Josh Williams, owner of Lakeland Septic Company in Lakeland, Florida, has built a business on successful branding — much of it through Google Ads. However, he counts success not only as building awareness for his business, but doing
it cost-effectively.
Clients pay for Google Ads by making a bid for a keyword — “septic” for instance. Google assesses the quality of the ad and the quality of the client’s landing page and then ranks the positioning of the ad on its search page. A similar bidding system and quality score formula determine how much you pay each time a web user clicks your ad.
“Many people think they want to get the most clicks possible,” Williams says. “The truth is, on pay-per-click you don't want everybody to find you. You only want clicks from people who are looking for septic service in your area. If somebody in north Florida is searching the term ‘septic tank,’ I don’t want my ad to pop up. Once they click it, Google is going to charge me for that click and there is zero chance of that person becoming a customer.”
Google customers can place a hard limit on the amount they spend on their Google Ads campaign. Left unchecked, a campaign could easily rack up thousands of dollars’ worth of clicks that don’t result in work.
Williams says he initially spent hours tweaking the settings on his Google Ads campaign to ensure that the right people saw his ad. This included manually eliminating ZIP codes from the campaign’s reach.
He eventually turned over management of his Google Ads account to a third party.
“The distinction is that they are working through my account, not an account created on my behalf by them,” he says. “This way, I can see all the settings that they set up. I can also remove them as a provider and still have all
my stuff running.”
Williams notes that he also invested heavily in Facebook ads through his first year in business and credits them with 90% of the work he received during that period.
“However, Facebook ads pay off over time, and are more like brand-building,” he says. “They were profitable for me, but the relationship between ads and the work you get is less obvious. With Google Ads someone sees, it clicks, it calls you to come pump their tank and within two hours the money you spent is already paid back.”
Read more about Lakeland Septic Company in the August issue of Onsite Installer.
