Help with a local PPC campaign for a small business.

efeezy

Well-known member
Oct 5, 2007
5,249
136
63
51
I could use some help on this one. I've got a friend who is a general contractor and wants me to help him with his PPC advertising efforts. I've never managed a campaign for anyone other than myself before, so I want to make sure I'm not missing anything that could help our efforts be more successful. I'm sitting down with him this week to figure out a plan, and so far this is where I'm at (just thinking out loud here).

We need to determine the areas of his business that bring him in the most money and focus on building ads around those keywords. So if kitchen remodels are his bread and butter, we need to target those keyword variations and run them in the zip codes that he covers.

Establish a monthly or daily budget. This is pretty obvious.

His current PPC efforts are sending everyone to his site homepage, which isn't a bad site, but I think we need to get people over to a lander with an online quote form so he can capture these people's information and then respond to them with a price quote for the services.

Do I need to generate monthly reports for him as to which keywords are converting etc.?

As for my fee, I have no idea what to charge for something like this. I'm not really going to have to monitor the hell out of it. Obviously we'll see what keywords are generating good leads and tweak as needed. Should I charge him a "per lead fee" or just a set number per month to handle this?

I normally wouldn't do this, but he's a good friend, and I think I can help him out on this. Any thoughts or ideas are welcome. Thanks.
 


I just went through this with business insurance. I would definately make a lander for each type of service like kitchen remodels, etc.

I would also make a separate campaign for each type of service and use the most obvious words at first + bid very high to get good CTR. (test ads on bing 1st)

As for the fee, i'm not sure, because i was doing it for my dads business. So i just did it for free.

If you have any questions, feel free to pm me.


I could use some help on this one. I've got a friend who is a general contractor and wants me to help him with his PPC advertising efforts. I've never managed a campaign for anyone other than myself before, so I want to make sure I'm not missing anything that could help our efforts be more successful. I'm sitting down with him this week to figure out a plan, and so far this is where I'm at (just thinking out loud here).

We need to determine the areas of his business that bring him in the most money and focus on building ads around those keywords. So if kitchen remodels are his bread and butter, we need to target those keyword variations and run them in the zip codes that he covers.

Establish a monthly or daily budget. This is pretty obvious.

His current PPC efforts are sending everyone to his site homepage, which isn't a bad site, but I think we need to get people over to a lander with an online quote form so he can capture these people's information and then respond to them with a price quote for the services.

Do I need to generate monthly reports for him as to which keywords are converting etc.?

As for my fee, I have no idea what to charge for something like this. I'm not really going to have to monitor the hell out of it. Obviously we'll see what keywords are generating good leads and tweak as needed. Should I charge him a "per lead fee" or just a set number per month to handle this?

I normally wouldn't do this, but he's a good friend, and I think I can help him out on this. Any thoughts or ideas are welcome. Thanks.
 
Thanks for the response. Those are good ideas. Still not sure what I should charge for this. I'm obviously going to have to build a few LP's, which will be $75-$100 per page. I'm thinking of maybe charging him $25-$50 per lead that's generated. A lead for a $20,000 kitchen remodel has got to be worth $50 bucks.

I just went through this with business insurance. I would definately make a lander for each type of service like kitchen remodels, etc.

I would also make a separate campaign for each type of service and use the most obvious words at first + bid very high to get good CTR. (test ads on bing 1st)

As for the fee, i'm not sure, because i was doing it for my dads business. So i just did it for free.

If you have any questions, feel free to pm me.
 
Thanks for the response. Those are good ideas. Still not sure what I should charge for this. I'm obviously going to have to build a few LP's, which will be $75-$100 per page. I'm thinking of maybe charging him $25-$50 per lead that's generated. A lead for a $20,000 kitchen remodel has got to be worth $50 bucks.
I was doing something like that for a catering company and to get only $25-$50 per lead off a $20k sale you'll be getting rape, he'll be getting rich off you if the campaigns are successful.. I was charging 10% off ticket prices. Think about it 10% of 20K, you be getting $2,000 for each kitchen remodels.
 
I was doing something like that for a catering company and to get only $25-$50 per lead off a $20k sale you'll be getting rape, he'll be getting rich off you if the campaigns are successful.. I was charging 10% off ticket prices. Think about it 10% of 20K, you be getting $2,000 for each kitchen remodels.

10% of sales is unrealistic in my opinion. He's not making the sale, just getting them leads.
 
He is a friend, so I'm not trying to dig into his pockets. I don't even know what his profit margin is on a 20k kitchen job, so if I was getting paid a % of his profit, then I'd be at his mercy as to what he figured the profit would be. I just want to get him some good quality leads, and be compensated fairly for my work.
 
charge him a base fee for your initial efforts (landing page, ppc management, ad copy/creatives, etc), and let it run for a trial week and see how it performs. Once you have a baseline with how many leads/referrals coming in a week, figure out a solid number based on that. This is what I've done for friends in similar situations. I've done this type of stuff for contractors before, and generally market value on these leads are like $25-$30.
 
I think you need to discuss who is going to cover the risk if this is a failure. For example, when I did PPC management for local clients they could have me cover all the costs of LP designing and the cost of the PPC itself and then I would charge them a higher lead price or they could take on all the risk themselves and I'd charge them a lower lead price.

Sometimes local areas are really competitive and whatever you do just doesn't seem to stick, other times you can crush it. If you plan to do more of this it's important to understand who is taking on what risk and then make sure that party is properly compensated for it.
 
He's currently doing some PPC with someone who is doing a shitty job. He's not getting any good leads and he's not even coming up in the paid results for the keywords he wanted to target. I has monthly PPC budget, so he's taking 100% of the risk. I have no intention of covering these costs. I'll manage it for them and do the LP's etc., but the ad costs are on them.