Selling Air Conditioners through Pay Per Click Ads
Clear the Air LLC - Houston, Texas
This HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) company came to us because their old website was just not performing well for them. They had hired a search engine consultant in the past but unfortunately had chosen one who was using very poor and outdated practices. They also wanted to do a major redesign and restructuring of the site to make it more welcoming to visitors.
Being in Southern Texas their primary market was A/C sales in Houston. Houston is a big city and the weather is warm so air conditioning is big business there. And a very competitive one at that.
They knew the internet could perform well for them but the old website was just not doing it for them. And they were seeing their competitors in the top spots in Google and wanted to be there too. So they came to us for help.
A New Website and a New Direction
We created a whole new look for their website. One that is modern and reflects the cool comfort they are selling to home owners. Not just in Houston but they sell air conditioners in Pearland and Friendswood too, just south of the city.
So with a spiffy new website we were then off to promote it for our client.
It Begins with Paying for Traffic
For those that don't know there a 2 sets of results displayed when you do a search in Google. The "organic" search results and the paid search results. The organic results are the main set of websites that Google finds out in the web. These are the sites that it's ranking algorithm has decided are the most relevant information to what the searcher is looking for.
Websites do not have to pay anything to be listed in the organic results, they just have to be relevant. Thought they may have to pay a search expert, like us, in order to make their site relevant in the eyes of a search engine. But it takes effort and time to become relevant. And the more competitive the niche, or the keywords, the more it takes to be relevant enough to be listed on the first page.
The paid results are the short cut to getting targeted search engine traffic. These are the links you often see over to the right hand side of the page. People create those little text ads and bid on specific keywords they want then to appear for. If a searcher clicks one of those ads then Google charges a fee for each time they are clicked.
So being that the Houston air conditioning market is highly competitive we would begin with using the Pay Per Click method to generate instant traffic to the new website. But we had to ensure that the purchased traffic was producing a positive return by generating more in sales then they were spending on traffic.
Testing Ad Copy and Landing Pages
The business owner had been using PPC ads on their own for about a year but were just not getting a decent return on the money they were spending there. In fact the returns were negative.
Many small business owners do try out the Adwords PPC system for themselves and many fail miserably. It can be a very lucrative form of advertising but you really need to know what your doing.
Google's mechanism for displaying ads and the price you pay for those clicks is very complicated. Even in the paid results they want to see relevancy. The more relevant you can be the more clicks you can attract.
It's not simply a matter of bidding a higher click price to get your ads positioned higher. In fact, advertisers who are bidding lower may be getting placed higher if their ads are well crafted and can generate more clicks.
This is a win win for both Google, they make more money, and the advertiser who gets more and cheaper traffic. To achieve good performance you have to test and test and test.
We created a diverse set of ad groups to target specific sets of keywords. For each ad group we created a number of ads to test which would perform the best. We made use of Google's Geo-Targeting systems so as to display the ads only to users within our specified area and minimize unwanted clicks.
After the ads had ran long enough to see statistically significant trends we were then able to make adjustments to increase the click through rates for the ads.
Next came the landing pages, or the sales pages. Again we used a variety of test pages to see what elements and text copy would perform the best. We worked towards getting those pages to deliver more customers, via phone or email.
"A Step in the Right Direction"
That was the comment we received from the owner after the first week. Ads and landing pages were still in testing mode but they had already been receiving a number of phone calls and emails from the new PPC campaign.
A couple of weeks later, after much of the fine tuning and adjustments had been made, we were informed that they were seeing a 10 fold improvement, even more, on internet leads over what they had been trying to do for the past year. They went from receiving a couple requests per week to getting a few emails and a few phone calls per day.
Now the ads are finely tuned and producing positive returns. This allows us to now move on to attracting other traffic sources for this client.
Up Next, Organic Traffic
We've only just begun this phase of the marketing campaign for this air conditioning contractor so we've nothing significant to report just yet. But we are warning our client to prepare for it.
Not many of our clients are in this large and this competitive of a market place and most clients don't need such an extensive internet marketing campaign of web design, pay per click advertising and on-going search optimization. Regardless of the size of your business we can create a successful internet marketing platform that will produce results. So get in touch with us and we'll let you know what we can do for you.