PPC in the AI Era: Winning Strategies for Carpet Cleaners in 2026

Yes! AI-driven search now leverages paid ads within its answers, making PPC a core element of brand visibility. The right campaign will get you seen when and where it counts.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:

Welcome back to another masterclass. I enjoy doing these every single month. As you know, we have lots and lots and lots and lots of topics to discuss and lots of reasons to discuss these topics as well. Today we’re going to be talking about pay per click. Some people might be rolling their eyes attend just to say, oh, I was young, I was able to pay per click. Other ones are going cool. It’s changing. I know that what’s happening, right? So depends on where you’re at.

John Clendenning [00:00:25]:

There’s a big picture to kind of get your head around as well that all, all of these talks that we go through are all about. But ultimately.

John Clendenning [00:00:34]:

It’S a little disturbing, I guess, to know that stats show some of them are studies on small businesses, some other study on home service businesses. Some of them are studies that I get, I pay for every year on cleaning services and things like that. Aberdeen Research Console, there’s a bunch of these, whatever, $500,000 every single year. Here’s the study, the stats where things are at in Canada, in the U.S. and in North America predominantly. I haven’t started looking into Australia, New Zealand, sorry, P.J. sorry, Nicholas. We got clients that are in those areas now and England and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:01:09]:

But ultimately the trends are the trends, right? So what we know is true is that 80% of all small businesses that start are no longer in business. They go out of business or bankruptcy within the first five years. Only 20% remain around. Of those that remain around, only 20% of the remainder are in business by year 10. Right? So add those up, do the statistical math. That works out to only 4% of businesses make it to year 10 that that start up and try small businesses. Everything that we do, mom paw shops, right? So that’s disturbing. In the cleaning world, home service world and cleaning world, it’s only 15% of cleaning service businesses ever make it to half a million dollars, right? So, and again, these stats are within the last few years, five years, seven years, some of them, stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:02:06]:

So with inflation, maybe that’s a little bit like maybe half a million is now 600,000. You know what I mean? As the value of the dollar, what it buys goes down, inflation, you need more dollars to buy the same thing. So, you know, if we’ve raised our prices by 20% in the last four or five years because inflation’s gone up compounded then yeah, maybe that’s closer to 550, 600,000, but it’s only 85%. Never do that. They miss something, they don’t know what they don’t know, right. And they haven’t tapped in. They think they know. Maybe you never know, Right.

John Clendenning [00:02:37]:

So as we know, like 30 years ago, started my Carpet Cleaning business. I’d been doing window cleaning since high school and janitorial prior to that, and then started my, my Carpet Cleaning company 30 years ago, 1995, in a town of 30,000 people.

John Clendenning [00:03:32]:

I moved to because I was a shy kid that didn’t want to talk, find any, knock on any doors or go into any houses that were friends of mine from school and stuff like that. So I went somewhere that nobody knew me and started my cleaning company and realized I knew nothing. Realized the phone just wouldn’t ring on its own. Invested a lot of time, energy and money and thought in figuring it out over that first year. But by the beginning of year two, I was already doing $10,000 a month in sales. Thirty years ago, money, right. And then within, by the next year, I was long since out of the truck and never back in it since, and then started buying other locations, expanding and buying other businesses and doing all that. So there’s a little bit of success.

John Clendenning [00:04:14]:

Most of them get into it and see it as a, you know, I’m the guy in the truck, blue collar, and you can do so much more because 90% of your competition, 99% of your competition don’t know this either. So that’s why we consult, we do Marketing services with Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters. But we do free services with, you know, Carpet Cleaner Success podcasts that these things are on and stuff like that. So and we help our clients on multiple fronts.

John Clendenning [00:06:26]:

Yeah, we’re going to be talking about pay per click in the AI era. Hard Carpet Cleaners win in 2026. And by the way, Sirica that we talked to here, she’s in the background. You can all say hi to her. She’s the one that helps make all these graphics and PowerPoints for me. So yay. Thank you, Sirika. So turn off your cell phones, turn off your Facebook.

