Quadruple Your Leads for Your Pavement Maintenance Business Without Spending a Penny More using Google Adwords

This post was contributed by Grayson Carter of Blacktop to Laptop and  Bill’s Sweeping Service

No matter what profession you’re in, generating qualified leads and converting them into customers on a consistent basis is your lifeblood.

Fortunately by harnessing some online tools available today we can generate those same qualified leads at a fraction of the cost of what was available just a few years ago. Today we’re going to discuss doing exactly that with the help of our friend Google Adwords.

What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is a service you can use (provided by Google) to help your business appear at the top of Internet search results when potential customers are searching for your services on the web.

Google Adwords allows you to set up Pay Per Click (PPC) ads to customers searching for your services. Because your ads will only show to people looking for the services you offer, the effectiveness of an Adwords campaign can be significantly better than other forms of advertising.

Why is Adwords a Better Form of Advertising?

I’ll illustrate with an example.

Let’s say you’re a paving contractor and you have a $1,000 marketing budget this month.

You choose to spend that money on sending post cards to everyone on your mailing list. After the cost of designing the postcards, having them printed, and paying for postage, you can afford to send them to 1,000 people.

Sending 1,000 postcards to your customer or prospect list sounds like a pretty effective strategy right?

Well, here’s the catch ’85- You Might Reach 10% of Your ‘Audience’

According to Chet Holmes in his book “The Ultimate Sales Machine” only 3% of people on your list are in a “ready to buy now” mode. Another 7% of people on your list are “open to the idea of buying now”.

That leaves the remaining 90% of people on your list that are getting your postcard in the “not thinking about it” or “not interested” category.

Following that math, the $1000 you spent on postcards would only get your brand in front of 100 (10% of 1000) people that are ready to buy or in the buying mode. Not a bad day.

But we can do better ’85- You Can Reach 50% of Your Audience

What would it look like if we spent that $1000 budget on an Adwords campaign?

After spending some time in the Google Keyword Tool, I found that the average Cost Per Click (CPC- the amount you pay when someone clicks on your Ad) for most paving related keywords (asphalt repair, pothole repair, asphalt contract, parking lot paving) is around $2.00.

That means that every time your ad shows up and somebody clicks on it you get charged $2.00.

With that being said, a budget of $1,000 spent at $2 per click would reach 500 people.

So the question becomes, “how many of those 500 people that clicked on your ad are interested in your service?”

And the answer is: nearly all of them ’85

The power of PPC advertising comes from the ability to only show ads to people that have figuratively raised their hands (by typing in specific keywords into the search bar in Google) and told you they’re interested in what you offer.

So that $1,000 you spent with Adwords is going to reach 500 interested buyers as opposed to only 100 interested buyers with postcards.

That’s a 5x’s more effective use of your budget, 5x’s more interested people looking at your brand, and 5x’s the amount of leads generated.

I’ll take those odds any day.

Grayson Carter


Grayson is an Adwords Consultant and Operations Manager for his family street sweeping business. He’s an avid cyclist, CrossFitter, Rubik’s Cuber, and a self proclaimed bibliophile.

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