variations of your keyword, including misspellings. Well-worded keywords that produce an exact match for queries are the best options because they save your budgets from being expended on useless bids.
Ad extensions increase the amount of information (like customer reviews) available to searchers. More information means a better ‘expected’ clickthrough rate. As an electrical service company, you should consider these ad extensions: your website link, a call button, a map of your location, call scheduling using an online form, and structured snippet extensions.
Electrical leads often move faster down the sales funnel when the electrician business provides enough contact details to show availability. And this makes sense because many of these electrical leads need your electrician services for an urgent complaint.
When building your ad sets, you must also think about mobile optimization. Mobile searches constitute over 60% of search bar usage; hence if you’re serious about your business ads, you need to use ad creatives that are most appealing on mobile devices. This is another primary reason to use ad extensions for your electrician PPC ads.
Again, Google local services ads are the best representations of Google ad extensions. Your business phone call hours, positive reviews from happy customers, and your service area location (sometimes in the form of google maps) are frequent information that appears on Google local services ads. And these are placed there to make reaching out easy for potential customers. However, with LSAs, you get charged based on cost per lead, which is also more costly than CPCs.
The success of your electrical PPC advertising strategy is also hinged on how well you track your performance metrics, such as impressions, clicks, conversions (or leads), and cost per click/conversion (CPC/CPA). The best way to monitor performance is with an analytics tool (Google Analytics) that gives real-time feedback on results so you can quickly see what’s working — and what needs improvement — within each ad group or individual ad campaign.
In addition, when implementing a PPC strategy for your electrician digital marketing campaign, it’s crucial to develop an ongoing plan that considers analytics data from previous successful campaigns, industry trends, and changes in customer behavior over time so that you can adjust your ads campaigns accordingly.
Testing different text variations within Google ads is essential for your electrician PPC and digital marketing strategies to succeed and meet your business goals. Consider running A/B tests around other hypotheses, such as adjustments made to ad copy or testing which categories are best suited for specific ads you are running simultaneously. This will allow insights into which versions perform better than others so that you can base future adjustments on accurate data-driven results rather than guesswork or assumptions.
Pro Tip: Even though PPC ads differ from social media ads because they target different client bases, you can test your ad creatives for Google search ads on your business social media accounts and across multiple social media channels.
PPC advertising is a great way to grow your business, but using it as a sole marketing channel is not sustainable in building a robust online presence that captures most of your target market. It is essential to build on the strides you gain from your PPC ads by capitalizing on other electrician advertising plans like search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, Email marketing campaigns, social media marketing, excellent customer service, et cetera. You can read our article on home service advertisements to see how these electrician marketing ideas work better together.
Understandably, running an electrician company and implementing online marketing strategies can be daunting since each needs your full attention. Fortunately, employing digital marketing agencies is an option you can explore. Electrical business marketing service providers like Klutch Growth can help you develop an electrical contractor marketing plan suited to your business stage.
As a side bonus, another terrific electrical contractor marketing idea is listing your business contact details on online directories, especially Google My Business. Many electrical service businesses don’t pay much attention to Google My Business because they consider its native advertising and don’t estimate it as a viable source of business. But if you can put 100% effort into your Google Business Profile, you will get phone calls via your business listing. Just make sure to include your contact info, your business hours, and a contact form.
PPC advertising is one of the best digital ads methods for electricians because they allow more freedom over ad spend and budget execution. To a fair amount, you can determine how you want your ad budget to be spent. And if you set up your PPC campaign well, you can easily get trackable returns and customer conversions.\
An SEO strategy can help your electrical contracting business search ads perform better, giving your website more domain authority. With a good content marketing strategy, you can get your electrician website to command lesser CPC and win more bids with Google ads. Additionally, when your website has a blog post that ranks well on Google, it serves as a form of positive background check for searchers who have engaged with your ads.
In addition to PPC ads, social media, customer reviews, content marketing, traditional marketing, referrals, and online reviews, are other integral parts of advanced electrician marketing strategies. You must employ a multi-channel and multi-format approach to advertising your electrical contracting business for the best ROI. For more ideas on growing your electrician business, I linked our piece that covers that topic.
Executing a rock-solid electrician PPC campaign is no child’s play neither is it rocket science. You just need to take up the task as seriously as possible. This starts with evaluating your ad ideas and ensuring they can be executed adequately via any electrician PPC campaign type. The good thing is that Google ads allow you to use any ad creative type, whether text ad copies (search campaign network), images (display ads), or videos (YouTube ads).
Choosing an ad creative is one side of the coin; the other complementary side is learning to set up your electrician business ads for low ad spend and high ROAS. As we’ve examined in this discussion, the best way to achieve this is to target key phrases with the right search intent to match your ad campaign goals. Then, you can set up all other PPC deliverables like location, ad groups, bidding, and extensions.
Are you interested in maximizing your electrical ads campaigns but need help figuring out where to start? Our digital marketing agency has got you covered. Our team of PPC and marketing experts at Klutch Growth are versatile and experienced in the home service industry, including online advertising services for electrical businesses. So, you don’t need to cause yourself headaches trying to figure out how to get returns from your ads without losing out on the competitive market. Allow us to use our digital marketing strategies to help you.
Schedule a call here to have someone on our team discuss your business’ ad opportunities with you.
I enjoy writing engaging and practical articles that help local businesses grow. That’s why I take my time to understand the industry - customers and businesses - before writing a word.
Aside from content marketing, I enjoy watching football and love my beloved Arsenal FC.
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