What is Paid Ads Management for Landscaping Businesses?
PPC management for landscapers refers to creating and optimizing PPC advertising campaigns. However, that is an incredibly simple explanation, so let's dig a little deeper.
To provide premium paid ads management, a paid advertising firm for landscapers should get to know you and your goals. Since the way you approach PPC advertising for a local landscaping business is much different than how you would for a nationwide landscaper ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.
Nearby landscaping businesses, for instance, are often only interested in contact form submissions or calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that gets traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't yet exist or need to be substantially improved.
In contrast, ecommerce-focused landscaping businesses are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that improves traffic to an optimized product page or category page. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. Our team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.
Understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale landscaper PPC campaigns is the next step. For some landscaping businesses, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.
Your landscaping business should use a variety of advertising plans and marketing tools to be successful with PPC advertising. Some of the best paid advertising packages for landscaping businesses include tactics to:
- Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social media channels, and third-party websites.
- Make your landscaping business more profitable by acquiring qualified leads or selling online.
- Utilize third-party attribution software to better understand ad attribution.
- Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
- Engage users in story creation, email collection, and user generated content.
- Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.
A Few of Our Paid Ads experts
Types of Paid Ads for Landscaping Businesses
The options for running PPC advertising for your landscaping business are numerous. landscaping businesses definitely use paid advertising. Let's take a look at some of the most common ones.
1.) Local Marketing
Local ads for your landscaping business can be run through nearly any advertising platform. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your localized landscaping business. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Here are a few options for local advertising.
Google is going to offer two options.
The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. Local professionals such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians frequently use Performance Max campaigns.
Alternatively, if your business qualifies, Google offers a Local Service Ads option. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.
Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to certain geographic areas. We often rely on nearby Facebook Ads for all types of landscaping businesses.
2.) Social Ads
A social ad is pretty much any online advertisement you see on a social networking site.
The trick to social media advertising is keeping the ad creatives fresh. The performance of your campaign will gradually decline if you do not rotate your ad creatives every couple of weeks. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative modifications for campaigns with higher spending.
Using social ads allows you to reach audiences who have never thought of your product or service, or aren't thinking about it right now. The opposite is true when you run search ads since your ads will only show when someone is actively searching for what your landscaping business has to offer.
However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.
3.) Search Advertising
You should invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for your products or services.
There are some people out there who refer to this as landscaper Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad, which are above the organic SEO placements.
You might consider copying your Google Ads campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform if you've had success with Google Ads. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.
4.) Display Ads
There are display ads on message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.
Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.
With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you get results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.
5.) Retargeting Ads
Your landscaping business website, landing page, or sales funnel won't convert everyone on the first visit.
It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your site after they've had time to think through different options.
Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.
6.) Shopping Ads
This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.
If you want to promote your landscaping business through Google Shopping, you'll need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), and a Google Merchant Center account.
By using these tools, you can provide Google Ads with accurate product data, including title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Then, your products will be displayed at the top of search results based on the right types of search queries.
7.) Video Ads
Social networking websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram allow you to advertise with video.
Using YouTube Ads is as simple as setting up a video ad campaign in Google Ads.
It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.
Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. Video ads are frequently used to showcase product launches, custom services, and personal introductions.
Your landscaping business paid advertising campaigns should definitely incorporate video creatives if you have the budget to support them.
Tips for Managing PPC for Landscapers
With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for landscaping businesses and other industries, we are a team of PPC advertising consultants.
Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.
1.) Keyword Research Tips
In the context of paid ads, keyword research for landscapers largely relates to Google Ads and Bing Ads search campaigns. After all, search ads only appear based on what is searched on Google or Bing and targeted by your landscaping business.
For example, a person searching for a landscaping business nearby might search "local landscaper" on a search engine. Targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.
However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the landscaping business needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.
After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the landscaping business about what products / services they want to target more often and where. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.
As an example, the PPC manager might find that "nearby landscaping businesses" and "landscaper services" have high search volumes. The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.
Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing in search queries that you know won't convert to more homeowners.
For example, someone searching for "free services from landscaping businesses" or "how to advertise to landscapers" isn't likely to convert with your landscaping business. They might see your paid advertising if you use broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".
Even if your keyword research needs are obvious when you start building out your campaign, they become more complex as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.
2.) Audience Research Tips
Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram for landscaper paid advertising campaigns. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.
Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.
Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by landscaping business paid ads managers in the past. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for landscaping businesses eagerly took advantage of.
The rise of data privacy and machine learning had a significant impact on custom audiences over time.
Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.
Following that, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most advertising firms for landscapers. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.
Although many landscaping business PPC advertising companies still rely on custom audiences, the trend is shifting toward broad targeting. You can see it for yourself. Every few months Facebook rolls out updates that gradually remove lesser-used interest-based targeting options. They even keep changing out "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is pushed in the ad set creation.
This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.
However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. The targeting options within landscaper ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.
3.) Tips for Optimizing Landing Pages
An important factor in the success of your landscaping business paid advertising campaign is the landing page.
When we take on the management of a PPC advertising campaign for landscapers, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:
- Does the headline focus on benefits?
- Are there any images above the fold?
- Does the content engage the reader?
- Do I have immediate access to a lead form?
- What is the visibility of the call to action?
- How fast does the page load?
- Is social proof present?
- Can I load the page on a mobile device?
Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors. Here is a great blog post about what makes a quality landing page.
Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! You should never consider your landing page complete. You can refine your sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.
4.) Revenue Funnel Tips
Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. To generate leads, build email audiences, and even make online purchases, we rely on sales funnels.
For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their website marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:
- We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
- We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
- We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
- We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.
There are many different types of funnels, so your landscaping business isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.
5.) Conversion Optimization Tips
Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.
Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.
- You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
- You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
- You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
- To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
- Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid ads you get one dollar in return.
For most landscaping businesses, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.
To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.
Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.
Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.
6.) Ad Creation Tips
This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.
When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for landscapers, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.
You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.
To do this, you need to build out awesome ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"
This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.
If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.
Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.
Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Paid Ads Services
Let's work together on paid ads for your landscaping business! In addition to PPC management, we have internal teams focused on sales funnel development, social media ads, and ad creative testing for landscapers. Landscaper-focused PPC ads management companies don't all operate this way, since most only have one person in charge of everything. You might not get the results you want from landscaping business PPC agencies if you don't test campaign optimization and innovative ideas often enough.
While researching paid advertising agencies for your landscaping business, there are many factors to consider. With more than 20 years of experience, you know you can trust the PPC plans and strategies we suggest for your landscaping business. Many of these are the same paid ads plans we use to drive leads for our company.
Landscaping businesses should choose our PPC advertising firm because they feel confident we are the right team. Here are a few reasons we suggest considering our paid ads experts:
- It has been more than 20 years since we opened our doors, which makes us an industry leader.
- We rely heavily on paid advertising to bring in traffic from keywords we don't yet rank for organically.
- Since we have an internal advertising team, we do not outsource landscaper website marketing plans, such as paid ads management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services.
- It is likely that one of our teammates will answer your call within a few rings if you call during normal business hours.
Get in touch with our PPC professionals to discuss what we can do for your landscaping business! Landscaper-related small businesses often hire us for paid advertising management services, but larger landscaping businesses can also hire us to augment their marketing departments.
Our team would appreciate the opportunity to be considered when your landscaping business needs a PPC marketing firm. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send an email or give us a call to start a discussion with the helpful staff at our PPC company.
