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11 ways to optimize Facebook advertising for a cleaning company

11 Facebook advertising tips for cleaning businesses

When it comes to marketing a cleaning business there are a lot of options. You can focus on organic marketing strategies like content marketing and SEO, or you could also run paid advertising. Typically these strategies work best when done together. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t fully understand running Facebook advertising for a cleaning company and end up losing money. In this post, you’ll learn 11 ways to optimize Facebook advertising for a cleaning company.

Targeting

A major factor in the success of running Facebook advertising for a cleaning company is using the right targeting. Now if you have an ideal customer avatar in mind that fits specific interests and demographics you can start with that. However, typically you will be advertising to a small local area for your cleaning business.

One thing to know is that if the audience you are trying to target is too small, Facebook will just not show your ads at all. So be careful with the audience size you use or you might not see any results.

You might consider just targeting everyone in a geographic location you are trying to reach and see the results first, and then add in other qualifications after that. One targeting method we have found to work well for residential clients is to target their desired zip codes and then add the filter of the top 50% of household incomes.

Typically house cleaning for example is more of a luxury for people rather than a necessity. Certainly, you don’t need to be extremely wealthy to hire a house cleaner, but often we see high-income households tend to convert better than the general population. However, if you use this method be sure to check the audience size when you add this filter. If the audience becomes too small your ad will likely struggle to get conversions.

Using Facebook pixels and lookalike audiences

Now to use more advanced advertising strategies on Facebook you’ll need to use a Facebook pixel. Once a Facebook pixel is installed on your website you can use it to unlock a lot of features.

The first feature you’ll have access to is the ability to start tracking visitors to your website. This can be used to gather data to see if your ad campaigns are effective, and can give you valuable insights on conversions and other important metrics we’ll cover more in a bit.

Another great feature you’ll gain access to by using the Facebook pixel is being able to create lookalike audiences. What this means is that once you have enough data you can make an audience that is just like the data you have.

For example, if you create an audience of people who visit your request a quote page, you can then make a lookalike audience and target people who are just like those who visit your quote page. Lookalike audiences can help you improve your targeting and often this will allow you to increase conversions and get better results from your advertising.

If you have a customer list, you can also upload that to Facebook and make that into a lookalike audience. We often find this lookalike audience converts very well compared to just targeting people based on interests.

Remarketing

In addition to building lookalike audiences, you can also build custom audiences that you can remarket to. Most people who visit your website or that see your ads are not going to hire you after one exposure.

This means that you need some kind of marketing strategy to share your business with potential customers multiple times. One strategy that can work well is email marketing, and another is running remarketing campaigns on Facebook.

Your remarketing campaigns could be as simple as showing an ad to people who have visited your site previously but that didn’t request a quote from you. You could do this by using your pixel data to show ads to people who have visited your website. Then make a custom audience for those who reached your quote request thank you page and excluding those people from your targeting.

Remarketing campaigns can get even more sophisticated than this as well. You could target those who visited your quote page but didn’t request a quote with a special offer to get them to hire you.

You can even adjust the ad copy to say something like, “Hey, it looks like you were interested in getting a quote from us but haven’t yet. You’ve probably just been busy, but we wanted you to know why some of our other happy customers decided to hire us…” (Insert reviews).

Remarketing is effective because it gives people that were close to hiring you to take the next step in your sales process.

Tracking

Another way to maximize your Facebook advertising for a cleaning company is to use proper tracking. Unfortunately, we often see cleaning business owners simply boosting their organic Facebook posts in hopes of getting new leads.

Typically we find that boosting posts is the worst way to utilize Facebook advertising for a cleaning business. You lack many of the features and tracking available to you in the regular ads manager when you boost a post.

There are several ways to optimize tracking. One is to make specific landing pages, thank you pages, and contact forms for each form of service you are going to advertise on Facebook. Often we see cleaning businesses simply use one estimate request form on their entire site.

