Google Ads for Electricians: The Definitive Guide [2024]

What are Google Ads for Electricians?

This is a PPC marketing strategy where electrical companies compete for ad spaces on Google Ads (Google’s PPC platform), paying a specific amount whenever someone clicks on their ad.

Google Ads, while just one of several PPC ad channels, is a popular digital marketing route since Google dominates the online search market and is the first call for most customers looking for local businesses.

How does PPC work?

Regardless of your format or platform, PPC ads follow a similar process.

Advertisers bid on target audiences or specific keywords and participate in lightning-fast auctions, after which the PPC ad platform determines the winning ads and their positions using different criteria.

For example, Google Ads’ criterion is known as Ad Rank, which the platform’s system computes using:

• Bid size: The highest amount bidders will pay for each click.

• Overall search context: The searcher's location and time of the search, the device they're using, the relevance of the search term to your ad vs. other ads, and organic results on the results page.

• Predicted impact of ad assets on ad performance: Ad assets are additional information you can include in your ad, such as phone numbers and links to pages on your site. Google Ads’ algorithm predicts how these assets will affect your ad's performance.

• Ad quality score: Grading your ad's quality compared to other ads.

After the auction, each ad will occupy a position determined by its Ad Rank—the ad with the highest Ad Rank takes the first position, followed by the one with the second-highest Ad Rank.

Why do Electricians Need Google Ads?

Like any other business, the number of job bookings you get depends on ensuring people can find you when they need an electrician. Maintaining a substantial online presence by running PPC ads on social media platforms like TikTok and search engines like Google and Bing is one way to do that.

You can also use PPC ads to appear at the exact moment when people are looking for an electrician, whether it’s through a search engine or a social media platform.

What Types of Ads Are Used in PPC for Electrical Companies?

You can use different types of PPC ads. Each has specific advantages, formats, and associated costs and caters to a different marketing goal. 

So, whether you want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, boost sales, or grow website traffic, there's a PPC ad type perfectly suited for you.

1. Search ads

Electrical search ads are textual ads that appear above and below search results and are triggered whenever someone searches with relevant electrical keywords.

Search ads labeled with a “sponsored tag” usually contain links to specific pages, click-to-contact links, a call to action, and other additional information.

Paid search ads generate leads and sales as they occupy a valuable SERP real estate and appear when a potential customer needs your services. 

2. Instream ads

Instream ads appear in YouTube feeds, before, within, or after YouTube videos, and across Google Display Network’s partners.

You can use instream ads to promote campaigns and retarget customers or prospects so they return to book an appointment. 

3. Display ads

These are rich media ads appearing as banners and other visual formats across digital platforms such as YouTube, websites, and search engines. By using your target audience's demographics, previous internet activity, and interests, you can ensure the right people view your ads.

Display ads reach a vast audience across various online platforms, making them ideal for building awareness, promoting electrical campaigns, and remarketing—i.e., encouraging prospects or customers to return to book an appointment.

4. Paid social media ads

This involves placing ads on social media networks like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. It allows you to reach a significant percentage of the United States population on these platforms.

Because most customers are active on social media, electrical companies can use social media ads to grow their online visibility. 

5. Local Services Ads

Local Services Ads (LSAs) are the most popular PPC format after search ads. But unlike search ads, you pay for leads—messages and calls—not clicks.

LSAs appear at the top of local result pages and contain a maximum of three electrical companies that score high on Google's local ranking factors, alongside their key details and a small map insert.

LSAs' position on local result pages and prominence make them an excellent lead-generation tool with high conversion rates. They also generate highly qualified leads as they appear only when a person wants to hire an electrician nearby. 

You can increase the conversion rates further by following up on the customers who called or sent a message but didn’t book an appointment.

Knowing the importance of following up on LSAs leads, we partnered with Google to create the Local Services Ads integration.

This automatically pulls all LSAs leads into your ServiceTitan account, limiting human errors, data redundancies, and lost leads.

ServiceTitan’s LSAs integration also tracks your LSAs’ performance, displaying their exact return on investment (ROI) in an easy-to-understand analytics dashboard.

This prevents wasted ad spend and provides the insights you need to tweak, pause, or discontinue your campaign.

What Are The Benefits of PPC for Electricians?

