HOW MUCH DOES GOOGLE ADS COST?

This is a huge topic. In order to make sure we cover every aspect about the cost of running Google Ads, we have to break it down into sections. As always, there are lots of variables to consider.

You're Paying Per Click

Google Ads is often referred to as "PPC" or "Pay-per-Click" advertising. This means that you're paying every time someone clicks on your ad. You don't actually pay a flat rate fee, and you don't pay per lead. If you're not running ads properly, it's very possible that 85%-90% of people who click on your ad don't end up calling your business. The cost you'll pay per click is determined by the following:

• Your location
• Your competition
• Your daily budget
• Your keywords
• Your bid strategy
• Your Google Ads Quality Score

Now, let's take a closer look at each of these.

Market Location

The cost of running ads is going to be primarily determined by your location. Advertising a junk removal business in Los Angeles is going to be a lot more expensive than it will be in Huntsville, Alabama. I recently had a business in LA ask me to audit their ads account, which was being managed by another PPC agency. They were paying $20 per click, and almost $120 per phone call. This campaign specifically was not built properly, but the high CPC (cost per click) is due to the amount of competition in this market. Los Angeles has an enormous population, as well as LOTS of competition.

Competition

More people to serve = More competition.

So why does more competition mean higher cost per click? Because regardless of the YouTube videos that have told you differently, there is a limited number of people looking for your service. The idea that there is always enough work for everyone, is just not true. It just isn't. In a busy market with a high population, there will absolutely be more search volume, but it's not an infinite number.

In Los Angeles, there are roughly 10,000-15,000 searches every month for terms related to "junk removal," according to Google's Keyword Planner Tool. This might seem like a very high number, but that's for terms related to "junk removal." This includes people looking for donation centers, trash pickup, scrapyards and all kinds of stuff we don't actually do. When we filter everything out and look at only the good terms, such as "Junk Haulers" or "Junk Removal Service," that number shrinks significantly. Now, there are only about 6,000-7,000 searches per month that we want to show up for.

This is still a lot of volume. However, you have to consider the fact that only a small percentage of people searching will actually click on your ad. An even smaller percentage of people will click on an ad that isn't in the #1 position at the very top of the page. Every time someone searches for your service, a virtual "auction" takes place. Every competitor is bidding "X" amount of dollars to have their ad show at the top, for that search.

In Los Angeles, you're not competing against 5 companies. You're competing against 30+ junk removal businesses. In order to show your ad over theirs, you have to be willing to pay more per click and outbid them in the auction.

However, it's not always that simple. Sometimes in smaller markets, there will be much less competition, and you'll still pay a lot per click. If there are only 1000 searches per month on Google for your service, even having only 5 or 6 competitors is going to have the same effect as 30 competitors in LA. If your competitors are willing to pay $25-$35 per click, then that's what it's going to cost to compete. Not all is lost, though. Having ads that outperform your competitors will give Google a reason to show your ads over your competitors at a lower cost. This is why it's so important to hire someone who knows what they're doing.

*Shameless Plug*

It's me. I know what I'm doing. But anyways, enough about that. Let's take a look at the next "factor" on our list.

Daily Budget

Ok, this one is simple. If your competitors are willing to spend $400/day, and you're only willing to spend $50, Google is going to show their ads much more often than yours.

In most markets, we aim to get leads (not clicks) at a cost of $35-$50. So, if you're only spending $50/day, it's unreasonable to expect multiple calls every day. Personally, I recommend at least spending $100-$150/day, but it depends on your specific needs and what you want to get out of Google Ads. It's definitely possible to get great leads with a lower budget, but it's unlikely that you'll get a lot of them.

Keywords

The keywords that you're bidding on plays a huge role here. For example, you might be able to get clicks for $1-$3 for search terms like "Free Scrap Pickup" or "Mattress Disposal Near Me." These obviously aren't great search terms. Even if the searcher ends up calling, they likely won't turn into a customer.

