The Power of Advanced Targeting for Fabrication Shops & Engineering Firms
Leveraging Google Ads for lead generation can be a game-changer for technical services providers. They key to maximizing your return on investment (ROI) is targeting the right audience with the right message. At Phoenix Technical Marketing (Phoenix), we specialize in generating leads for engineering firms and fabrication shops using Google Ads, ensuring that every dollar spent translates into high-quality leads and, ultimately, bigger and better customers. In this article, we’ll dive deep into advanced targeting strategies for Google Ads, sharing actionable insights that you can apply to your own campaigns to maximize results.
Our Advanced Targeting Strategies
Keyword Selection and Architecture
Choosing the right keywords and architecting the campaigns and ad groups is absolutely key in setting up a campaign for success. Using broad, generic keywords is a recipe for failure, as it will result in your ad being seen and clicked by a ton of non-deal prospects who are going to cost you $ every time they click your ad. Or worse, they may even give you a call and waste your time in addition to wasting your ad spend.
When doing keyword research, we identify search trends and categorize keywords based on exactly what a user is searching for. Once we have a robust list of keywords, we organize them into tightly themed ad groups. This ensures that each ad group targets a specific subset of your audience with highly relevant ads. For instance, an ad group for “structural steel fabrication” would include keywords, ads, and landing pages specifically related to that service. This tight alignment between keywords, ads, and landing pages significantly improves your Quality Score, reduces cost-per-click (CPC), and increases your ad’s relevance, leading to higher click-through and conversion rates.
Then we analyze the intent level of those keywords and rank them to determine which keywords to bid on. For example, the buying intent level of someone searching for “Structural Fabrication Company” is much higher than someone searching for “Fabricator.” And when it comes to bidding and optimization, we should be willing to pay more for the former keyword. The only way to do that is to properly structure the campaign and ad groups so that you can control the ad spend and bidding structure to each ad group according to the keyword types contained within that group. This is also critical for scalability. The ability to focus the ad spend on high value keywords is key for being able to scale results without exponentially increasing the cost per conversion.
Additionally, we continuously refine our keyword strategy through A/B testing and performance analysis. By monitoring which keywords drive the most conversions and adjusting bids accordingly, we ensure that your budget is allocated to the most effective keywords. This ongoing optimization process is crucial for maintaining high performance and achieving a strong ROI.
Audience Targeting
Google Ads allows for highly granular audience targeting. We can target potential customers based on their location, income level, job type, interests, and even hobbies. For technical service providers, this means your ads can reach decision-makers and influencers in the industries you serve. By creating custom audiences and lookalike audiences based on your ideal customer profiles, we ensure that your ads are seen by those most likely to need and pay for your services.
Location targeting is critical, especially for businesses that serve specific geographic areas. We can target by country, state, city, or even a radius around a particular location. For example, if you provide engineering services in New York, we can ensure your ads are only shown to users in that area or people searching specifically for services in that area, maximizing the relevance and effectiveness of your campaigns. We are also able to exclude searches from specific countries to prevent people located in other countries from seeing your ad when searching for your services in the US.
Income targeting allows us to focus on users who are more likely to afford your services. By targeting higher income brackets, we can ensure that your ads reach users with the financial capability to engage your services.
Company and industry targeting are particularly useful for B2B technical service providers as it allows us to target users based on their industry and company size. This level of precision ensures that your ads are reaching the type of people who are most likely to need your services.
Google also allows you upload a custom audience, meaning a list of people (names, emails, & phone numbers) that look like your ideal customers. We typically don’t need our customers to give us this because we already have it. We have data from tens of thousands of leads for technical services that we can use to quickly teach google what your ideal customer looks like. It can drastically shorten the time needed for Google to start producing consistent leads. That’s something that you’re not going to find with other marketing agencies.
By leveraging Google’s audience targeting capabilities, we can ensure that your ads are seen by the right people at the right time, significantly increasing the likelihood of attracting high-quality leads.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are just as important as the keywords you bid on. They help you avoid wasting ad spend on irrelevant traffic. For instance, a structural engineering firm doesn’t want clicks from users searching for “structural engineering jobs” or “best structural engineering schools.” This includes adding broad negative keywords that are commonly associated with low value and low intent, such as “free,” “cheap,” or “how to.” By continually refining and expanding your negative keyword list, we maximize the likelihood that your ads are shown to users with intent to buy.
As industry experts with a wide customer base, we have developed thousands of industry-specific negative keywords that we use to target you search traffic and convert leads at higher rates.
By implementing and continuously refining your negative keyword list, we ensure that your ad spend is focused on high-intent searches, maximizing your ROI.