John Clendenning [00:06:47]:

We’re not streaming this into Facebook yet, so you can turn off Facebook. Maybe by next time if you’re part of the AI marketing Expert Marketing Secrets for Carpet Cleaners private Facebook group, we’re going to try and stream this into there. We might have to get a new platform, but we’re going to try and stream this into there next time as well and maybe even open that up for a little bit of Q and A. We’ll figure it out. But if you’re a cleaning or home service business owner and you’re serious about getting better results staying in business with this massive change that’s coming, it’s, it’s looming. Like we’ve been talking about it for a while, but there’s the signs are all there globally, just like they were in 2007, just before 2008. It’s hard to outrun these things, right? So how do we survive when in, in a marketplace where 70, 80% of businesses. You know, in the cleaning world, two things happen.

John Clendenning [00:07:36]:

Sorry, straight up, right? So last, last recession, 2008, 9, 10, I watched 70 new Carpet Cleaners show up.

John Clendenning [00:08:36]:

That 2008, 9 and beginning of 10 recession that rolled in due to the housing bubble collapse. Well, the mortgage crisis, the big short was the movie built on it, right? Well, that same thing exists right now in the, in the, in the auto loan world. There’s loans that were given to people, leases and loans and all that stuff that don’t qualify. They were given at low rates that as those rates go up, there’s a huge bubble waiting to burst. And they did bundle them all together and put them into products just like they did back in, in the day with real, with mortgages. And that’s a problem now too. So we’ve got AI disrupting and taking over jobs and work and displacement. We’ve got economies and slowdowns and, and governments trying to react like crazy and, and, and like just everything right now.

John Clendenning [00:09:27]:

Because done right, they should never call you again. If your competitor does a great job and stays in touch properly, does good Marketing.

John Clendenning [00:10:18]:

So anyways, we’re going to get into that. So what we’re going to talk about today, why Google’s AI powered search makes local pay per click essential for brand visibility. AI powered search, how we search in AI gives answers, makes pay per click. You’re going, wait a minute John, we’re going to explain this. Essential for brand visibility. What is my business card, my brand or the logo on the side of my truck? Oh gosh, no.

John Clendenning [00:10:48]:

Oh gosh no. Really important to be visible and a known brand. And there’s a reason why adapting to the new customer journey, the new customer journey, it’s changed, it’s massively changed and the fastest change in human history. So what today’s tech savvy home homeowners expect from you or from what they’re looking for and where they’re looking. Omnipresence done right, connecting every lead to touch point even in any tough or uncertain economies. Omnipresence, that’s the key word here as well. And lead nurture is your superpower. How to follow up smarter and maximize every opportunity.

John Clendenning [00:11:32]:

If you think an opportunity is, I would like people to just go to my website, click a button and book themselves so I can stay at home and watch Netflix and, and I don’t, you know, if they don’t, if, if they call me and I don’t answer the phone, then AI will answer my phone for me and that’s good enough. None of that’s good enough. None of what I just said works for any size, scale or strategy. There’s pieces in there that should be plugged in in the right way. But there’s a strategy that works with human beings that allows you to sell at prices higher than your competition and get them every single day. So that’s what we want to talk about. So who am I told you a little bit at the beginning there, but I’ve been in business since in high school, right. So I started a window cleaning business and didn’t go off to college or anything like that and did window cleaning during the day and played a band at night.

John Clendenning [00:12:30]:

That was, you know, my parents, my dad who you know, ran companies and corporations absolutely love that, right. So I got kicked out of the house obviously and lived with my buddies and played in a band and did window cleaning. And then I started a janitorial company. Grew really fast and then we were in a very specific niche, really smart. We didn’t know the nowhere niching. We just ended up getting into a series of, of bingo halls and it was amazing. And we hired crews and I was in my early twent and me and me and a brother in law, an older brother in law who had a heart attack and couldn’t drive truck anymore. That’s how we ended up doing, getting together and doing that.

John Clendenning [00:13:06]:

And started from zero. So since then I’ve, you know, I’ve grown, I’ve been the got over my shyness, spoken on stages, three day elite retreats, got flown to the island of Samoa. I’ve spoken in Vegas and Toronto and Chilliwack B.C. and, and Orlando and San Diego and at conventions and, and you name it, all that kind of stuff. I’ve, I’ve spoken in front of the Chamber of Commerce every single month for a number of years all on reputation and building a great business back in 2010, 11, 12, all that, those kinds of things as well.

