Increasing Website Traffic for a Home Cleaning Service Via Pay Per Click

Create a Defined Audience Target List: We began by conducting a study to determine and then identify the ideal customer for the home cleaning business. Using data obtained from the client and other resources, we determined that to be homeowners, apartment renters and busy professionals that were located within a 15-mile radius of Seattle.

By using the geo-targeting capabilities within the Google Ads platform, our campaigns were only shown to firstly, users within the defined service area – this ensured that ads (and potenially, clicks) were not being wasted on prospects that were not within the reach of the business geographically.

Further refinements to the campaign also included adjustments to high-income households and users that had previously expressed an interest  in home maintenance and cleaning.

Keyword Optimization: A predominant reason the current PPC campaigns were underperforming was due to the campaign targeting an audience using what are called “broad match” keywords. While this can be useful to expand the “target zone” of a campaign, it can exhaust budgets quickly and lead to clicks from mismatched searches. To counter this, we changed the focus of the campaign to both phrase match and exact match keyword campaigns, which helped to refine the target audience.

For example – keywords like “house cleaning services Seattle” and “professional maid service near me” were prioritized – this means that we apportioned more budget to be most-visible for those types of searches.

Additionally, keywords like “DIY cleaning tips” and “cleaning job vacancies” were added to a dedicated “negative” keyword list to help filter out irrelevant traffic. This is a very useful capability in the Google Ads platform and instructs Google to NOT show ads in the campaign when a user enters those terms (and/or those terms closely related) in a Google search.

Improvements To The Ad Copy and Landing Page: We also revisited the copy that wa being used in the ads themselves – focusing on convenience, reliability of the service and also, affordability. We also indexed on giving uses something for free to entice engagement – for example, adding “Get a Free Quote Today!” into the ad copy.

The ad headlines were also scrutinzed and revamped – based around the pain points we identified with prospects that may need a cleaning service – for example, “Busy Schedule? Lets Us Handle the Cleaning” was used as an ad headline.

The landing pages were also revisited to include stronger, more-visible calls to action – this included a very prominent contact form that was visible immediately when the page loaded – this speaks to user experience where the user did not have to scroll down the page should they want to reach out and contact the business. Testimonials from prior clients were also added as were trust signals like “Locally Owned” and “100% Satisfaction Guarantee” in an effort to build credibility.

Introducing a Remarketing Campaign: To target users that had visited the website and NOT filled out a contact form, we used Google’s retargeting feature to display ads on the Google Display Network in addition to various Social Media channels. This is a soft-touch approach to remind those users that they still needed a cleaning service…

Custom ads were created for this audience where we offered limited-time discounts to further encourage users and convert these warm leads into job opportunities for our client.

A/B Testing and Continuous Optimization: As part of our regular campaign operation, we ran A/B split tests for different ad variations. Those tests compared headlines, descriptions, and calls to action to determine which elements produced the greatest amount of clicks from the same volume (and acquisition cost) of traffic.

Dynamic Budget Allocation: Budgets were set up to adjust automatically, ensuring that greater investment was placed on top-performing keywords (those that produced the most/best leads) and reduced on those that may produce leads but SOME may not be generating jobs for our client.

Reporting: Weekly performance reports were drawn and then analyzed to help identify other areas in the campaign that may benefit from further optimization.

Increase in Qualified Traffic: Total, new website traffic from the paid search increased by 60%. The majority of thos users were located via local searches where search terms aligned with the types of services the home cleaning business was offering to provide.

Bounce rates also decreased by 15% – this indicates that the ads were more closely aligned with the users intention (they needed local cleaning services).

Higher Conversion Rates: The ad-click to generating a lead rate jumped from the 1% when we began the new strategy, to 6.2%, surpassing the initial goal by 1.2%.

As more clicks were turning into more leads, the acquisition cost per lead (CPL) was reduced by 35%, which in turn, helped to stretch the marketing budget even further.

Improved Lead Volume: Leads from new prospects via the website’s contact form more than doubled – this was a 120% increase over the prior agency.

Side Note – over 80% of the new leads generated during the 3 month trial were directly attributed to the optimized PPC campaigns.

Remarketing Campaign Growth: The remarketing campaigns successfully re-engaged users that did not initially convert when they first visited the website – these leads accounted for 20% of conversions. The average return on ad spend (ROAS) from the remarketing campaign was 8:1 – this means that for every $1 spend in the remarketing campaign, the business generated $8 in revenue.