When you use only one quote request form and have several forms of marketing and advertising happening it can be very difficult to tell which form of marketing resulted in a lead or sale.

Once you have this separation established you can create custom conversions for each of your service offerings. For example, if you were running Facebook ads for carpet cleaning, you could have a carpet cleaning estimate form and thank you page, and your regular estimate request form and thank you page.

With separate forms and custom conversions, you could track who visits your site from an ad for carpet cleaning but requests a regular cleaning estimate or vice versa. When you have the right tracking in place you can do a better job of optimizing your ads and see your actual results.

Verify domain

Now one thing to note is that while tracking for these various custom conversions is important, you also want to be able to run conversions ads for them. This means that the ad itself will optimize for getting you the most of those conversions possible.

However, if you don’t have your domain verified on Facebook, this isn’t possible. Facebook wants to confirm that you own a specific domain before you can start running conversion ads with it.

This process can get a bit technical because you need to install a .txt file to your DNS servers or installing code on the website. Thankfully Facebook does give you instructions on how you do this, or your Facebook ads manager or tech person should be able to do this as well.

Once your domain is verified you’ll need to prioritize which of your custom conversions is of most value to you. For example, you may value a carpet cleaning estimate less than a house cleaning estimate or commercial cleaning estimate.

Typically you’ll want to rank your conversions based on the most profitable as the most important. Without a verified domain you’ll be stuck running only traffic ads instead of conversions ads.

setting conversion priority on Facebook advertising for a cleaning business

Use real images

Another way to improve the results from your advertising on Facebook is to use real images. The Facebook newsfeed has become a very busy place and you need to grab people’s attention if you want your advertising to stand out.

Most people have gotten used to stock photos and simply ignore them at this point. Either that or the stock photos stick out and are obviously fake and people scroll right past them.

The key is to have your advertisements appear like they are native to the platform. You want them to be intriguing enough for people to stop scrolling and using real photos is one way to do that.

Focus on benefits messaging

The next step of optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns is to optimize the messaging of your ads. For the most part, people understand what cleaning is. They think of vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, taking out the trash, waxing floors, etc.

Because of this general understanding, your Facebook advertising for your cleaning company shouldn’t focus on features of your service. Instead, you want to highlight the benefits of your service and what having cleaning done professionally will do.

For example, if you are promoting house cleaning, most people feel like they are too busy to clean, or would rather do something else. They also might feel like cleaning is stressful and that it’s the last thing they want to do with their free time.

These are the kinds of things you want to highlight in your advertisements. Again understand that people seeing your ads on Facebook aren’t likely actively looking to hire a cleaning service. If they were, you might be able to convince them to hire you just by listing your features.

However, since most people seeing your ads aren’t actively looking, you need to sell them on why they should hire your cleaning service. Focusing your advertising on benefits can help sell people on why they should hire you.

Test ad variations

One thing that continues to hold true with running paid advertising is that you need to test and track your results to see what works. You can think that you have the best ad copy in the world, but you never really know until you actually start running ads.

Also, if you only ever run one variation of your ad, you’ll never know if something could have performed better. There are multiple aspects of your ads that you want to test. These should be things like the ad copy, the images, the headlines, and the call to action.

Now you could run all of these ads individually and test each variable one at a time, but that could take several weeks or more to get enough data to determine a winner. An alternative to this method is to use what Facebook calls “Dynamic creative”.

Dynamic creative allows you to split test many variables against each other. This can be extremely helpful when you have a lot of variables to test at the same time.

It can help you to narrow down to 2 or 3 winning ad combinations and then you can test those specifically against each other. Doing this on a regular basis can help you to maximize your Facebook ads results. Lowering cost and increasing conversions at the same time.

Optimize landing page

Having an optimized Facebook ad is only part of the equation. You also need an optimized landing page or the people who visit your site will never convert.