John Clendenning [00:13:38]:

He went and landed the contracts. I ran the cruise. So I started the carpet cleaning company to break my shyness to be in people’s homes and to do the next step. And started from zero. So since then I’ve, you know, I’ve grown, I’ve been the got over my shyness, spoken on stages, three day elite retreats, got flown to the island of Samoa. I’ve spoken in Vegas and Toronto and Chilliwack B.C. and, and Orlando and San Diego and at conventions and, and you name it, all that kind of stuff. I’ve, I’ve spoken in front of the chamber of Commerce commerce every single month for a number of years all on reputation and building a great business back in 2010, 11, 12, all that, those kinds of things as well.

John Clendenning [00:14:23]:

I’ve sold, bought, built and sold off, sold all my businesses. Now the brick and mortar businesses around the corner there is the cleaning company bought by Carl, one of our managers. Took it over four years ago now. So I’m still right next door, I’m still like right he rents the office from me and I’m still intimately involved with all of our clients and people like that and still you know, get my hands dirty in it. But I was able to exit for many, many multiples of, of of, of EBITDA because I built the company to be a structured operating machine that did not require my time. Therefore easier to sell for the person who wants to buy it. Also the author of the book the Guide to Internet Marketing for Carpet Cleaners, got a couple other books on the go right now around AI and marketing strategies and our blueprint for success, Million Dollar cleaning business coaching program and stuff like that. All of that is, is part of what we do.

John Clendenning [00:15:26]:

And also I am the host of the Carpet Cleaner Success podcast. You might be listening to this simulcast on the podcast or you’re watching it on YouTube or on our website or any of the other places. But also industry leader of the year in CleanFax magazine a couple years ago and speak with all the guys we know, the Howard Partridge and Dusty Roberts and Mark Sagers and Jeff Cross from CleanFax, ISSA and all that kind of stuff. So more importantly, we help our clients take over, be number one and be the best known Cleaner in the marketplace. That’s the goal. That’s what we do. We make our clients the top cleaning brand in their local marketplace so they can attract the best clients, not the ones that are running out of money and can’t afford eggs, so they’re able to charge top rates. Most of our clients, their average residential job is well north of $500, some of them $700.

John Clendenning [00:16:21]:

Average residential job in marketplaces where the competitors are three rooms in a hall for $99. You might go, John, how does that happen? Jump on a consult. Let’s have a conversation, right? We’ll talk about it. I’ll show you. We’ll break it down. We’ll see where you are and where you want to go. And if you could be the guy in your marketplace that gets there, because there’s only one or two or none that ever that ever figure this out. So you want to be booked out weeks in advance.

John Clendenning [00:16:45]:

In fact, we were booked out a year in advance. Our regular clients booked into our schedule a year in advance. So we were able to say that on the phone. Hey, yeah, we’re one of the most in demand. In fact, our regular clients book a year in advance into our schedule. So no, I don’t have anything for today or tomorrow, but let me take a look at the schedule and see what we do have for you. Oh my God, you guys must be really good. Again, that’s also a moment of influence because you get to say things like that.

John Clendenning [00:17:07]:

That creates a ton of social proof. Another, another thing that should be in all of Your scripts and all of your messaging. Again, that AI voice answering can’t quite do. You can’t teach that, that level of nuance yet. We’re not there yet. You can try, but it’s not, it’s not influential. Have a really hard time getting it there. So, so how do we do this? The three principles of omnipresent omnipresence.

John Clendenning [00:17:33]:

We call it the integrated integrative omnipresence marketing system. Integrative means it all goes together, meshes together. Omnipresence is your name is known everywhere. Think of that plumbing company. Think of that personal injury lawyer. Think of that real estate agent that you know because you see them everywhere, right? They’ve gotten to a point of scale and saturation. Right. Not.

John Clendenning [00:17:56]:

It’s not just. It is an investment in the marketing of their company because that investment pays massive dividends for the rest of their lives. If they stop investing, they’ll coast and then they’ll drop off a cliff and disappear. Happens all the time. So you want to make sure you’re omnipresent in the right way. Grassroots, offline, online, anywhere they look and anywhere AI looks. AI is not a keyword search platform anymore or at all. AI doesn’t care.

John Clendenning [00:18:23]:

AI is like eager to go, oh, I will go find out what everybody’s thinking about you and happy customer stories and all that. So you have to have the right mix of marketing and to attract, retain and keep the right people. The one thing that we do a lot of in the omnipresence marketing world is we do things that help our clients get their, their real phone number to ring where it can’t be tracked because of us. Because people know, know the name, know the name, know the name, See the van, call that number. Right. We don’t necessarily get credit or brownie points for that, but we show them how omnipresence helps. Everything you start doing, you know, every door mail. Yeah, it works.