Terms like "Hoarding Cleanup Near Me" and "Same Day Junk Removal" might average a $25 cost per click. That's because your competitors are willing to pay more to show up for these terms, since the searcher likely has high intent to purchase.

Bid Strategies

Your bid strategies will have a large impact on your overall costs. We won't dive too deep into this topic, but I will explain why this will affect how expensive your campaign is, followed by an example.

Company A is using a Maximize Clicks strategy. Their goal is to send as many people as possible to their landing page or website, for the lowest cost. With this strategy, they apply a Maximum Bid amount of $12 to the campaign.

Company B hired Ads by Josh to set up conversion tracking on their landing page and their account. (Ok - I'm really done plugging myself.) We use a mix of different conversion-based bidding strategies. Instead of just sending everybody to our landing page, we bid more for searchers that are likely to convert, and less for searchers that are unlikely to convert.

An example:

With Company B's campaign, we've found that people are more likely to convert if they are:

• Male
• Between the Ages of 35 and 50
• Searching on a Smart Phone
• Searching on a Weekday
• Searching Between 10AM and 12PM
• Searching from Zip Code 12345

and people are less likely to convert if they are:

• Female
• Between the Ages of 20 and 35
• Searching on a Desktop
• Searching on a Weekend
• Searching Between 12PM and 2PM
• Searching from Zip Code 67890

In this made-up scenario, we would bid MORE when a searcher meets the first set of parameters, and less for the latter set.

We would bid more to show up for men during those times on those devices, bringing our average cost per click to $19.

However, we would bid less to show up for women searching on a desktop, resulting in less clicks overall.

Even though Company B has a higher cost per click, our campaign is more targeted. We're only paying for the best searches possible, yielding a high conversion rate of 40%. This means for every 10 clicks, 4 of those searches end up calling our business. At $19/click with a 40% conversion rate, Company B would be receiving leads for $47.50.

Company A has a lower cost per click of $12, but they're converting at a lower rate of 20%, since they aren't targeting specific groups of people. So, the overall cost per lead for Company A would come out to $60.00.

Even with a higher cost per click, Company B will spend less to hit their goal.

There are many different bid strategies available to choose from, and there's really an endless number of possibilities here. But hopefully you get my point - bid strategy has a lot to do with your overall Google Ads costs.

Quality Scores

"Quality Score" is a metric used by Google to determine how well your ad will perform in an auction. I don't want to focus too much on this section, because nobody fully understands how Quality Scores are determined, aside from Google. Here's what we do know.

Google will assign a Quality Score for all of your keywords in your campaign. The Quality Score is measured on a scale of 1-10. 1 being the lowest quality, and 10 being the highest.

If your ads aren't relevant to what people are searching for, it will have a negative impact on your Quality Score for that specific keyword. 

If your landing page isn't converting well and people are just leaving right away, it will negatively affect your Quality Score.

Lastly, if people aren't clicking on your ad, it will lead to a lower Quality Score.

If you have a 10/10 Quality Score for the term "Junk Removal" Google will show your ad higher than your competitors a lot of the time, at a much lower cost per click.

If you have a 1/10 Quality Score for the term "Furniture Removal" Google will make sure your clicks cost a ton of money, or your ad doesn't show.

At least this is what Google claims. I personally have never noticed too much of a difference in performance between low and high Quality Scores.

Nonetheless, I had to include it. It's safe to say that if your ads suck, over time Google will catch on and make sure it costs you.  If your ads are amazing, Google will reward you.

Google Ads costs a lot of money. If done properly, you'll get lots of work from it. If done poorly, it will burn a hole in your wallet quickly. On average, junk removal businesses should expect to pay $35-$50 per conversion with a well-rounded campaign.

There are many other things that will affect the overall cost of your campaign. Some of these include:

• Your landing page
• Your service radius
• Your manager's fee

While I won't go into detail about all of these, I will give you a quick piece of advice:

There is no point in running ads that send people to the homepage on your website. You need to use a landing page that is built to convert. Your website will not work. I've done a ridiculous amount of testing in this area. Take my word on this.

