👋 Hey, Jon here! Since launching this newsletter, the most popular article is a breakdown I did in August of PPC Impressions to Sold Jobs, so I decided to run another report and summarize it below for October data! As always, if you have questions or data topics you’d like to see talked about more, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or send me an e-mail at Jon@SearchLightDigital.io.
PS - I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends. Thank you so much for following The Data-Driven Trades :)
Introduction
Click-through-rate and cost-per-click are commonly used metrics to analyze the performance of PPC ads but the story (and data) usually stops there.
If you are curious about how many of those impressions and clicks from PPC actually turn into revenue, you’re going to love this data!
In this article, I’m going to walk through each step of the customer journey from PPC ad impression to sold job:
Impression —> Click —> Lead —> Matched Lead —> Booked Job
Ultimately, we want to know how many PPC clicks it took to get a sold job in this sample.
I’ll also look at various percentages, like the % of impressions that become booked jobs so that you have a reference and a way to begin to understand the customer journey through PPC.
This data is from over 1.1 million impressions from HVAC businesses across the United States for the month of October.
What Percentage of Impressions Click PPC Ads?
We’ll start off with the most basic metric here by looking at click-through-rate.
In this sample, 3.59% of ad impressions clicked on a PPC ad.
So for every 100 times a PPC ad was served and seen, between 3-4 people clicked on that ad.
This is up slightly from August (3.25%).
But we don’t want to stop after just measuring click through rates.
What Percentage of Clicks Turn into Leads?
Once somebody clicks on a PPC ad, we’ll want to know if they contacted the business via a phone call, form submission, chat or online scheduler.
In this sample, 16.12% of people who clicked a PPC ad ended up contacting the business.
This is also up slightly from August (15.23%).
That means for every 7 clicks on a PPC ad, 1 turned into a lead.
So far we have the following benchmarks:
3.59% of people clicked a PPC ad
16.12% of people who clicked a PPC ad contacted the business
What Percentage of Leads Are A Sellable Opportunity?
Just because somebody contacts your business doesn’t automatically qualify that person as a lead.
For example, a customer outside of your service area might click your PPC ad to call your business and then learn on the phone that you don’t service their area.
That shows up as a lead and would factor into your cost per lead, but that customer never has a chance of turning into revenue.
We want to measure leads that have a chance of turning into revenue, so we want to measure leads that ended up in the CRM with a sellable opportunity.
In this sample, 36% of the PPC leads ended up in the CRM with a sellable opportunity, which is the same rate as August.
The progression continues:
3.59% of people clicked a PPC ad
16.12% of people who clicked a PPC ad contacted the business
36% of people who clicked a PPC ad and contacted the business ended up with a sellable opportunity
What Percentage of PPC Clicks Turned Into Sold Jobs?
In this sample, 3.37% of PPC clicks turned into a sold job at an average ticket of $3,554.80 (service and installation).
That means it took 33 PPC clicks to get a sold job in this sample.
This is slightly higher than August (25 PPC clicks per 1 sold job).
Also, 0.12% of PPC impressions turned into a sold job, which means 900 PPC impressions were needed in this sample to get a sold job.
Closing Thoughts
PPC performance varies widely based on a number of factors, so it might not be an apples-to-apples comparison to your business, but looking at the data in this way (telling a story about revenue flow) can help you prioritize optimization efforts:
Awareness:
3.59% of people clicked a PPC ad —> if your click-through-rate is lower than expected, you/your vendor can and should leverage ad extensions, add negative keywords, update your copy, create relevant landing pages, etc.
Consideration:
16.12% of people who clicked a PPC ad contacted the business —> if the % of people who click your ads and turn into a lead is lower than expected, do a deep dive review of your website to ensure it loads quickly, is easy to navigate and has the correct information
Intent
36% of people who clicked a PPC ad and contacted the business ended up with a sellable opportunity - if leads aren’t matching to new opportunities in your CRM, make sure that your teams are responding to leads in a timely manner and that they have all the info they need (service area, specials, services) to provide a good customer experience
Decision
58% of matched leads with a sellable opportunity turned into a sold/closed job - make sure your sales team has what they need to close deals and consider outbound follow-ups if you want to improve close rates
Ultimately, your marketing strategy has to do one very important job: get you consideration in a moment of need.
But as you can see from the data, you/your vendors/your team may need to optimize other parts of the buyer’s journey to ensure the clicks driven from PPC turn into revenue.
As changes are implemented in different parts of the that journey, you can track these metrics (look at more than just click-through-rate and cost per lead) to see how it affects the performance of your revenue flow.
Until next time . . .
-Jon
PS - Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