Are you ready to start scaling your cleaning business? Advertising on Google can be a great way to do it and to bring targeted traffic to your website. In this post, you’ll learn how to advertise your cleaning business on Google even if you haven’t run an ad before.
Set up a Google Ads account
Before we jump into anything on how to advertise your cleaning business on Google, you need to first set up your account. This is a simple process and you just go to ads.google.com.
Create a landing page and thank you page
Before you even start to set up your first ad on Google you need a place to send the traffic to. Ideally, this is going to be some kind of free estimate page or offer where people are able to enter their name, email, and phone number.
You can drive traffic to a content post, but if you are targeting keywords with high buyer intent, you will likely be better off sending people to a free quote page. It isn’t 100% necessary, especially for commercial cleaning companies, but you may also want to have some kind of special offer like a discounted service, or free add on service promoted on this landing page.
A special offer or discount is more common for residential cleaning companies, and can help increase the conversion rate for people clicking on your advertisement vs a competitor.
Some things you can include on this page are:
- the benefits of your service
- a basic description of your features
- why they should choose your company over another
- testimonials or reviews from customers
Also, include a form that someone can opt-in for a quote or estimate, and once that is filled out forward them to a thank you page. This way you can track conversions when people fill out the quote form.
How does advertising your business on Google work?
Advertising on Google can be a bit confusing and for most people, it seems a lot harder than it actually is. There are many types of ads you can run, but for a cleaning business, most likely the best option to run will be search-based ads.
The reason you should choose this option over others is that your ads will then show to the most relevant people. A lot of people get confused when they make their first campaign because there are so many options to choose from.
As you can see in the picture below, many of the options seem like they would be a good choice, but in most cases, you can create an ad without a goal’s guidance and just optimize for conversions. From here you’ll choose keywords and a location to target and your ad will then show up when people search for those terms and in those locations you are targeting.
We will walk you through this process later in the post, but understand the general concept of making ads based around search intent. By targeting the right keywords you will have a better likelihood someone would be interested in buying your services. You want to show your ads to those people.
Keyword research
Most people hear the term keyword research and get scared and think that it is some kind of overly complex process. Certainly, you can dig very deep into it and that can get complex, but to set up a basic ad that generates leads isn’t as difficult.
The basic idea is to determine what search terms are going to be the most relevant to your ad. You also want to make sure that the term has a high probability for buying intent or intent to request an estimate.
For example, some good terms to use would be things like, “janitorial cleaning estimate”, “house cleaning quote”, “commercial cleaning services”, “house cleaning service near me”, etc. People using these kinds of search terms are looking to get a quote on a cleaning service.
You probably don’t need to convince these people that they need a service, you simply need to convince them you are the best option to go with. This is why highlighting the benefits of your service, your core difference, and customer testimonials and reviews can be important to have on your landing page.
The people using buying intent search terms are ready to hire someone rather than just getting started in their research process.
What do the 3 sections of the Google advertising setup mean?
The next of how to advertise your cleaning business on Google is to set up your ad. There are 3 areas you need to set up when creating an ad. The campaign, the ad groups, and the ad.
You can look at the campaign like what is the goal of the ad. For example, the two common ones you’ll use are to get traffic and clicks to a page or conversions like leads and phone calls.
The ad group is what locations, keywords, and demographics you are targeting. The final part of the ad is the ad itself, and this is where you can write various versions of the ad and test what converts best for you.
The setup process of advertising your cleaning business on Google
Going in the order of the 3 steps of making an ad, you first want to create a new campaign. You do this simply by clicking on a new campaign on the home page of your Google Ads account.
The next step is to choose the goal of the campaign. For now, you can just choose “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.”
Next, you will click on the search campaign type.
The next step is to choose the website you want traffic to go to, and the phone number you want people to call. You can do these two at the same time, or put them into two separate ads. Another good practice is to use tracking links and a separate tracking phone number so you can distinguish the traffic and calls from your advertising from other forms of traffic.
On the next page, you will choose the general settings and name your campaign.
Typically we recommend unchecking the next two checkboxes for include Google search partners and include Google display network. These two can get more people seeing your ads, but the locations where they are seen might not be as relevant and could result in wasted clicks and ad spend.
Also, below this it says “show more settings” you may want to check these out as one of the options is a start and end date for your ad. Typically you can leave this alone and simply pause the ad if you don’t want it running anymore, but you can set an end date to make sure it turns off in case you forget about it.
The next step of advertising your cleaning business on Google is to choose the locations you want to target with your ads.
Unless you are a national cleaning company you’ll want to select the option of entering another location. Once this is selected you can enter city names you want to target, or specific zip codes you want to target.
Also, be sure to click on location options and then choose the option below of people in or regularly in your targeted locations or the bottom option could work as well. This setting is important because with the first option it could show your ad to people simply searching for that location but that might not actually live there. This means that you might be wasting money on showing your ad to irrelevant people.
Usually, the middle option works best because it is showing your ad to people who actually live in that area you are targeting. The last option can work as well, as it includes people searching for that area you are targeting. It’s possible someone from outside the area owns a property in the area and could be searching for cleaning services there, but most often that isn’t the case, but it can still be effective using that setting.
The next step of setting up your Google Ads is to choose the language you target and any audiences you want to target.
Typically you should choose English here unless you speak another language or your ads are going to be in another language. Moving onto audiences, you can search for interest groups that Google has set up.
These audiences may or may not be effective or completely accurate, but you can certainly test them out and see how they perform. Also if you are using the right keywords these audiences might not even be necessary as people are already searching for the terms you determined that show high buyer intent. Typically, for this reason, we leave that section blank.
