Local and service businesses
The sale happens on the phone, in a van or at a counter, which is exactly where most advertising measurement gives up.
You are a trade, a clinic, a salon, a firm or an operator with a service area. Customers call, fill in a form or walk in, and a person closes the work.
What we keep finding
Four things that are true in almost every one of these businesses.
Every call counts as a lead
Including the wrong numbers, the suppliers and the nine second hang ups. Set a minimum duration and the cost per real enquiry usually moves further in a week than a month of bid changes would.
Nobody knows which enquiries became jobs
The job is booked in a diary or a field service tool that never speaks to the advertising. Connecting those two is the single highest value thing most of these businesses can do.
The service area is advertised as a circle
A radius around a postcode, when the profitable work is in three suburbs and the loss making work is the long drive in the fourth.
Out of hours enquiries fall on the floor
A third of the calls arrive when nobody can answer, and the advertising keeps paying for them at the same rate as the ones somebody picks up.
What we measure here
The numbers this sector lives on.
Every business gets the fundamentals. These are the ones that matter here and would be a waste of money somewhere else.
- Call tracking with a minimum duration, so a wrong number is not a conversion
- Forms and calls counted as the same enquiry when they come from one person
- Jobs won imported back from your diary or field service tool
- Cost per job, by suburb and by service, rather than cost per click
- Hours of the day and days of the week separated, because the answer rate is not flat
- Google Business Profile treated as a channel with numbers, not as a listing
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
A taxi company buying phone calls with no way of knowing which became rides. This is the sector that work was built in.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
We only spend a few hundred a month. Can you help?
Probably not on a retainer, and we would rather say that than take it. At that level the honest advice is a one off piece of work to get the tracking right, after which you can run it yourself.
Most of our work comes from word of mouth.
Then the first job is measuring that properly, because businesses in this position routinely credit advertising for work a neighbour recommended, and then spend more on the advertising.
Do you do the Google Business Profile as well?
Yes, as part of the measurement rather than as a separate product. It is often the highest intent traffic a local business gets and the least examined.
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.