Transcript
Joe Troyer: Shane Patrick asks, “With pay per call, what are your ideal margins with Google Ads to either help jumpstart leads and or before other organic results mature or just to add more lead volume?” So this is a very difficult question because we have these different circumstances here. We have until organic results mature or just to add more lead volume. So depending on those two scenarios, my answers are very different because these are just two very, very, very, different examples and I’ll walk through these.
Joe Troyer: If you’re trying to make profit on a pay per call campaign with Google Ads, if that’s the goal just, “How much money can I make at the end of the day?” I would suggest running mobile call only ads and not touching desktop. Why? Because mobile call only ads, one in three people roughly, one in two people, one in three people, you’re going to have a conversion, meaning they are actually going to call. If you send them to a website, I don’t care how good of a designer you are, you’re never going to be able to compete with that conversion rate. You might be able to get one in six, one in seven, so it’s double, triple the amount of people that actually get a conversion. So if you’re just after the money, I would start with call only but we got these other scenarios here, organic results mature or just to add more lead volume. So again, my goals and my expectations would be very, very different depending on the circumstance or the use case.
Joe Troyer: So I’ve used Google Ads and Bing Ads to help drive more call volume for businesses where I already had lead generation streams in place. For me, I’ve used it just to help bolster the call volume because the client wants more. It’s just like, “I want more help, please give me more, I have more technicians, I got to keep them busier.” I have as a use case in our pay per call agency, we ran Google Ads where our goal was to make 20% markup but we were okay breaking even, even because we were making money on all the other calls that we were sending. So that’s kind of one use case as well.
Joe Troyer: Another use case is you’re starting from scratch and you have no other lead sources, you don’t have any websites, you have no other ads running, you’re starting from scratch. So that could be to test the market and to also test price points on what price per lead is acceptable and do you have an okay customer? Again, I think that the goal would be to make 20% markup but again, okay with break even. Understand when you’re testing a market, whether it’s a city or an area, a region, or you’re testing just HVAC or plumbing or whatever vertical that you’re getting into, you’re still in test mode and at the end of the day, I don’t think that you should have expectations to crush it and make thousands of dollars a month when you’re still doing your due diligence in test mode. Really at the end of the day, you’re trying to figure out what keywords convert, what kind of ads and messaging convert and when you start figuring that stuff out, you’re going to start to make more money but you also want to figure out where do your leads need to be priced at in order for you to be able to sell them. Until you’ve been in a market, it’s not really okay for you to know that. You’re not going to know it. You’re not going to know what it costs to generate a call with this medium or with that medium.
Joe Troyer: So I’ll leave you with one thought here. If I was just going in right now into a new market, let’s say on a prospect that was a really promising prospect, called me up, he heard that I did pay per call marketing, or that I did lead generation and he wants to pay me to send him leads. I check him out, I do a little discovery session with him, he’s a perfect candidate, he understands his average customer value and he just needs more leads. He’s advertising all over the place, that’s the perfect pay per call customer. That criteria right there. If he met that criteria and I didn’t know the industry, what I would do is say, “Let’s run a test. I’ll run a campaign for you for 30 days. You pay for the Google Ads spend, I’ll run the campaign for you for free, I’ll put up all the landing pages, all the ads, all the maintenance, all the optimization and we’ll see where the numbers fall. After 30 days of us running it, we’ll sit down together, conference call or in person, whatever it is,” I would recommend conference call, ” … and we’ll come up with something that’s mutually agreeable.”
Joe Troyer: What’s good about that? You don’t have to put down $3,000 in ad spend on the table yourself. All that you got to do is run the campaign. Then you get out of it after 30 days and you know exactly what’s going on. You know the ads that work the best, you know the keywords that work the best. Maybe you know the landing pages that work the best and you’re able to have a face to face conversation with your prospect to understand the business more and what they can afford to pay. So if I was just getting into a niche, just getting into an industry, that’s exactly how I would do pay per call. If you do it any other way, if you just guess, you just throw out some numbers, you’re going to screw yourself. You’re either going to put yourself upside down and the leads are costing more than you thought and so you’re literally negative, or you’re going to undersell yourself.
Joe Troyer: Underselling yourself is best case scenario, meaning the CPA that you could have gotten is 70 bucks a call and instead, you priced it too low because you didn’t know your ass from your elbow and you sold it for $40. You’re literally missing out on $30 a call and I’ve seen way too many people do that.