Choose the right budget for your Google Advertising
The next section of your Google advertising setup consists of choosing your budget and optimizing your bidding strategy.
Setting your budget is rather simple as you can just take what you want to spend for the month and divide by 30 and get what you should set as the average ad spend per day.
For example, if you wanted to set your monthly budget to $1500, just take 1500/30 and you get $50 per day. Also, you want to know that Google will sometimes fluctuate around this number. Some days it spends more, some days less, but for the month it should average out to around what you set at this option.
Google Advertising is a bidding platform so you are competing against other advertisers often for the same keywords. So your costs per click or conversion may increase if your market is more competitive. There are several options to choose from to optimize your ads, but if you are looking for leads or phone calls choose conversions as the setting here.
In this section, you can also choose what your target cost per acquisition (target CPA), but if you have never run ads before in your market and don’t know this number, just leave it unchecked.
The last section on this page is to set up Ad extensions.
With ad extensions, you are able to add extra ad text around your ads and even include your phone number and additional calls to action. Ad extensions aren’t something you have to use, but they can be helpful if you provide a variety of services. For example, your ads might be focused on requesting a free estimate, but you could also promote carpet cleaning or other specialty services you might offer.
Creating Ad groups to advertise your cleaning business on Google
The next section you need to set up for your Google Ads is to create various ad groups. Since you selected a search ad, you will be given the option to input various combinations of keywords.
As you can see in the photo below, using our website MyHouseCleaningBiz.com, which is a training site for residential cleaning business owners, several keyword ideas are given to you. In this case, some aren’t the most relevant as that site isn’t a cleaning business, but you can simply delete keywords that aren’t relevant or add more that are relevant.
As a side note, you’ll see below the list of the description of match types. These are broken down into broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Typically you should use phrase match and exact match when selecting keywords.
Exact match means a person needs to type in exactly the keywords you listed or your ad won’t be shown. Phrase match means people are shown your ads if that keyword is mentioned in the search. Broad match will show your ads to people using those terms and terms close to it, which can lead to irrelevant clicks and traffic, which could waste your money.
Writing your ad for your cleaning business
The final step of creating your ads is to write the ad copy. You can see the ad below as an example of something you could write for your ad. The primary focus of this ad is to get someone to call you or visit your website and to request a quote.
Ideally, you should use some of the keywords you selected to target in your ad groups as well. This will make your ad quality score higher and it means Google will be more likely to show your ad to potential customers. If your ad quality score is too low, they will stop showing your ad.
Some ideas to improve your ad copy is to highlight some pain points your ideal customers want to avoid, include a call to action, and also some offer that makes your business stand out. In the case below, you see the call to action to get a free quote, it highlights the pain point of being too busy to clean, and it offers a 20% off special.
We’d also suggest making multiple variations of your ad testing different copy as some may perform better than others.
Test and track your Google ads to optimize them
The next step of how to advertise your cleaning business with Google ads is to test and track the results so you can optimize your ads. Even professional marketers use this strategy to continually improve their ads.
Certainly, as you gain more experience running Google ads, you will get better results as you create ads, but this doesn’t eliminate the need for testing. This strategy is called A/B testing, and it can help you incrementally improve things like your conversion rates, and the quality of your ads.
A/B testing consists of running multiple versions of your ad with different text, offers, or targeting and comparing the results of each version. When one version clearly has better results, you then use that ad as your base ad and continue to try other versions to see if you can beat that ad’s results. This strategy continues until you are left with your best performing ads.
Also, check out this post to learn more about what metrics you should be tracking when advertising your cleaning business.
Have proper expectations for results while advertising your cleaning business on Google
Follow the steps outlined above to begin advertising your cleaning business on Google. Understand though that this process takes time to generate results. The testing and tracking process takes time to optimize your ads, and you need to have proper expectations around what your ad budget can actually achieve.
For example, we often find that many cleaning business owners have improper expectations of what a small marketing budget can actually get them. We recommend that if you are going to use Google ads to promote your cleaning business at a minimum you should be spending $1000 a month for either a residential or commercial cleaning business.
For many cleaning businesses just starting out, this may seem like a big amount. However, when you break that budget down to a daily ad spend it is really only around $33 per day.
The cost per click for commercial cleaning keywords tend to be higher. Because commercial cleaning contracts are larger than residential cleaning contracts this makes the keywords more valuable as well. As an example, you may get clicks on some keywords from around $15-30 per click. If that is the case, you may only get 1-2 clicks a day on a $1000 a month budget.
You also need to understand that not every click is going to become a lead or a customer, so while $1000 a month in ad spend is a place to start you shouldn’t expect a flood of phone calls every day from it.
Conclusion
How to advertise your cleaning business on Google isn’t as complicated as it seems once you understand the setup process we converted in this post. The biggest factors that can contribute to a quality ad are the right targeting, keywords, budget, and ad copy.
Structure your ads in a way that addresses your ideal customers problems and pain points, and then share the benefits of your services that can help eliminate those problems. Also include an offer or some explanation of why your business is unique and why someone seeing your ad should click on it.
Design your landing page for your ad traffic to establish credibility, provide social proof, and to further instill your difference from competitors and why they should choose to hire you.
With these in place you should start getting quality traffic, leads, and phone calls from your ads, but along with that be sure to set proper expectations for your results based on your advertising budget. Follow these steps and your well on your way to creating success through advertising your cleaning business on Google!
By the way, if all of this Google advertising stuff sounds too complex, you can always hire our agency to do that for you! Click here to learn more about our marketing packages.
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.