Marketing Pro’s Optimizing Power of Today and Tomorrow

Solving the Disjointed Customer Journey

The customer journey for the trades industry takes place both online and offline with multiple touchpoints along the way, such as Google and Angi (online) and phone calls and home visits (offline). 

“It’s really important to pay attention to all the different ways that a conversion can make its way through to your business,” Kessler says. “The tools you use to track this are going to go along this journey the same way, where you're going to have Google Ads, Google Analytics, your website, and then ServiceTitan for fulfillment. You’re left looking at three different platforms to try to track this journey all the way through.”

While Google Ads, Google Analytics, and ServiceTitan are all powerful tools, when awareness, consideration, and intent/conversion are tracked in different systems, it’s difficult to understand the impact they have on each other. 

“You have that manual drop-down your CSR is using for marketing attribution within ServiceTitan, and it's really impossible to know what the exact campaign is that's driving the ROI coming from Google Ads,” Kessler says. “What we saw that end up as, time and time again, was all PPC campaigns rolling up into one of two ServiceTitan categories.”

To connect the dots, ServiceTitan developed a solution to:

• Automate job and revenue attribution

• Identify weak campaigns and wasted spend

• Allow the user to reallocate budget based on what’s working and what isn’t

“Creating this kind of transparency that wasn’t there before was really important,” Kessler says. “We did that with our Ads Measurement product last year.”

Marketing Pro - Ads Measurement provides a revenue analytics table with aggregate roll-up metrics. 

“You can analyze click rate, conversion rate, and booking rate,” Kessler says. “But the gold here is on this performance table at the bottom of the page where you have campaign-by-campaign impression through to revenue statistics, and you can really look and see which campaigns are your top performers and which ones need to be cut.”

Marketing Pro - Ads Optimizer

Marketing Pro - Ads Optimizer is ServiceTitan’s solution for the next two pain points contractors noted:

• High spend, low efficiency

• Difficult to navigate

“There's been a shift happening with Google where they’ve been taking control of advertising away from you and from your agencies,” says Johnny Wenzel, ServiceTitan Product Manager, Ads & Reputation. “They say, ‘Use smart bidding, and we are going to decide where your ads show up and when.’ The problem is they don’t know anything about the trades or your business.”

This results in a fiercely competitive marketplace where you could be paying high dollar amounts for a click with poor lead quality. Wenzel gives the example of four different people searching for air conditioning with a cost per lead of $150. As long as these searchers call your business, Google considers it a lead, and treats them all equally. 

“The problem is we know they're not all equal, that every time the phone rings it can be a golden call or it could be a low-quality call,” Wenzel says. 

Imagine out of the four calls, only one converts, with a $12,000 replacement. Two were excused for being out of your service area or wanting a service you didn’t perform. The other was a budget shopper who paid the $100 call-out fee, then left a bad review complaining about price. 

“We saw the opportunity to give more data back to Google, and by giving more data back to Google, allow it to have the insight it needs into your business to make the ads work for you,” Wenzel says. “So we do this by automating data flow back into Google Ads and Google Analytics.”

In the example above, with the actual sales data from ServiceTitan, Google could optimize your campaigns to find more customers like the $12,000 replacement call. And if you already use Ads - Measurement, all you have to do is flip a switch to get started with Ads - Optimizer. 

Brianna Skiffington, CFO at Ad Leverage, a performance marketing agency with a large portfolio in the trades, says their agency turned to this type of technology several years ago when they were tired of competing on lead cost. 

“We were looking for ways to technologically integrate CRMs with the Ads platform, so that we could actually see and prove that our campaigns were better because we were looking for higher-quality leads,” Skiffington says. “When you're going to scale your business based on cheap leads, you're only going to get more of those mediocre leads. If you optimize toward high-quality leads, then you're able to actually generate more revenue.”

In 2020, Ad Leverage client Nexgen was generating about $2 million a year from Google Ads. After about two and a half years of integrating CRM revenue data back into the Ads platform, they’re on track to generate $40 million in 2023. 

“The most scalable channel is now infinitely more scalable and more efficient because of the integration with ServiceTitan that you're able to utilize with Marketing Pro - Ads Optimizer,” Skiffington says. “You're able to multiply your revenue, literally. And that's how we've been able to see those kinds of results with NexGen. We've been able to do it thanks to ServiceTitan and that integration.”

In addition to optimizing your spend, the tool helps optimize for capacity, too. 

“When capacity is full, we should scale down our ad budgets,” Wenzel says. “When capacity is empty, usually you want to scale that up.”

Capacity awareness within ServiceTitan allows the user to select campaigns and their corresponding business units, then set capacity notifications based on custom thresholds. 

Over the past year, ServiceTitan has been tracking Ads Optimizer’s impact across 20 early adopters. The results show an average 250% increase in ROI. The tool is now live, and anyone with Marketing Pro has access to it. Users pay $5.25 per qualified lead, booked or unbooked, acquired through Optimizer. They won’t be charged for excused or abandoned leads. Prepaying for a package of leads saves between 15% to 30%.

“We really wanted to align incentives here and make sure that you're only paying when you're seeing value,” Wenzel says. “And we have seen the average revenue that's generated for each of these leads to be 40 times what you're paying for it in terms of that $5.25.”

The Future of Optimizer

As trades business owners know, a lead can take a bit of nurturing before becoming a booked job. So there’s a delay in Google receiving revenue data.

“Imagine a world where we can send that signal on day one,” says James Zhang, ServiceTitan Principal Product Manager, Data. “With Job Value Prediction, you'll be able to. Job Value Prediction, or JVP as we call it, is a proprietary machine learning model that can predict, with high accuracy, the amount of revenue you'll earn from a given job, in addition to the lifetime revenue from that lead. By passing that JVP to Google as soon as the job is booked, we're able to get Ads Optimizer and Google's Ads engine working for you instantaneously.”

ServiceTitan has also invested in the Neighborhood Propensity Model, which uses historical weather patterns, property data, and jobs history in an area to predict what the likely job demand will be within a ZIP code. 

“This feature is already live in your marketing dashboards, and we're working to bring that more intimately into the campaign creation workflow,” Zhang says. “And by passing this information to Google, we're able to even further optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of your Google Ad campaigns.”

Zhang says these two features together will create an “ROI crystal ball for your marketing, powered by Titan Intelligence.” 

ServiceTitan also plans to make Ads Optimizer more proactive and user-friendly by incorporating dynamic recommendations. 

“We're super excited to be continuously investing, through Titan Intelligence, into the Ads Optimizer platform to deliver even more ROI,” Zhang says.