Swift Lawn And Garden Care, Brisbane Australia. A small/medium sized lawn care business (it's a lot more than one man with a mower) who had had a terrible experience with inexperienced marketers in the past. They were understandably wary, and wanted to start small. Results mattered, big time.
After revamping their entire website we decided to make a highly targeted Google ads campaign. Using geo targeting we identified the most potentially profitable neighborhoods around Brisbane and started showing ads for their lawn care services. We know that the most profitable clients are regular service mowers. A one time mow is worth on average ~$150aud, but a repeat customer will get serviced twice a month for an average of 2 years. After factoring in their discounts, the seasonality etc, this brings the long term value of a regular client to around $4800aud.
Our goal was to generate repeat mowing clients for as little as possible, in the same neighborhoods as much as possible (making it easier for the teams to plan their mowing routes).
Once we had our target neighborhoods, our target keywords (based on a lot of keyword research) and negative keywords (based on even more keyword research), we created the ads and launched the campaign.
And these are the results 9 months later. Lets take it apart:
We spent a total of $4330aud (about $480aud a month) and paid on average $26aud for each new customer acquired. With a total of 165 direct conversions (conversions are counted as jobs booked directly, phone call enquiries are counted separately).
On face value this looks pretty good - at $150aud a job (on average) that means the campaign generated more than $24k, at just $4k ad spend. However this is completely ignoring repeat business!
Good thing we tracked repeat business as well. Approximately 1 out of 3 customers became regular service customers. Each repeat customer is worth ~$4800 over a 2 year period. That's 55 repeat customers for a total long term value of $264,000. But I hear you cry, that's just expected value (based on years of tracked numbers)! How do we know the actual value?
Well luckily we also tracked the on going revenue from total customers created through the campaign each month. As of the last month of the campaign (which is still on going) our reoccurring revenue for the campaign was just shy of $9k. That means an ad spend of $480aud to generate $9kaud in monthly revenue. And that number has been steadily growing each month as the number of repeat customers grows.
This is the power of targeted advertising. With the steady income Swift has a much easier time managing expenses, and scaling their business.
Firstly tracking is everything. Understanding how your marketing is creating returns is incredibly important - make sure you have Google tag manager installed, and conversion tracking set up in Google Ads. The returns we created here are largely due to changes we were able to make based on data!
The most important thing to track is keywords and their performance. You need to have a very healthy, constantly updated negative keyword list for Google ads to work. You also need to track what keywords are working for you and create specific ad groups which are relevant for those keywords. In this campaign we have an ad group for "lawn mowing near me" and another one for "how much to mow my lawn". Most advertisers wouldn't bother! But because the intent of each search is different, we wanted the searcher to see different information. And this has paid off! Relevancy is king, and you get there by tracking your keyword performance.
In summary negative keywords help prevent wastage, and highly relevant keyword ad groups help improve your click rates (and conversion rates). Create geo targeted campaigns so you can see which suburbs perform best for you. And make sure to review this information at least monthly.
And finally, if you would like to create this kind of growth for your business, please don't hesitate to reach out. We would love to work with your company as well!