Why bother spending on electrical PPC marketing when you can use low-cost online marketing strategies and SEO to increase your organic search rankings instead of paying for PPC ads?

Well, as it turns out, PPC campaigns offer several benefits to electrician companies, including the following:

1. Low barrier to entry

Organic channels such as search engine optimization (SEO) take a while to build momentum and start yielding results. That’s not so with PPC.

Log into your PPC ad platform of choice, place bids on relevant electrical keywords and target audience demographics, and launch your campaign.

Once you’ve launched it, you become eligible for ad auctions and can start seeing leads and conversions immediately.

2. Measurable ROI

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted—the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker.

Although over 100 years old, that quote summarizes a common problem with traditional advertising channels such as TV and radio. 

Luckily, PPC advertising platforms, such as Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads), and social media platforms like Meta Ad Manager, provide detailed campaign performance reports.

The reports reveal the number of people who viewed your ad, the proportion who clicked it, and the percentage who booked your services. 

This data can be used to decide which campaigns to discontinue or optimize and what other marketing initiatives to support such as SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.

3. Full control over ad spend

With PPC, you decide how much you will pay for a click. You also fully control your campaign budget, copy, and duration, ensuring that you stay within your marketing budget.

4. Cost-effectiveness

Unlike traditional media like TV and radio, where your message reaches even low-quality leads, PPC allows you to specify your ad viewers' demographics, interests, and behaviors.

This way, you pay only for leads likely to convert into new customers.

5. Online visibility boost

Aside from generating qualified leads, PPC ads help grow your online visibility. You can reach customers on social media platforms, search engines, websites, and applications.

What Are The Drawbacks of PPC for Electricians?

Electrician PPC marketing, like every other marketing channel, has some disadvantages. That’s why we always advise you to use it alongside other marketing strategies that can compensate for PPC ads’ shortcomings.

Here are some drawbacks of PPC ad campaigns:

Rising costs

PPC ad campaign costs have skyrocketed tremendously over the years––no thanks to the increased competition for keywords and audiences. Google search cost-per-click (CPC) has increased by 19 percent, increasing search advertising ad spend by 17 percent.

That’s because most business owners now appreciate the benefits of PPC advertising and so include it in their marketing budgets.

Increased digital awareness

Customers are increasingly digitally aware and, therefore, try to block out ads with tools. Others prefer to ignore them entirely in favor of organic search results.

Profitable campaigns take time

As we mentioned above, creating a PPC ad campaign is easy. Many guides and YouTube video tutorials show how to set up any PPC ad type.

However, creating a profitable one requires research, several A/B tests, and hours spent analyzing Google Analytics reports. It's equal parts skill, knowledge, and patience.

That’s why we advise you to use a digital or marketing agency specializing in PPC management.

How Does Commercial Electrician PPC Differ from Residential?

Make no mistake: every electrician company, whether commercial or residential, has a lot to gain from PPC marketing campaigns. 

However, the PPC strategy that works for a residential electrical company may not work for a commercial one since their customers, mode of operation, and marketing objectives are different.

PPC for commercial electrical businesses

Commercial electrical businesses serve large buildings such as office complexes, estates, and government agencies. They also usually earn a lot for each job and have large PPC ad budgets.

Joe Karasin, CMO and founder of Karasin PPC, identifies the level of competition as a core distinction between commercial and residential PPC.

“Commercial services tend to be much more competitive,” he says, “so you'll need a larger budget and more competitive bids to succeed.”

Another key feature of commercial PPC that Karasin points out is the target keywords.

“For example, a client of mine is a residential roofer, and one big difference in the roofing industry between commercial and residential is the use of flat roofs. Residential roofers rarely install flat roofs, whereas commercial roofers install them frequently.”

“So including "flat roof" and related keywords in a negative keyword list helped my client avoid a lot of irrelevant clicks on his ads and saved him money,” he adds.

Also, commercial PPC is less about generating leads and more about creating awareness, so customers always consider the company for electrical projects.

As Eliza Fillo, Senior Digital Ads Coordinator at Online Optimism, points out, “Commercial PPC would likely be catering to companies with projects on a much larger scale, with much longer sales cycles and timelines to completion [and more decision makers].”

PPC for residential electrical businesses

Residential electrical businesses cater to the immediate needs of homeowners and tenants, typically handling smaller projects such as home electrical system inspections, repairs, installations, and upgrades.

