Running Pool Service Google Ads is undoubtedly a solid way to bring in new leads for your pool service business, and today I’ll walk you through a quick case study for a pool service Google Ads client of ours.
Google Ads can be a great source of high intent, high quality leads.
Ultimately, it’s one of my favorite platforms for generating pool service leads, but it can absolutely be a money pit if it’s not managed properly.
So, not only will I go over the campaign in this post, but I also like my content to at least be educational as well.
That way, at the very least you can leave this Pool Service Google Ads case study with a bit more knowledge you can apply for your business.
If you’re someone who would prefer to watch this content, you can check out one of our case study videos above. Or, if you’d prefer to read through it, you can find the rest of the content below.
Let’s get into it!
How Things Started
This client was actually a previous client of ours when they had another business.
Before starting their pool service business, they were running a junk removal company.
Previously, we were running their Google Ads account for their junk removal company, but eventually the owner decided to sell that business.
Fast forward about half a year, and I get an email letting me know that he started a pool service company and he wanted to see if I could check out his pool service Google Ads account.
He had hired a specialist pool service agency to manage his pool service google ads campaign, but unfortunately he didn’t feel like he was getting results.
I checked the campaign out, and up front it seemed like everything on the account was checking out.
They had things set up properly, they had decent enough pages in place to send the traffic to, and all of the settings set up as they should be.
But the campaign just wasn’t quite where we needed it to be to really be a profitable pool service google ads.
Then I checked out the change history on the account, and noticed…
Since they built the campaign out, nobody had touched it in months. No changes, no updates, no new negative keywords, no pausing underperforming keywords, nothing at all.
When you’re running Google Ads for pool service companies, you need to make sure that you’re at the very least cleaning up the traffic on a weekly basis.
But unfortunately, none of that was being done.
So, we decided to partner up and take on their pool service google ads efforts to work on a fresh campaign build to get things pointed in the right direction.
It’s been well over a year since then, and the campaign is going strong along with some other additional things I’ll cover in this post.
Recap Of The Numbers
As of the time of this writing, the campaign has brought in over 670 leads and is consistently converting clicks into leads at about an average of 20%.
It’s important to keep in mind though, when you’re starting a pool service Google Ads campaign conversion rates very likely won’t be anywhere near that 20% number.
I’m sometimes hesitant to do these case studies, because they’re the culmination of multiple months of optimization work on a campaign to get them to that place.
When this campaign started, we were somewhere closer to the 14% conversion rate number, and over the months that has gotten to a pretty consistent 20-25%. Some months when demand is better, it’s gone to 30% or above.
I should also probably clarify what I mean when I say conversions and conversion rates.
The conversions that I mention are leads, and the leads that have come from this campaign are a combination of inbound phone calls and form submission leads.
Here are the numbers by lead type:
As of today there have been 495 phone calls and 175 form fills. Not too terrible in the first year of a pool service Google Ads campaign.
One other really important point to bring up is that this campaign is being run in Phoenix AZ.
The reason that’s important is because this market is very likely going to be on the higher end of what competition would be when running Google Ads for your pool service business.
The competition heavily drives the cost per click up, and especially right now during the winter the cost per click is much higher than what I would typically see during the spring and summer months.
One Additional Thing We Added In
Google Ads isn’t the only thing this pool service company has been running.
We’ve also got a Google Local Service Ads campaign running alongside the main Google Ads campaign.
If you’ve got the budget, this is another great option for those who want to open up another source of leads for their pool service business.
In total since launching the campaign, the Local Service Ads have brought in an additional 440 leads on top of the 670 from our pool service Google Ads campaign.
I’ve put up another post on the site going over the entire pool service marketing campaign we’ve been running and diving into both of the platforms.
But it’s something important to keep in mind if you’re looking to drive even more inbound leads for your pool service company.
Foundations Of A Good Pool Service Google Ads Campaign
Now that we’ve gone over the numbers, I wanted to highlight some important points to keep in mind whether you’re currently running pool service Google Ads or you’re thinking about launching a campaign.
I’ve got plenty of other in depth tutorial content on the site, so if you really wanted to DIY it I’ve got a ton of content out there that can help you out with that.
Alternatively, if you’re the owner of a pool service company that needs help setting up, managing, and optimizing a Google Ads campaign for a pool service company, reach out below.
The button below will take you to a free consultation form that will be sent over to me personally, and if I feel like I can help you out I’ll reach out to set up a quick chat.
In the meantime, let’s get into those foundations of good pool service Google Ads campaigns.
Select The Right Campaign Type
If you’re thinking about running Google Ads for your pool service company, there’s a few campaign types/Google Ads dashboards you want to avoid…
- Performance Max Campaigns
- Smart Campaigns
- Google Ads Express
These campaigns really struggle to get good quality traffic in the first place for your pool service company.
Without good quality traffic you’re either going to get no leads, or really low quality leads.
When I’ve audited campaigns in the past, these are a few of the culprits that I’ve seen when I hear that people are “spending money on Google Ads, but getting nothing out of it”.
I’ll log in and see one of these campaign types, and then immediately know that’s the reason the Google Ads investment isn’t working.
What I recommend instead is only running a Google Search Campaign.
This will put your ad directly in Google Search, and will get you the most relevant high quality traffic for your business.
Use The Right Settings
Running a Google Search campaign alone doesn’t guarantee that your pool service Google Ads will work right away.
In order to build on that foundation, you need to make sure you have the right settings in place from the start.
I don’t have time to get into every little setting in this post, but I’ll cover some key things you want to have set up.
Networks
Google will try to sneakily hide a couple of these settings, but right up front you need to turn off display network and search partners network on your campaign.