John Clendenning [00:19:02]:

Do it in an omnipresence environment where everybody knows your name and what you’re all about and your risk reversal guarantees and all of those kinds of things. It works really good. Yeah, we don’t have to help our clients do, do things like that.

John Clendenning [00:19:18]:

Like to do their every, every door mails and stuff like that. We can advise, we can consult, they can go to a, you know, a vendor or go to, you know, US Post or whatever, Canada Post and do that. But in an omnipresence environment, the return on investment is way more and it’s just the side byproduct of doing this properly it Rising tide lifts all ships. So you do that with maximizing your opportunity to generate a qualified lead. Do you know what your ideal customer profile is? Your icp? It’s not everybody. There is a certain type of person, maybe residential, and then a certain type of person, business owner, commercial, that works for you, that resonates with your pricing, your messaging, what you do, why you do it, how it all all works. And there’s a whole bunch that don’t. So if you know who that qualified person is, that I, that avatar, those people, then you will speak to them directly, differently, but you’ll also know where they hang out.

John Clendenning [00:20:19]:

Now you can maximize your opportunity to generate a qualified inquiry because you know where they are now. You can put messaging in front of them, not deals and offers. And that, that’s, that’s, that’s tone deaf. What you do is you put great messaging and stories and education and information in front of them and they start to know like and trust you. When they need you, they’re ready to call you and the competitors have nothing they can do about that at all. You want to maximize your brand impressions. Pay per click actually helps with this a little bit as well. You want to maximize the impression of your brands.

John Clendenning [00:20:52]:

Everything we just talked about, people got to see you everywhere.

John Clendenning [00:20:56]:

And you want to maximize your conversions. What the heck does that mean? That means when somebody reaches out to you.

John Clendenning [00:21:04]:

Because you’ve been able to influence and explain why discount Carpet Cleaner may not be right and quality Carpet Cleaner is as an example.

John Clendenning [00:21:58]:

Have you ever wondered.

John Clendenning [00:22:01]:

Should PPC be part of my overall growth Marketing strategy?

John Clendenning [00:22:26]:

So build the right foundation, make it personal. No more babies lying on Carpets and dogs and families sitting on couches.

John Clendenning [00:23:00]:

They want to know that you’re coming out professional because they’re inviting you into an areas of your home like their bedrooms and their closets and that they don’t even let their best friends.

John Clendenning [00:23:27]:

So why should it be part of your overall Marketing strategy?

John Clendenning [00:24:02]:

That.

John Clendenning [00:24:06]:

A report on what do they find is change is moving the needle. This year things are different than other years. Some people might think that, oh, all I need is reviews on my Google Business profile and I’ll rank. Nope. Did you know your Google Business profile ranks about maybe a few hundred feet, then one mile, then five miles, then ten miles. You know, if you do good work, if you do good, like if, if the signals are there properly. Right? So it takes a while for this to even show up 10 miles away from where your office is. If 10 miles away from your office is not your ideal customer profile, your Google Business profile sucks anyways because they’re not seeing it 20 miles away and 30 miles away at all.

John Clendenning [00:24:41]:

That’s not how it works. Right. Those platforms and SEO takes a long time and needs a lot of content. SEO is not building a website with, you know, four or five paragraphs on the homepage and two or three paragraphs on a couple other pages. SEO search Engine optimization is about teaching the search engines and now AI what you do, how you do it, having the right coding, having the right schema, having all kinds of stuff. So you pay per click allows you to show up much faster because you pay and you get to be seen in the paid ads areas. You get to show up as much as possible where your customers are looking. So the customers that make it to Google, you want to be appearing in Google, right? You get to show up for non geo modified terms.

John Clendenning [00:25:27]:

So what does that mean? Well, people don’t have to say hey, I’m looking for a carpet cleaner near me. Looking for a carpet cleaner in, you know, Colorado Springs.