Using Google’s Machine Learning to Your Advantage
Google Ads’ machine learning capabilities can optimize for conversions, but they need the right data to learn from. By setting up comprehensive conversion tracking through Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, we feed valuable data back to Google. This includes not just who clicked on your ad, but who converted into a lead, who made it to the proposal stage, and who ultimately became a customer. This helps Google understand what a high-quality lead looks like, further refining and improving your ad targeting over time.
Conversion tracking setup involves placing tracking codes (or tags) on key pages of your website, such as the thank-you page after a form submission. This allows us to track specific actions that users take on your site and attribute those actions back to your ads.
Because we provide all our customers with a CRM, we are able to integrating Google Ads with your CRM. This allows us to track the entire customer journey, from the initial click on your ad to the final sale. By feeding this data back to Google, we can train the algorithm to identify and optimize for high-value actions, such as qualified leads or completed sales.
Caution: Google’s Algorithm can have negative consequences if not well-managed. Google’s definition of a good lead can change over time and actually mess up the targeting. Google Ads is a machine learning algorithm and it optimizes based on conversions. If you start getting conversions for poor quality leads and they’re cheap, Google may decide that leads from those types of people are cheaper and easier to get so it starts optimizing for those types of leads. In a fairly short amount of time, you can go from 80% quality leads to 20% quality leads. This is one of the reasons you need a team of experts to set up and maintain your Google Ad account.
Leveraging Industry Data & Best Practices
Another benefit of working with Phoenix Marketing is that we have tons of data from all the engineering firms and fab shops we’ve worked with which we use to further optimize your targeting and convert leads at higher rates. We know what times of day and days of the week are best, which landing page structures and CTAs work best for each industry, and best practices for ad copy that attract the right prospects and repel the wrong ones. We’ve learned this through years of experience and you can’t buy that data.
Case Study: Elevated Steel
Elevated Steel, a client of Phoenix Technical Marketing, has experienced the benefit of our advanced targeting strategies and achieved an impressive 90:1 return on their marketing spend over a period of many months. By focusing on specific, high-intent keywords and refining their audience targeting, they consistently attract and convert high-value leads. With projects ranging from $90k to over $1M, their monthly ROI sometimes reaches an astounding 200:1.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Poor Targeting
Incorrect targeting can derail your entire campaign. We took over an account for a customer that designs elevated platforms and stairs. The previous agency had “mezzanine” as a negative keyword, not realizing it was critical to their business. This mistake blocked half of their quality traffic. Understanding your business deeply allows us to avoid such costly errors.
Ineffective Ad Spend
Scaling your ad spend without a strategic plan can lead to diminishing returns. By structuring your bidding to scale with demand and continually optimizing based on performance data, we help you efficiently increase your ad spend while maintaining or even improving your ROI.
Unlock the Full Potential of Google Ads
Advanced targeting in Google Ads is not just about getting more clicks; it’s about getting the right clicks. By employing sophisticated targeting strategies, leveraging machine learning, and continuously refining our approach based on data and industry insights, Phoenix Technical Marketing ensures that your Google Ads campaigns drive high-quality leads and substantial ROI. If you’re ready to take your lead generation to the next level, click below to book a meeting or submit a form on our Contact Us page.
About Phoenix Technical Marketing
We’re a team of engineers and marketing gurus with practical experience in construction, manufacturing, and technology, who’ve designed industry-specific solutions that help technical product and service providers scale their business.
Our mission is to help engineering firms and fabrication shops generate more leads and land better customers with repeat, high margin work in their specific area of expertise.
Our proven track record and commitment to ROI make us more than just a marketing agency; we are your growth partner.
How To Get Started
First, you’ll jump on a discovery call with one of our consultants so that we can understand your business, what areas you specialize in, who your target customers are, and how we can help you best.
Then, we’ll come up with a plan to make you findable to people who are already seeking you out (trust us, there’s a LOT of them).
From there, one of two things will happen:
- You’ll love the plan and decide to go implement it on your own. If that’s the case, we’ll wish you the best of luck and ask you keep in touch and let us know how you’re doing.
- You’ll love the plan and ask to become a client of ours so we can personally help you execute, maximize, and profit from it ASAP.
The “worst” that can happen is you have a short phone call with an industry expert (who happens to speak your language and love all the things you love). The best that can happen is we work together to increase your sales and profit several times over.
Remember: We are engineers! We don’t over-promise and make unsubstantiated claims that we can’t deliver. Our confidence is based on data and the results we’ve gotten our customers. Let us do for your business what has worked for so many others! Click below to book a meeting or email us at [email protected].