Advertising Help

Danno6102

I was wondering if any successful deck companies (in different geographical areas of course) would be interested in sharing their successful Google Adwords keywords & campaign secrets? I'm having trouble getting more than 60 impressions a day & 0 CT's. It's stressing me out. I've done nothing but mess with this for the past week & still have 0 CT's. In a market of over 2 million people probably, that seems low to me. If I could get a good list of key words I could apply the same principles to my other services. I could send you mine for review & comment too.

I serve Indianapolis & east of the city.

Many many thanks in advance if anyone is willing to email me their secrets.

Dan

terrynistler

Keep working on the keywords and remember it won't happen overnight. It takes a while to propogate.

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lgoode

Sign up for some deck manufacturer's contractor programs, get them working for you, linking to your site.
Send us to your website so we can check it out - might get some constructive feedback that way.
Try connecting with decks.com, that can be better than google. Buying google adwords is brutally expensive, not sure I can recommend it. How does it work to buy adwords locally, do they define it by zip code or something?
What's a CT?

BreyerConstruct

You can specify to only advertise to users within a certain radius, or even get more specific about areas...
I'm guessing CorrectDeck isn't big on buying Google advertising space?

~Matt

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Breyer Construction & Landscape, LLC Facebook Page
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Danno6102

Yea, I have it the radius thing set to include all of Indianapolis, so that's over a million people, not counting all the surrounding area.

So far 565 impressions & 1 click through. .18% that sucks! Average ad position of 5.3, so I'm pretty close to the top & definitely on the first page. Not sure what's up. I'll keep refining those keywords & keep my fingers crossed I hit the magic one.

BreyerConstruct

Wow...
Maybe create a few different ads with different "catch phrases"?

~Matt

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Custom Deck Builder Deck Designer Lancaster Deck Builder Berks Deck Cleaning
Breyer Construction & Landscape, LLC Facebook Page
www.BreyerConstruction.com

lgoode

Matt,
You're right, we don't buy Google AdWords anymore. We got on that train early, back in 02 or so, and it did us a lot of good. But then it got so expensive. We just try to have a good site with good content, and the clicks do come. We also pay-per-click on decks.com (which has the advantage of getting typed in a lot just by itself).

Danno6102

How many leads do you guys get from Decks.com? At $100 a month, I would a hope at least a few solid ones. All my leads from other services are for vinyl siding, which is all fun & makes me money, but there's not much creativity in it. I might do it if I can cancel it after a couple months if it doesn't pan out. Bad part is my harddrive crashed & I lost all the pics of my past work, so I have nothing to show customers. Word of advice, burn your pics to CD often.

PressurePros

Do a search on here for the topic. I spend $50 per week and have a CTR of 8% (about 60 hits per day) with a .8 % conversion rate. There are definitely some secrets to a successful PPC campaign.

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Ken Fenner
Pressure Washing PA
Roof Cleaning Services PA

Danno6102

I've read through the threads in the advertising forum a few times. I'm trying different wording & catch phrases, but nothing seems to work. My campaign now says "All guys want a Big Deck" for the title. No Indiana guys steal my idea! What's your average position Ken? I'm starting to wonder if I need to be 1-3 all the time.

PressurePros

I am usually 3-5 on the better keywords.

One word to remember in PPC campaigns is relevance. That wod should stay paramount from CTR to conversion.

For example: Someone types "deck builders" (which is diferent than deck builder)
The searcher will seek that phrase on the search page results. Your headline for that key phrase should be Deck Builder. You can use the subheadlines to further affirm that yous is the page that is relevant to what they seek. You can be fancy, use out of the box thinking, or use some type of gimmicky catch phrase but that is not my style. I use the subheadlines to outline two key benefits.

Deck Builder
Afford Your Dream Deck
Our Pictures Tell A Story

Boring? In the standard sense.. yes. But, the promise of pictures is a powerful one. You have also hit a key button. Everyone wants to build their dream deck on a budget. There is a ton of crap on the internet and even google cannot filter it out. Letting someone know you have a no BS site that will give them the information they want is critical.

The nice thing about PPC campaigns is that you can land them wherever you want. You can make special landing pages or in the above instance, you can send them directly to your portfolio.

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Ken Fenner
Pressure Washing PA
Roof Cleaning Services PA

Danno6102

Ok, been playing with this some more. Think I see some of the problems with my CTR. I had a HUGE number of content impressions. So I run a report & they are mostly from MySpace! WTF?! So I used the site exclusion tool to get rid of that damn thing.

I also changed my wording to draw more attention to my add & peak some interest like Ken suggested. Seems to be working, I am seeing a very slight increase in clicks. So coupled with getting rid of myspace, my CTR should increase. Still not seeing as many clicks as I would like though.

Thanks for the help all!
Dan

Grumpyplumber

Dan, I just checked your site...I'm no web designer, but there seems to be no mention of your location, neither on the site, nor in your "meta" content.
I can't recall if you said you're PPC, but if you are it would seem silly to pay for people in England to look for you to build a deck, all to discover you're a wee bit far away.

Danno6102

My PPC campaign is localized to just 35 mile radius around my zipcode, so no worries of any Brits clicking it unless they are in Indy when they search.

I probably should add some clearer location text in there somewhere. I'm no web designer either. Just threw it together myself on GoDaddy. Will probably upgrade the site in a year or so, but am on a limited advertising budget at the moment.

Maybe I'm jsut expecting more out of it, than I will ever get. Is there anyway to find out the searching demographics in Indianapolis, like what percentage of the population uses the web or yellow pages to find a contractor, etc.?

dougchips

My two cents, the national average for decks is 76.8%, you might want to use that figure instead of your local figure. Why do you have the paypal donate icon on your pages? If people actually donate let me know and I will add one.

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Grumpyplumber

Dan, you have absolutely nothing to lose by spending some time tweaking your site and researching how to improve rankings.
Just don't drop what you do already to get work in.
I'm close to the same situation...recently bought a domain, but slowly learning about all the "keyword", "meta" and other lil' tricks...just treating it like a hobby for now...from what I've heard it doesn't happen over night

Giftcard

Dan,
When did you start your adds?

Danno6102

The donate button is so people can use their dredit cards. It's the only icon that fit the way poeple would pay for a deck or roof. The price isn't always the same so I needed a checkout that reflected that & the donate option was the perfect fit. I need to add it to a seperate page, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Campaigns have been running for probably 3 weeks now. I'm getting a few clicks per day now, but still nothing.

dougchips

Could you use something like this and then add a header with "click here to purchase", and when they click on the logo it re-directs them to your payment page?

Attached Images

 

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To get the best replacement windows, or sun rooms contact the replacement windows experts at FHI Vinyl Window Company.