John Clendenning [00:25:36]:

Those are geo modified. And your website because it’s, oh you, you’re in Colorado Springs and you do carpet cleaning and all of the articles and content and all of that stuff that’s necessary to have your website show up more and get more traffic and then have your, the, the influence factors that have people go, I came to your website and I actually like what I saw and I’m going to reach out to you. Normally that’s only about 5%. Just so you know this, you know you get to actually show up in pay per click for raw terms. People just go in carpet cleaning, right? Need a carpet cleaning service, whatever. And you get to show up because you can target those and unlimited scalability, Meh, what we mean by unlimited is there, there will be a maximum number of people that are looking on any given day and you’ve got competitors that are going to take some of the clicks as well. And, and you want to be competitive in that marketplace to influence. Well, but you can scale as you’ve got great conversion rates, great cost per click, great conversion rates on the website, great conversion rates on your phone calls, like booking people, all that stuff, you can throw more money at it because your return on investment, it’s like a slot machine.

John Clendenning [00:26:49]:

You put a dollar in, you get $3 out. You put a dollar in, you get $3 out. Well, your goal is just to get how fast can I put a dollar in then? Right. If you’re gonna get $3 out every time, just keep throwing dollars in. Right. So that’s what we mean by unlimited scalability.

John Clendenning [00:27:04]:

So why most pay Per click campaigns fail, fail to understand Google’s ad auction process and the complexity of the Carpet Cleaning, home cleaning services and how quality scores and a whole bunch of things. We’re gonna get into a bunch of this stuff here. But there’s a lot of things that affect.

John Clendenning [00:27:21]:

How to do it. A lot of people, there’s these people that try and do it themselves. Carpet Cleaner going, I’m going to do it all myself. I don’t need to go out and meet people. I don’t need to build the, you know, out, be the outreach officer and do all the things that have always worked. All the stuff Howard Partridge taught us about bringing donuts and all. Nope, don’t need to do any of that. I need to learn how to be a pay per click ad manager, because that sounds easy.

John Clendenning [00:27:42]:

Because there’s a button that says smart ads and I’m just going to press that and Google’s going to take my money and it’s going to work. It’s not that easy. There’s a reason why there are certification courses and degrees and just to learn how to be an ad manager, a media buyer they call it, because it’s. You need to understand statistics and math and data. There’s a lot. It’s not just push button easy, that’s why you’ll stop doing it. Or if you are doing it that way, your cost per click and your return on investment are way out of whack. You want to.

John Clendenning [00:28:13]:

A lot of people set up only one ad group and just throw everything in it. They don’t even know what an ad group is. They don’t know what ad types are, they don’t know anything. They don’t use specific text ads and landing pages like, we’re going to get back to this. Like, holy crap, that right there. If you’ve got an ad manager running your ad accounts and they’re not using landing pages, fire them. No compelling call to action or offers. I just put my name up there, right? No.

John Clendenning [00:28:41]:

If you actually look at how many people click to how many people reach out, convert a conversion to a lead, an inquiry, you’ll understand why this is really critical. Because it’s only on average, one out of every five. That’s average. So you don’t want to be.

John Clendenning [00:29:01]:

That’s done well. Right? You might try and get it down to one out of every four, 25% conversion rate. But 15 to 20% is good when everything’s humming well. And that does not happen if you don’t give them a reason to take action. Right away. It’s all psychology. Right.

John Clendenning [00:29:20]:

So yeah, you don’t want to take people to your website.

John Clendenning [00:29:25]:

The downside is you’re trying to do a whole bunch of things. The quality score that Google gives you drops because it’s, it’s not like you’ve got a, you know, homepage. Your website isn’t targeted well enough. Like if you have a carpet cleaning service ad, you need to go to a page all about that. Google gives you a quality score. Yep. They have ads about this and the page is all about that and everything’s good about that. And people don’t click on it and then click away.

John Clendenning [00:29:49]:

Google’s tracking all of that. Right. So you’ve got all that aligned. Google gives you a great quality score. Guess what they do? They give you a lower cost per click than your competitor that doesn’t have as good a quality score as you. So you pay less than somebody else for the same, the same quality client, the same click, click. Right. So you want to make sure that you have this dialed in, but you also don’t get the ability to split test.