Now you may be able to bypass this step depending on where your ads send people, for example, if you are using a messenger campaign. We have several residential cleaning clients that have used this method and they follow up with house cleaning leads directly in Facebook messenger.

However, if you want people to come to your website and to fill out an estimate request form, you’ll likely need to have an optimized landing page. There are many factors that go into an optimized landing page such as using real images, SEO, relevant content, clear calls to action, a lead generation method, etc.

All of these aspects are important and need to be accounted for when you design your landing page. Also, consider including reviews from your customers on your landing pages. Especially if you have reviews related to a specific service you are promoting. For example, if you are running ads for carpet cleaning, it would be best to highlight a carpet cleaning review, or floor care review.

Below we’ll discuss some metrics to pay attention to that can let you know if what parts of your ads are working and what parts might need improvement.

Analyze metrics

When it comes to important metrics to monitor for Facebook ads, most people think of back-end sales. Certainly, that is important, but the back-end sale may have very little to do with your actual Facebook ads. By analyzing other key metrics you can tell where potential breakdowns may be happening in your sales process.

Two important metrics besides leads and conversions are click-through rate and cost per click. Typically if your cost per click is around $1 and the click-through rate is 1% or more your ads are performing well. When prices are in that range it means people are resonating with your ad copy and you are likely targeting the right people.

It isn’t a guarantee, but if you aren’t generating leads ad those numbers are off, that could be why. If you aren’t generating leads and those numbers are looking good, that means something else is causing the issue.

Likely it could be your landing page in that case. For example, another metric to pay attention to is your landing page view percentage. When this number is too low, it means people are clicking your ad but aren’t waiting for the page to load. It could be an indication that your site is running too slow and needs to be optimized or redesigned.

Also, your landing page messaging may be off, or the design might be poor. For example, if your site is dated, and full of stock images, it could lead people not to trust you. So even if they clicked your ad, the lack of quality of your site drove the sales away.

Continually monitor your Facebook ads

A final piece of advice is that you need to monitor your ads on an ongoing basis. Many people not familiar with Facebook ads think that they are something you can set up and forget about them and they will just work forever. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

For your Facebook advertising campaigns to be successful you need to monitor your ads on a regular basis. Now this means that you should check your ads frequently, but not necessarily change your ads frequently.

A common mistake we see people make when they run Facebook ads is they make changes to their ads too frequently. You need time for your ads to run so you can gather enough meaningful data to make an educated decision about changes.

Depending on the size of your ad spend budget, this could take several days or even weeks if your budget is small. When you make changes too quickly your sample size of data isn’t large enough and it could lead you to make changes on data that is incomplete.

Monitoring frequently is important to see any drastic changes in results that may happen quickly or to see long-term trends. Once you have a better understanding and enough data you can make the best adjustments for your ad campaigns.

Conclusion

Overall, understand that Facebook ads can be a powerful marketing tool for a cleaning business, but it’s the little details that can make the difference between a successful campaign or not.

Some elements to focus on that can create improvements are things like the targeting, ad copy, images, and call to action. A successful campaign can also depend on things like properly using your Facebook pixel. When the pixel is properly installed you can track visitors, make custom conversions, and optimize for conversions as well.

You should also optimize things like your landing page to make sure that once people reach your site they actually convert. Some metrics you also need to pay attention to are things like the cost per click and the click-through rate. Monitoring your ads and looking at these data metrics regularly can help you maintain a successful ad campaign.

Facebook advertising is not something you can set and forget if you want to maintain results over the long term. If you don’t have the time to do this yourself, it is likely best to hire a marketing agency to do this for you.

If your Facebook ads aren’t optimized you could end up wasting a lot of money on ads that don’t convert. Use these Facebook advertising optimization tips to maximize results for your cleaning business.

P.S. If you are struggling to get quality leads for your cleaning business, Click Here to Learn How to Get More Clients for your business with these Top 10 Lead Sources For Cleaning Business Owners.