Residential PPC is not as competitive as commercial and doesn’t require a large budget or competitive bids.

Another feature of residential PPC is the short sales cycle involving only one decision maker—the homeowner, tenant, landlord, etc.

Eliza Fillo states, “PPC campaigns for residential home services businesses target homeowners with much more immediate needs (i.e., a shorter sales cycle).”

Drawing from Online Optimism’s experience running PPC campaigns for residential electrical companies, Eliza adds, “It’s easier to deliver the client warm leads if we target these high-intent searches with highly segmented ad groups and keywords.”

How Can You Start a PPC Campaign For an Electrical Company?

Regardless of the PPC ad type, here are the key steps to follow to kickstart your PPC ad campaign:

1. Define your PPC campaign’s goal

Goal-setting is the first step to creating a successful electrical PPC campaign. It provides a way to track progress and ensures you pick the right PPC ad type and platform.

When setting a PPC goal, consider framing it with the SMART framework to increase your chances of meeting it. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Let’s say your goal is getting new customers. Your goal document will read as follows:

Reach 100 prospects through PPC campaigns to acquire 20 new customers in the next two months. Track the number of new customers acquired through sign-ups, lead forms, and sales conversions.

Your PPC marketing strategy’s success hinges on your knowledge of your target audience and the search terms they use to find electricians.

To know your audience, survey your current customers. Or, if you’re just starting, observe businesses that already serve your target audience. Then, create a target audience persona complete with their demographics, hobbies, income, and the problems they’re facing.

This audience persona will come in handy if you’re running ads on social media platforms, which allow you to target customers using target audience demographics. But you'll need to do keyword research if you’re running search, display, local service, or video ads. 

Keyword research entails finding keywords that capture the search terms your target audience is already using to search. You can use free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner—or premium SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush.

Simply enter your seed keyword (a word or phrase related to your business) and wait for the tool to generate a list of related keywords.

Before you use any keyword, check its search intent—the goal the searcher has in mind when using the search query—to ensure your ad’s content meets the customer’s needs. 

For example, someone searching for “how to fix a faulty switch” needs a guide or a DIY article with step-by-step instructions. But someone searching for “electrical repairs near me,” needs to hire an electrician.

Here’s a summary of the different search intents:

You should target keywords with commercial and transactional intent to reach people ready to hire an electrician and generate revenue from your PPC ads.

Aside from search intent, other factors to consider when picking a keyword include:

• CPC: Pick keywords with an affordable CPC. Long-tail keywords such as “residential electrician near me” have a low CPC. 

• Search volume: Select keywords your target audience already uses to search for your services.

Finally, ensure you bid on branded keywords such as “X plumbing company” to capture potential customers who have forgotten your website address.

Brandon Doyle, Director of Marketing at Blue Corona, says, “You want to make sure you're capturing the search that's out there for your own company.”

“So do not neglect branded pay-per-click campaigns, where you're bidding on your own brand name. They're affordable leads, and they help you win more customers.”

3. Set a budget

Budget setting ensures you spend an amount that maximizes your return on investment (ROI) without sacrificing revenue. Your budget will depend on the cost of your keyword, marketing, SEO tools, and PPC campaign goal.

To determine your budget, check the average CPC on Google’s Keyword Planner for the keywords you picked earlier. Then, calculate the total average CPC and multiply the result by your website’s current conversion rate to reach the budget.

After determining your budget, set a bidding strategy that matches it.

As Blue Corona’s Brandon Doyle says, “If you're comfortable spending your entire budget, I would recommend [you] maximize leads. But if you're saying, ‘Hey, I want to be sensitive to how much I'm paying for a lead,’ that's where you might take that max-per-lead play when it comes to your bid strategy.”

4. Create your landing page

The landing page is the last opportunity to encourage prospects to take action. So, its content must match the ad’s copy and the keyword’s search intent so prospects find what you promised in the ad. This ensures prospects have a positive on-site experience, increasing conversions and improving your quality score.

Take a look at an example of landing page-ad alignment from American Electrical:

Going through the landing page copy, you’ll notice it’s optimized for the ad copy’s value proposition—troubleshooting and repairing electrical systems for residents in Jacksonville. 