John Clendenning [00:30:13]:

We’ll talk about that as well. So why Google’s AI powered search makes search makes local pay per click essential for every for brand visibility. Right. So what this is that, that thing we’re talking about, how does this all factor in? What is AI powered search? How is PPC involved in this? And what is brand visibility? Right, so AI visibility, the AI visibility squeeze. We’ve all noticed this now when we type something into Google, ask a question, ramble, do like, whatever the AI overview shows up first, everything’s pushed down. That’s a problem. Takes longer to get there. Are you being mentioned up there? What about the people that don’t go to Google anymore at all because they’re so used to chatgpt now or perplexity or any of these kinds of things? Right.

John Clendenning [00:31:00]:

But the AI overview pushes traditional organic listings and maps listings and standard pay per click further down the page. So we’re getting declining click through rates. Everybody’s noticing this.

John Clendenning [00:31:15]:

Well, if they get used to doing that, they’re getting used to doing it for finding their Carpet Cleaner as well, right?

John Clendenning [00:32:21]:

AI is often, often defaults to triggering things like the local pack, right. Local service ads or the Google Maps pack and stuff like that in those types of searches, right. But they’re getting better and better and better at, at actually.

John Clendenning [00:32:37]:

But this is changing because more and more people are going, you know what chat? I’ve got like a stain on my carpet and I don’t know what to do about it. I probably should call somebody who’s like a good Carpet Cleaner.

John Clendenning [00:33:24]:

That, that’s not like the cheapest but, you know, not the most expensive. That’s now the keyword search. How do you write pay per click ads for that? I’ll show you. Because it’s different. It’s right there. New premium ad surface. Google is actively testing and expanding the display of sponsored links inside the AI overview itself. Why? Because Google makes money.

John Clendenning [00:33:51]:

On ads, not on providing a free search engine. Google needs to make money. Their billions and billions of dollars come from attracting so many eyeballs that they can sell you access to those eyeballs. If people aren’t buying having to buy from Google, their stock goes down, their revenue goes down. So Google’s smart, Google’s going, oh, now that we’ve got eyeballs and people are really liking Gemini and Gemini 3 is incredible. And, and all of this stuff. If they want to continue to be the leader, they’re also going to want to continue to make money. So this is what Google’s doing.

John Clendenning [00:34:29]:

They’re going to start putting ads directly inside the AI overview. So guess what? The AI overview is going to try and figure out who best answers that question. So now all your SEO, all your content, all of your happy customer stories, everything that you need to do to market your business online in the old ways of organic, needs to be tweaked, needs to be changed, needs to be modified to also speak to AI. And that shift is going to right now it’s about 20% of searches. 10 to 20% are on are people searching on AI platforms and 80% are still the old way for local businesses. But that 20% showed up from 1% in just January of this year. It’s a massive growth. It’s going to start doing this.

John Clendenning [00:35:11]:

You’re going to start, we’re all going to just start talking to our AI and get answers. And if you’re not there in the paid or naturally chosen for every single way that they talk, you say ola John, I show up in chat GPT. Okay, for which 200 to 300 search phrases and sentences and rambles did you try.

John Clendenning [00:35:34]:

You show up for all of them or did you try one thing right? You might show up for Carpet Cleaner near me and in Google Maps, but do you show up for carpet cleaning services? Do you show up for like, like there’s a million other ways around it. So you know, again an agency will test all of them. LLM visibility, AI or SEO visibility, you know, ranking. How far out from your known pin drop do you do your rank and stuff like that. So and you want paid ads to teach AI all about your business and you want paid ads to show up. Right. So the shift is now from keywords to intent AI and Google is trying to determine your intent based on your search history. How you said the question what you’re looking for.

John Clendenning [00:36:13]:

So AI prioritizes ads and content that address conversational long tail search queries and users intent, not these keywords anymore. So this, there’s this shift happening right now. We’re in the middle of it so it’s kind of like ah, we got to do both. It’s very unsteady. This is happening really, really fast. Our team spends thousands of dollars a month and hours and hours and hours and hours trying to keep up with just this alone. I don’t know how somebody can do that and clean carpets and find referral Partners and build a business. Doesn’t make sense.

John Clendenning [00:36:47]:

Right. So some PPC case studies to prove that this is valuable.

John Clendenning [00:36:53]:

Okay, so here’s a client, very, very large client. $2 million. Over $2 million a year. Right. Well over $2 million a year. Carpet cleaning client, one of that. Less than 1% in the entire marketplace, the entire world of cleaning services that have made it to that level. This is a month from the monthly reporting charts that we give to them.