If you leave both of those options checked, your pool service Google Ads will show up on a bunch of other irrelevant websites.
When that happens, your campaign ends up getting a bunch of irrelevant traffic.
As I mentioned above, if you’re getting a bunch of irrelevant traffic then you won’t have any hope in having a profitable campaign.
Turn those off to save money and ultimately bring more leads in over the long term.
Bid Strategy
It’s very likely that Google will recommend that you start your campaign with a conversion based bid strategy.
A conversion based bid strategy will tell Google to bid what they need to bid to get more conversions (leads).
The only problem is that if we’re starting a campaign, we don’t have any conversions.
So, it’s best to start with a clicks based bidding strategy like Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC to start your campaign.
Get conversions coming through your campaign, and then once you have conversion data switch over to a conversion based bidding strategy.
There’s a process to bidding strategies, and just choosing one that sounds good or going with the Google recommended option tends to not work well.
Location Settings
It’s key that, on top of targeting your desired locations, that you exclude all of the other areas you don’t want your ads to show up.
Ideally, you want to exclude all other states that you don’t want ads to show up in on top of all of the other counties in the state that you’re advertising in.
To add in some more layers, you want to make sure your Location Settings are set to “Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations”.
Stacking all of this together will help to prevent out of location calls coming from your Google Ads campaign.
Set Up Conversion Tracking
Speaking of conversions and bid strategies, it’s crucially important that if you’re going to run Google Ads for a pool service company you need to set up conversion tracking.
Conversion tracking allows you to track when leads come through your campaign.
This is important for a couple of primary reasons…
Optimization – When you set up conversion tracking, you’ll be able to see what parts of your campaign are driving leads and what parts aren’t. This is necessary if you want to do any kind of optimization on your campaign. If you have no idea where you’re getting leads from (or not getting them from), you’ll have no way to trim out the things that are wasting money on your campaign.
Google’s Algorithm – You have to think of Google like an AI or a robot with a brain that learns what you feed it. If you want Google to go get you more leads, you need to tell Google what a lead is. With conversion tracking, you’re showing Google what you want more of. The more conversions you get, the more Google learns what you’re looking for.
The number of times I’ve audited campaigns that don’t have any conversion tracking set up is way too high.
Without conversion tracking the campaign simply won’t work.
This is a must if you want to have the foundations set up for a successful long term pool service Google Ads campaign.
Structure Your Campaign Properly
The way you structure a good pool service Google Ads campaign is with using ad groups.
Ad groups are the way you organize your keywords in your campaign.
You want to take all of your keywords and group them up into relevant keyword themes in each ad group.
This is going to give your campaign structure, and more importantly make your ads more relevant to what someone is searching over on Google.
Some of the keyword themes I tend to group my ad groups into are…
- General Keywords
- Things like “pool service near me”, “pool cleaning services”, “weekly pool service”, etc
- Service Keywords
- Things like “pool pump repair”, “pool heater installation”, “pool acid wash near me”, etc
- Location Keywords
- Things like “pool service phoenix”, “pool service scottsdale”, pool service glendale”, etc
You don’t want to do what I see a lot of people do where they create one ad group and drop all of their keywords into that one ad group.
Separate all of your keywords into relevant groups, and then drop them into your campaign in different ad groups that are aligned with each keyword group’s theme.
Do that, and you’re going to be way ahead of many other pool service companies out there.
Send Traffic To Landing Pages
This is arguably the biggest thing you want to do with any pool service Google Ads campaign.
Too often I see people just taking their traffic from their Google Ads campaign, and sending that traffic directly to the home page of their website.
The reason why this is bad is that, in general, Google Ads traffic will convert at a fraction of the conversion rate.
This will drive up the cost per lead, meaning that you’ll get fewer leads and each one will cost more.
Landing pages, on the other hand, often convert traffic at double the rate of websites.
Meaning that you can just about double your lead flow just by switching to sending your traffic to landing pages.
You can have everything else set up…
Get the best high quality traffic coming through your campaign, have all of the right settings, conversion tracking, write really good ads, etc…
But if the pages you’re sending traffic to just don’t convert the traffic then it’s all a waste at the end of the day.
If you want to get more leads from your pool service Google Ads campaign, you need to send your traffic to landing pages.
Conclusion
That’s pretty much it for this pool service Google Ads case study.
There’s lots of moving parts with Google Ads, so hopefully this post gave you a bit more insight on running Google Ads for your pool service business.
If you’re more inclined to DIY Google Ads, there’s plenty of other content both on this website as well as on my YouTube Channel going over tons of different stuff.
Google Ads isn’t something that I would just wing it on though. Especially if you’re in a more competitive market.
Things can get expensive pretty quick if you’re not careful.
Doing even just a handful of things from this post and in some of the videos on my YouTube Channel will help save a ton of headache in the long run.
Regardless of all of that, Google Ads is still one of my favorite platforms for many local businesses to generate more inbound leads.
It’s not right for every business, but when it comes to generating pool service Google Ads leads it can be awesome.
Especially if you pair it with something like Local Service Ads, you can generate just about as many pool service leads as you want.
Need Help Running Pool Service Google Ads?
Need an experienced Google Ads management agency to help you get your pool service Google Ads campaign off the ground?
Reach out for a free consultation, and I’ll personally review it to see if I can help you out. If I feel like I can, I’ll get back in touch to set up a quick phone call.
Just click on the button below and it will take you over to the free consultation form.
Totally no pressure, and at the very least I can help you get some strategies put together that can help you market your pool service business.
In the meantime, I hope this post helped you out a bit.
Thanks for reading!
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