There’s also a form at the bottom for capturing prospect information. More importantly, American Electric places a click-to-call button at the top-right-hand corner, which aligns with people’s typical left-to-right reading pattern.

Aligning the ad and landing page copy and carefully placing the click-to-call button can help increase conversions.

Finally, to increase readability and boost your quality score, consider the following web-design guidelines:

• Use clear headings and bullet points to break up text.

• Ensure ample white space to simplify scanning and show visual hierarchy.

• Use a legible font size and a color with high contrast against the background color.

• Optimize your design for mobile devices, ensuring the text size, layout, and buttons can fit small screens. This is important since most online searches happen on mobile devices.

5. Write your ad

Your ad copy does the heavy lifting. It convinces people to visit your landing page and take action. So, you should take time to craft the perfect ad copy, and if the PPC ad platform allows it, use appealing visuals—images and videos.

PPC ad platforms usually recommend ad copy character counts. PPC experts advise using them all to give a complete but concise description of your services and value proposition. 

This can increase conversions. And if you’re using search ads, exhausting the recommended character count helps your ad appear more prominent and pushes competitors down the viewport, increasing the odds of people clicking on it.

Another way to increase your search ad’s prominence is to use site links, callouts, location extensions, reviews, and phone numbers.

Beyond attracting your ideal customers, use your ad to chase away low-quality leads and increase your return on investment.

For example, Karasin PPC’s Joe Karasin ran a PPC ad for a window installation company that wanted only homeowners (not renters) to submit contact forms and call the company. So, his PPC company used callouts to signal that the ad was for homeowners only. 

“This helped reduce the number of leads that had to be abandoned because they were not qualified,” says Joe.

6. Consistently track and optimize

You must keep tracking your ad’s performance and optimizing it for conversions to increase its ROI and lower your ad spend.

When tracking your campaign’s performance, some metrics to keep a close eye on are:

• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks your ad receives compared to the number of times it’s shown. A low CTR usually means there’s a problem with your ad copy.

• Impressions: The number of times your ad was shown. A very low impression may mean you have to adjust your maximum bid.

• Conversion rate: The percentage of landing page or website visitors booking a job. It's the result of dividing the total number of conversions by the amount of ad clicks. A low conversion rate can mean your landing page's copy needs tweaking.

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) or cost per lead (CPL): The price you're paying for every new customer (CPA) or lead (CPL). Your CPA or CPL must not exceed or match your revenue per job.

• Quality score: This measures your ad's quality and likelihood of appearing compared to others. Low-quality scores mean you must improve your ads, keywords, or landing page.

You can use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Ads to track the metrics mentioned above. However, as Johnny Wenzel, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations for ServiceTitan Marketing Pro – Ads, points out in a recent webinar, such tools fail to track revenue.

“Google tracks website clicks or phone calls as conversions, whether they correlate to revenue or not,” Wenzel says.

“For example, a customer searching for a specific competitor may receive an ad for your business instead. They click to call, but then end the call once they realize they called the wrong company. If it didn’t cost much to earn this phone call, Google tracks a low cost per conversion or cost per lead.”

Even worse, “Google will see this as a winning campaign and reallocate more of its resources to that campaign because it has a better cost per conversion,” Wenzel says.

To resolve this challenge and help electricians manage and optimize their PPC ads, ServiceTitan created Marketing Pro – Ads.

This feature integrates with Google Ads and Google Analytics, and lets you assign tracking numbers to each marketing campaign using DNI (dynamic number insertion). 

This helps the system attribute each call, message, booked appointment, and form filled to the originating campaign, revealing the exact revenue each campaign generates.

Recommended watch: See how to connect Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts to your ServiceTitan account.

Another useful PPC ad management tool is ServiceTitan’s Ads Optimizer, which uses  ServiceTitan's AI—Titan Intelligence—to help trades like yours.

When fully set up and integrated with your PPC campaign, the Optimizer analyzes conversion data from ServiceTitan and Google Ads. It uses the results to learn what high-quality leads look like and then trains Google’s machine-learning algorithm to show your ads to high-quality leads.

This lowers your ad spend and increases conversion rates.

Pro tip: Watch this video to start using the Ads Optimizer to make your PPC ad campaigns 300 percent better.

What Are The Best Practices for Electrician PPC?

