Measuring Revenue Flow from Impression to Sold Job: August 2022
PPC Edition
Introduction
If you have ever been curious about your customer’s full journey from pay-per-click ads (Google and Bing), from impression to sold job and every single step in between, you’re going to love today’s research report.
You’ll get to see what percentage of impressions turn into clicks, what percentage of those clicks turn into leads, matched leads and ultimately sold jobs so that you’ll have some benchmarks in understanding where your customers drop off in the revenue flow process.
By now, you probably know that our team at SearchLight has built a robust tracking platform to follow customers through the journey to purchase to help you optimize your business and marketing strategy.
Because of that technology, you’ll get to see anonymized, aggregated PPC-only data from HVAC contractors for the month of August that can help you better understand how revenue flows into your business from this ad channel, which can help you make performance predictions and strategy adjustments.
What Percentage of Impressions Click PPC Ads?
We tracked over 1.1 million impressions to PPC ads in August, and this is our highest point in the funnel.
A customer performed a search and your ad showed up.
The next step in their journey, if the ad is relevant and compelling enough to stand out from the crowd, is to click the ad (to call your business directly or go to your website).
In the month of August, we tracked 36,050 clicks from those impressions, which means that 3.25% of PPC impressions clicked an ad in this sample.
Remember, your performance may vary as PPC is different across markets (this is a sample size of 20 contractors in all areas of the US, but still keep that in mind) but now you have something to compare with your marketing performance.
If you’re looking at a report of clicks on your PPC ads, you now at least have a data point and can make an assumption that about 3.25% of those impressions actually click your ad.
What Percentage of Clicks Turn into Leads?
We tracked 36,050 clicks, and from those clicks, we tracked 5,489 total leads.
Note: This is the total number of leads. These leads could be multiple calls from one customer, they could be your techs calling in, wrong numbers, existing customers checking in on appointments, etc. That’s why we track match rate and ultimately booked job rate to see what turned into revenue.
Based on this performance of total leads, we found that 15.23% of PPC clicks turned into a lead.
This is another data point to the story of revenue flow:
3.25% of impressions turned into clicks
15.23% of those clicks turned into leads
We can also look at impression to lead, which was 0.5%, meaning you need 200 impressions for every lead.
Fascinating stuff so far, let’s keep going.
What Percentage of Leads Are Actually A Sellable Opportunity?
We created the metric, “match rate” to help answer this - our tracking platform looks for records in the CRM that came after a lead that have an opportunity associated with it to remove duplicates, wrong number calls and leads that won’t turn into revenue.
In this example, we tracked 1,988 matched leads.
This means that 36% of total PPC leads ended up in the CRM with a sellable opportunity.
The data points continue to build:
3.25% of impressions turned into clicks
15.23% of those clicks turned into leads
36% of those leads matched to a new opportunity in the CRM
So far, we know that .18% of impressions turn into a matched opportunity in the CRM and that 5.5% of PPC clicks turn into a matched opportunity in the CRM.
What Percentage of Matched Leads Turn Into Sold Jobs?
Of the 1,988 matched leads we tracked, 1,429 turned into revenue (sold and schedule or closed and completed).
That means 71.8% of matched leads from PPC turned into revenue for the month of August.
3.25% of impressions turned into clicks
15.23% of those clicks turned into leads
36% of those leads matched to a new opportunity in the CRM
71.8% of matched leads turned into sold jobs
Because we have the full revenue flow picture, we get some interesting insight like this:
.13% of impressions from PPC (from this sample) turned into sold jobs and 3.9% of clicks from PPC turned into sold jobs!
This means (again, in this sample) every 800 PPC impressions turned into 1 sold job, and every 25 clicks turned into 1 sold job:
How PPC Website Visitors Converted on HVAC Websites
Before you start optimizing for more impressions and clicks, it’s important to remember that lead handling processes can significantly impact how well clicks and leads convert to sold revenue.
If your website doesn’t load, 2 billion clicks would still return $0 to your business.
That’s an extreme example, but you can optimize your ad copy, strategy, website, conversion tools and the way you handle leads to improve all of these numbers and put you in the driver’s seat for your business growth.
Let’s look at how PPC visitors converted on the websites across this sample.
Note that not all of these websites offered chat and online scheduling, so it’s not an apples to apples comparison, but is still useful in understanding customer behavior:
79% of PPC leads converted via Phone
11% of PPC leads converted via Form
5% of PPC leads converted via Online Scheduling
5% of PPC leads converted via Chat
Keep in mind, some of the phone conversions are from click-to-call, when someone calls your business right from an ad.
In a previous research report we did, we found that 62.4% of Google PPC calls were click-to-call so it’s safe to assume a similar percentage here.
As you think about optimizing your business, you are now armed with a case study of how customers convert, so you can optimize the experience you give them to help meet their needs.
Closing Thoughts
While you probably don’t think of paid ads in this way, it is the ultimate game of attention and conversion arbitrage.
Where can you get impressions that convert to sold jobs at the best possible price?
Can your business do more with fewer leads by improving the customer experience and charging more?
Can your business do more with fewer clicks because of a pristine website experience that makes it easier to convert?
For example, my previous article detailed how Bing is favorable in attention and conversion arbitrage because not that many HVAC companies advertise on the channel.
Arbitrage can work in the reverse, like it did for some contractors with Google Local Service Ads as it got less performant with more competition.
Our mission is to unlock the reality of advertising performance and help you stay ahead of those trends instead of playing catch-up when it’s the most painful: business is slow.
Part of that reality is understanding revenue flow, well-documented in this article, and applying it to your business so you can optimize that right parts of that flow for your own growth goals.
I hope this “lands” and gives you some new ways to think about your customers and the actions they take leading up to purchasing from you.
Do you have a question, topic idea or data point you want me to write about?
Shoot me an e-mail at Jon@SearchLightDigital.io.
Until next time…
-Jon