John Clendenning [00:37:13]:

Names are blocked out so that you don’t have to. Not everybody’s gonna start calling them up and, and bugging them. Right. 936 leads we generated two months ago. I think this, this chart was taken last month somewhere in there. Their total investment in their marketing.

John Clendenning [00:37:29]:

For online is $12,001.95. Let’s call it $12,000. Their average cost per lead is under $13. Organically, they’re getting a big chunk of their traffic because their website ranks really, really well. Google Maps is even bigger because their Google Maps ranks wide and they actually have three or four. Four locations. Google Maps locations, right? So because you can only rank for about 10 to 20 miles, depend 10 to 15 miles, call it to be safe, depending on the size of your population in a Google Maps before, there’s everything done well, not just reviews, but also images and posts and, and linking and text and citations and. And again the.

John Clendenning [00:38:18]:

The hundreds of ranking factors, but the top 20 or so that are really, really important to make sure Google Maps ranks. You have to get them all. Right. And your competitors are trying to do the same thing as well. Eventually at a point they’re closer. Google Maps is still proximity. They’re closer than you are. And you’re pushed off the three pack.

John Clendenning [00:38:36]:

You’re now spot 4, 5, 6, 7, you’re. You’re down the page. You don’t get found. Right. That’s a moment where it makes sense to consider a second office a little bit farther away. The circles touch each other, right? So these guys have Google Maps, they have organic web forms, they have pay per click. Pay per click generated 224 of these 936 inquiries.

John Clendenning [00:39:03]:

Now just the pay per click, the 224 we just talked about. The total investment of their $12,000 was $9,000 going towards pay per click. So the remaining $3,000 was for their SEO campaigns and maintaining SEO on Google Maps. Right. So their average cost per Click was under $13 across all of it. Because organic takes the longest.

John Clendenning [00:39:29]:

But becomes your very best friend. Because it takes the longest, but it has the, you know, the highest conversion and rate of return pay per click. It’s not a problem to pay $40 for a phone call if you’re good on the phones. Right. So.

John Clendenning [00:39:48]:

You want your ad to sort out the ones that are looking for the $99 Carpet Cleaner and let them call those guys because they’re going out of business slowly anyway. They just don’t notice it. They just don’t know that at $99, three rooms in a hall, you can’t make enough money to keep the truck from rusting out in five years and in.

John Clendenning [00:40:27]:

Right. So but so the click through rate, 4, 4%. Not bad. You know, we like to see it 4, 5, 6%.

John Clendenning [00:40:36]:

So cost per click, $10. So for every click there’s $10. It took four clicks before somebody called, then $10 a click. Average cost per lead, conversion, phone call or form fill, $40. So about a 25%. Right. It’s actually 27.45 click to call ratio.

John Clendenning [00:41:01]:

So what does that mean?

John Clendenning [00:41:03]:

We got 244 inquiries. They convert at 40%. We listen to their calls. They converted just, just over 40% of every single cold phone call from people that don’t know them. Your customers should never go back to Google to find you. Your customers should have all kinds of information about you in their home and be hearing from you on a regular basis. That’s how you keep them forever. Right.

John Clendenning [00:41:27]:

So 40% of these new people, these guys are able to turn into a job at prices higher than the competition. I’ll show you average prices on these guys. 224 leads. We know that times 40% was 89 booking book jobs. Average ticket 395. So good that that $350 to $500 range. Good place to be thinking about on average your average first, first time cleaning. A repeat cleaning with your clients should go higher because a lot of people try you out at a lower amount first.

John Clendenning [00:41:59]:

So $35,000 came from pay per click. They need this in the mix, right? Projected ROI, it’s just, it’s one of those poles in the water, right? So the $9,000 ad spend as a ratio of the $35,000 revenue that they generated is a 3.9 to 1 return on investment. Anything better than 3 to 1 ROI? Because your ability to have good phone calls, your ability to sell at a decent price, that’s like, that’s the key drivers. Anything over three to one and you’ve bought a client, you’ve bought a customer that you can turn into a long term client if you know what you’re doing. And that right here, what is the lifetime value? If half of those people in Carpet Cleaning, half of your first time customers, one time customers should come back for years on average, they should pay somewhere between five to $20,000 in their lifetime in repeat and referral business that they generate.

