We increased our profit by driving down AdWords costs. — Here’s how we did it!
TL;DR Started a Maid Company in The Netherlands, growth was alright but advertising through AdWords was costing too much. Took a break, read/learned a lot about AdWords and managed to get costs down by 50%. Created a free e-book and Facebook group so others don’t have to lose money like I did. E-book can be found here.
At the beginning of this year I decided that enough was enough: this year was going to be the year that I started a business. Super excited, I set out to work on my first project ever. Aaaaand then it failed…
The reason why my business partner and I decided to stop working on our first idea was not because we didn’t have customers, but because we didn’t have enough of them. We had no clue on how to reach people and this impacted sales. Which meant that after eight months we refunded a lot of money to our existing customers and left it at that.
Our second idea was a simple one: an online maid service! Following a guide provided by a redditor, we started developing the service. After a successful month of developing the idea we launched our site GetMaid.nl. We’ve since rebranded to TeamClean.nl but that’s a different story.
The first few weeks were a great learning experience. Taking bookings from the website and passing them on to our cleaning teams was something that we had to learn, as well as talking to customers. We acquired about €1000 in revenue in the first six weeks of operation. Super excited! To prevent our original problem, we started using Google AdWords from day 1, but the problem now was that AdWords was a bottomless pit where our money went to die and I wasn’t happy with our ROI…
Not wanting to raise our prices, as we consider ourselves a premium service, I decided to pause our AdWords campaigns until I could figure out what we could do to improve. I took a couple weeks to read and watch everything I could find about the topic. You won’t believe how much information there is to find on Google AdWords, and how much of it is just nonsense and outdated.
The Hunt For Exacts
In order for us to continue with AdWords we needed a strategy, a formula we could follow daily which would improve our results the next day. After a while it began to dawn on me that ideally my whole AdWords account would be filled with exact keywords and one or two perfectly relevant ads per exact keyword. Because ideally I would know exactly what people (who would be willing to make a booking with us) were searching for, so we would show them ads that would make them book today!
In order for this to work, I created one ad group that is as broad as I want it to be to start ‘catching’ the keywords that people are searching on. I would then look into the keyword report daily and add every single relevant clicked keyword as its own ad group with two very relevant ads. Then I would add the exact keyword as a negative in the broad ad group, so the broad ad group wouldn’t show ads for that keyword anymore. These exact ad keywords are highly relevant to their ads and therefore get a high quality score from AdWords, which drives the cost down quickly!
Using this method, we managed to stay on top of what people were searching for and optimised our ads every day. Over the course of 4–5 weeks this resulted in our AdWords costs being reduced by 50%, which in turn increased our profit.
Our takeaway from this is that we need a set strategy, a rule set, by which we measure success and determine how we can improve. Otherwise the tools we use will only consume time and money. For us, it was a great way to learn!
In order for others to grasp this lesson without wasting unnecessary money, we decided to create a FB group. And created a free e-book so others can get a more detailed overview of what exactly we did to get to this point.