If you don't want to hire someone to run your ads, you will NEED the following:

Landing Page Builder

I recommend using Instapage. It's extremely user friendly, and there are many templates to choose from. Once again, skipping this step is not optional. You will waste money sending people to your website, regardless of how great it is.

Cost: $199/Month

Click Fraud Protection

You need some sort of click fraud defender protecting your ads from fraudulent/competitor clicks. Without this protection in place, there's nothing stopping your competitors from clicking on your ads over and over again, costing you money. Clickcease is the best option in my opinion.

Cost: $69/Month

Call & Form Tracking Software

This is absolutely required. If you're not tracking conversions and reporting them back to Google, you'll never know what is working and what isn't. You'll also never be able to use conversion-based bidding strategies. CallRail will easily integrate with Google Ads. Every time you get a phone call or form submission from your Google Ads, CallRail will automatically report it as a conversion to Google.

Cost: $95/Month + Minutes

The total cost of all the tools needed to run your own campaign comes out to $363/Month.

If you are wondering what it costs to hire a manager, I will build and manage your campaign for you. Everything I just listed above is included, no strings attached. I charge anywhere from $400 to $500 per month.

You won't save much money by running ads yourself. But, if you're wanting to do them on your own for the experience and knowledge, knock yourself out.

HOW LONG DOES GOOGLE ADS TAKE TO WORK?

This actually isn't very difficult to answer. My short answer is 60-90 days. Earlier in the post I boasted about Google Ads being the fastest way to grow your business. I also said that Google Ads can provide results almost immediately. With a well-built campaign, you will start getting phone calls as early as the next day, but optimizing the campaign takes much longer. First, let's talk about the typical Google Ads timeline.

Day 1: We submit our ads for approval.

Google will take at least the first day to review and approve our ads. There are all kinds of rules and policies we must follow in order to show ads on Google's platform. Although this usually only takes 1 day, it can take longer. I personally have never seen this take longer than 3 full days.

Week 1: Our ads start showing.

Once our ads have been approved, Google will start showing our ads to potential customers. Google doesn't trust a brand-new campaign, so expect to wait 1-5 days before your website actually starts getting traffic. Google places our campaign in what's referred to as a "learning period." Every time we make significant changes to the campaign, Google will restart the learning period. This typically takes a full 5 days.

Weeks 2-4: The campaign starts getting traffic and generating data.

During this period, the campaign should not be paused or interrupted. We need to let it run and gather data for us. We should make only necessary changes and adding in negative keywords.

Month 2: We start using a conversion-based bidding strategy and using data to our advantage.

Since we have 30 days of data from the campaign, we can start to use it to figure out who is more likely to convert in our campaign. From this point forward, we will be making continuous changes to further improve performance.

Month 3: Things start to become more consistent.

Now, we have 60 days' worth of data. We want to audit our campaign to identify patterns. We use those patterns to make further improvements and find out our best days, times, etc. We will reallocate our budget accordingly.

Month 4 and Beyond: The campaign gradually improves, and we continue to do what we've been doing.

There will always be work to be done. Whether we're testing new ad variations, inserting different headlines, A/B testing our landing pages, or testing new ad extensions, we're always improving something. The longer the campaign runs, and the more data we collect, the better our campaign will perform.

If you're strapped for cash, and you need something to bail you out so you can pay your bills by Monday, Google Ads isn't for you. You have to look at this as a short-term investment.

SHOULD YOU RUN YOUR OWN CAMPAIGN, OR HIRE A PROFESSIONAL?

I already touched on the cost of running ads yourself or hiring a manager earlier in this post. Let's just do a quick recap.

