TL;DR: Paid search campaigns for service-based businesses succeed when you focus on lead quality and actionable data. Unlike e-commerce, where conversions are directly tied to revenue, service providers must rely on tools like CRMs and call tracking to evaluate and refine their performance. Feeding accurate lead data back into Google Ads, assigning value to different lead types, and reallocating budget to top-performing services can have a significant impact. Prioritizing meaningful conversions over volume helps improve efficiency and drive better results.
Four Best Practices for the Best Results
Creating and running successful PPC campaigns for service providers and lead generation businesses differs from managing campaigns for an eCommerce business. In eCommerce, you can directly attribute revenue to each conversion, whereas with a service-based business, that’s almost never the case. Here are four tips and best practices for running effective service provider-focused PPC campaigns.
1. Track Lead Quality and Feed That Data Back to Google
One of the most important aspects of running successful PPC campaigns for lead generation is being able to track lead quality and feed that information back to Google with a CRM or call tracking service that is capable of that. One of the biggest challenges with lead generation PPC is the high amount of spam leads that come in. Filtering those out and providing only qualified leads back into Google Ads will drastically improve the success of your ad campaigns.
Some CRMs, like HubSpot, allow you to score leads. You can set different steps in the lead process from a qualified lead all the way up to a closed deal and feed that back to Google Ads. Doing so will allow you to send back only the quality leads and allow the algorithm to learn from that. The best thing you can do is attribute the revenue from closed deals back to Google Ads, which HubSpot is capable of, but it can also be done through offline conversions.
2. Improve Call Tracking Accuracy
When it comes to call tracking, the last thing you want is to be counting spam calls, wrong numbers, hangups, and such, as conversions. Depending on your business, you may want to set the minimum call time to something like a minute. If you know that a customer could not possibly convert over the phone in under a minute, make sure to set that parameter. It’s important to have a good call tracking system to evaluate call lead quality as well. Some call tracking services, like Call Tracking Metrics, are great for this.
Being able to label unqualified leads, existing customers, and qualified leads is super important for feeding Google Ads quality phone call conversions. The common takeaway here is that if you feed your campaign’s algorithm bad data, you’ll probably get bad results, so feed it good data.
3. Understand the Value of Each Lead
Another important thing is knowing how much a lead is worth to you. Depending on the industry you’re in, this will likely vary by the type of service provider.
Let’s use a dentist as an example. A dental implant lead may be worth $200 to you, but not a general cleaning/exam lead. In this case, you’d split those services out into separate campaigns. Once you have enough conversion data, you should apply an appropriate CPA target. It’s always important to be realistic and look at your current cost-per-conversion.
If your current cost-per-conversion for dental implants is $250, setting a $200 target may work, but you’ll have to adjust as needed if your campaign can’t hit that target, and reevaluate what that lead is worth to you. Let’s say your dental cleaning campaign is running at a $200 cost-per-conversion, and you can’t hit that $100 CPA target. It may be smarter to pause the dental cleaning campaign and focus just on dental implants.
4. Focus on What Works
Some services will be more profitable to advertise than others. Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to pause ads on services that aren’t delivering results, and focus on the ones that are.
Ultimately, running a successful service provider PPC campaign hinges on refining lead quality and understanding the value of each lead for your services, all while setting a realistic Target CPA. Since we don’t have the luxury of sales revenue instantly attributed to conversions like eCommerce, you have to focus on the data, which is lead quality control, and figuring out the sweet spot of a CPA that is profitable to you and drives in enough conversions.