Here are some tips and tricks for running high-performing PPC campaigns.

1. Rule out negative keywords

As Brandon Bateman rightly points out in a recent podcast, PPC advertising isn’t about getting the highest number of clicks. It’s about getting the right clicks. Including negative keywords in your campaign is one way to do that.

Negative keywords are words or phrases you can add to your PPC keyword so your ads are not triggered for irrelevant search terms. Or so they don’t appear on irrelevant sites. This prevents you from spending on non-revenue-generating clicks.

Some examples of negative keywords include:

• Keywords with your competitor’s names or variations of it

• Informational queries such as how-to keywords

• Keywords related to other services such as plumbing services 

• Keywords containing the words “free” or “discount”

Consistently check your PPC campaign’s search term report to see the searches triggering your ads. Once you find irrelevant keywords generating clicks but no conversions, add them to the negative keywords list.

2. Target residents in your local service area

Most PPC ad platforms allow you to target residents and visitors to your local service area.

While targeting visitors may increase clicks, it may not generate revenue as they are likelier to hire an electrician in their own neighborhood.

If you’re using search ads, set your targeting criteria to “only presence,” not “presence and interest.” You could also use the name of your local service area in your ad and landing page copy.

3. Use trust-building elements

A new customer must always overcome a high trust barrier before booking an appointment. It’s your responsibility to lower the barrier in any way possible so they convert.

One way you can do that is to include trust-building elements in your landing page and ad copy. Some examples are:

• Statistics: Quote the percentage of customers who return with positive reviews or refer others to you. 

• Certifications: Refer to your industry certifications to show your expertise and adherence to industry standards. This can make customers feel more secure choosing you over competitors.

• Social proof: Quote testimonials from satisfied customers. You can go a step further by including video testimonials.

• Words and phrases that denote expertise: Examples include “exceeding industry standards,” “expert electricians,” “professional electricians,” etc.

• Years of experience: To prove your expertise, you can mention the number of years you’ve been in the electrical industry.

4. Run an occasional A/B test

A/B testing involves trying out two or more ad variations that differ in single  element, such as color or copy. A/B testing helps you identify which one will convert better. It ensures you spend only on high-performing ad campaigns and consistently improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).

To run A/B tests, consider the following:

• Develop a hypothesis

• Pick the element you want to use to test the hypothesis

• Create the ad variants

• Launch the ad variants

For example, let’s say you hypothesize that longer headlines perform better. You would create one ad with a short headline and another with a long one. Then, launch them and test their performance.

Other things you can A/B test include:

• Target audiences

• Time and date adjustments

• Demographics

• Images

• Devices

• Bidding strategies

Pro tip: Consider using ServiceTitan’s Leads Integrations platform to bring all booking requests from third-party lead sources such as The Home Depot, Building36, and FlowPath into ServiceTitan.

What PPC Tools Can Electrical Contractors Use?

Like every other marketing service, PP ad campaigns need the right tools. Fortunately, some of these tools are free, such as:

• Keyword Planner: A Google tool for finding keyword ideas alongside their estimated targeting costs and search volume. You can also use the tool to analyze competitors’ landing pages and websites, and find the keywords they are ranking for.

• Google Analytics: An analytics tool that collects information about customer behavior throughout their journey and processes the data into reports. It also tracks the behavior of visitors on your landing page—the buttons they clicked, the sections of your website they ignored, etc.

• Google Tag Manager: A tool that lets you create, manage, store, and deploy marketing tags—short code snippets that track user behavior—without modifying your website’s codebase. You can use tags to track form fills, scroll behavior, call-to-action interactions, button and link clicks, and conversions.

• ServiceTitan’s Ads Optimizer: An AI tool that uses conversion data from ServiceTitan to train Google to show your ads to high-quality leads.

Over to You

Now that you’ve learned all about PPC ads, you can set up your campaign or employ someone to do it for you.

Remember to research your keywords and audience, create an audience persona, and structure your ad and landing page copy to convert.

However, generating leads alone is not enough. To keep your marketing costs low, you must retain them by delivering quality customer service.

Use electrician software like ServiceTitan to track your PPC ad campaigns and optimize them for success.

ServiceTitan is a cloud-based software electricians use to manage customer interactions, marketing campaigns, and business operations. Over 100,000 contractors across the country use it.