Costs

Running Ads Yourself: At least $363/month

Hiring Ads by Josh: $400-$500/month

Average PPC Agency: $600-$750/month

DIY Ads Pros and Cons

Pros:

• You will learn a lot about the platform
• You will understand everything that's going on in the account
• You can make changes as you see fit

Cons:

• It will take a long time to learn how to do everything correctly
• You'll need to invest lots of money before you understand what works and what doesn't
• If something goes wrong within the account, you're responsible for fixing it
• It will take time away from running your business
• You'll probably get a lower ROI for awhile

Hiring an Agency Pros and Cons

Pros:

• An agency will have more experience, and we know what works
• We run ads for dozens of other companies just like yours, meaning we have a lot more data to go off of
• You don't have to do anything other than answer the phone
• In most cases, you'll make much more money, especially from the start
• You won't waste as much money on poor traffic
• You can focus solely on running your business
• It really isn't that much cheaper to do it yourself

Cons:

• You will have to pay a monthly fee, and if you don't pay your manager they will stop working on your campaign
• There are lots of digital marketing agencies out there that will take your money even if they don't know what they're doing, so you have to vet them thoroughly
• You may feel that you have less control over your campaign

Conclusion

It all really depends on what you're looking for. If you're only looking to run ads yourself to save money, you're doing it for the wrong reason. You won't really save any more than $100 or $200, and it could cost you tens of thousands of dollars if the ads don't perform like you thought they would.

If you want to do them yourself because you want full control of your campaign and you're ok with investing lots of time and money into this, give it a shot. But please for the love of God, make sure you're using a landing page, conversion tracking, and click fraud defender.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU SPEND ON GOOGLE ADS?

Earlier in this post I briefly discussed budget. We'll go a bit more in depth here. The amount of money you spend on Google Ads should be based on how much revenue you want to get out of it.

When trying to determine estimated revenue, there are a couple variables to consider.

1. Your average job price
2. Your average booking rate

If you're charging what most junk haulers charge in your market, your average job price should be around $400. If your average sale is less than this, you it will negatively impact your ROI.

If your average booking rate is less than 50%, it will adversely affect your ROI. "Booking rate" is the percentage of people who book an appointment versus the amount of people who call you. If 10 customers call you, and you book 5 of them, you would have a booking rate of 50%.

If you aren't booking at least 50% of your calls, it's likely due to what you're saying on the phone. Check out my Junk Removal Phone Script article.

If your pricing is average, and your booking rate is average, you should expect at least a 4x ROI. If you spend $1,000 you should make $4,000.

So, if you want to make $20,000, you should spend $5,000.

Please understand, simply running ads isn't a foolproof machine that spits out $4 for every $1 spent. The campaign has to be well-rounded, you have to be good on the phone and you have to be a great salesman to convince people to spend money.

THINGS A JUNK REMOVAL COMPANY SHOULD CONSIDER BEFORE RUNNING GOOGLE ADS

I think I've covered a lot in this article. Hopefully the information I've shared with you today will help you decide if Google Ads is right for your business. Let's just do a quick recap.

Should you invest in Google Ads?

You should only consider running Google Ads if:

1. You're willing to give it time.
2. You understand that it's an investment, and you'll get what you give.
3. You're in a busy area.
4. You're a great salesman or you have great salesmen on your team.
5. You're currently advertising in other ways.

This is not a switch that you can turn off and on. It is not as simple as giving me $400, spending $50/day on ads, giving it 2 weeks, and making $1,000/day. It just doesn't work that way. I made sure to mention that you should be using other methods of advertising before running Google Ads, because you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. There will be bad days with Facebook Ads. There will be bad days with SEO leads. There will be bad days with referrals. There will be bad days with Google Ads. You can't rely on any one system to run your business for you.

Although it may seem like I'm talking you out of running ads, that's not my intention at all. This platform is only for businesses who are serious and want to give it everything they've got.

When done properly, Google Ads is extremely profitable, and the fastest way to make more money for your junk removal business.

"Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins."

-Dan Kennedy