John Clendenning [00:43:30]:

If you’ve got referral programs and client reactivation programs and client database VIP programs and, and all of that really good marketing because you are the marketer of cleaning services to grow a business. And once you figure that out, you can buy maid services, you can buy janitorial, you can you just start building a conglomerate if you want. But the lifetime value of that client is two of these, this group of this $35,000 that came in in that month, the lifetime value is between 220 and $400,000 that they acquired to the future of their business with good back end marketing. So you want to collect these people on the front end because what happens if any of these 224 inquiries didn’t see your ad? You weren’t there. They’re obviously calling from ads. Not everybody does, right? Obviously these guys need a lot more than $35,000 a month to get to $200,000 a month to build a multimillion dollar business. Right, we know that, but this is a part of it. This is one of the poles in the water that generates a lot of legacy to the company.

John Clendenning [00:44:32]:

All right, so here’s a $500,000 a year Carpet Cleaner client. So again, those other guys were top part of the less than 1% elite.

John Clendenning [00:45:16]:

These guys are part of the 15% that, that make it to this level. 440 total inquiries in a month. $6,282 in total marketing investment for their online and digital. That includes our fee to manage all of this. $14.28 average cost per lead. They got 80 organic calls, 237 pay per click. Why? Because these guys are new. Their organic’s not ranking yet.

John Clendenning [00:45:44]:

They had a crappy little website that had no rankings at all, had no coding on it that wasn’t well. And we need to be writing one to two articles a week and press releases and signals and social and, and all that.

John Clendenning [00:46:13]:

And on the Google Maps images going up every couple of days and Google posts every day and all kinds of. And tie them all together on top of getting a few reviews on top of doing other things. And these are growing and growing and growing. But right now the big driver is their paid ads to get those leads. Right. So all of those 237, their cost per click, there’s the total investment is $3800 of that $6000 investment per month. Oops, let me go back to that. Right, so $16 average cost per lead, right? We know how many impressions.

John Clendenning [00:46:49]:

3.98. So 4% click through rate pretty similar, right? 4 or 5%. That’s, that’s a good rate. $8 cost per click. That’s good in carpet cleaning. Bring it down as low as you can. We like to keep getting it lower and lower. Find that sweet spot where the cost per click works.

John Clendenning [00:47:05]:

And a 49%.

John Clendenning [00:47:08]:

Click to call ratio. Really good. Really good.

John Clendenning [00:47:13]:

So here’s their math. 237 leads, 40 booking. I think they’re just a little bit higher than that but kind of dumbed it down to that number. They’re about 45% booking, but.

John Clendenning [00:47:24]:

They’re $120 lower than the other fellows. Like they’re not good at upselling at all yet. They haven’t learned good scripting and, and, and, and Right. So their average ticket is sitting around there. So they made $25,000 per month just from their pay per click. Right.

John Clendenning [00:47:46]:

Good little investment. Without it they would be down $25,000 because these people went somewhere else then. So the projected ROI, they had the $3,800 ad spend, 25,000. Right. They actually have a 6.7 to 1 ROI. Right. So little bit better ROI because of.

John Clendenning [00:48:08]:

Again the way the metrics play out. So their lifetime value is 180 to 360. Somewhere in that range. The lifetime value of this $25,000 of these 237 people that half of them will go away and you’ll never see again. They might clean once or twice and gone. The other half will be 5, 10, $20,000 lifetime value if you do a great marketing job. So it’s not just about getting them the one time and I need more leads. I need more leads.

John Clendenning [00:48:38]:

I need more leads. I need more leads. If you’re constantly chasing leads, you’re constantly running on the wrong end of the ROI spectrum. Your, your repeat clients marketed too well will be 1520 to 1 ROI. That’s where all your money sits. That’s where the profit of your company sits. That’s where the money when you go to sell your company, your, your how many multiples of EBITDA sit is in is in the repeat clients that come back. So any key insights, Take a few notes.

John Clendenning [00:49:05]:

Right now we’re going to move through to the next section as we move through here. But any key insights, note them down. Hopefully you’ve learned a little bit so far about the way AI is changing some stuff, how to do sort of pay per click math. Hopefully I’ve made a bit of a case why if you’re not getting the customer, somebody else is and you may never see them for the rest of your life unless that other guy, that other company makes a mistake and pisses them off so much that they decide to go shopping again. That shouldn’t happen. And that shouldn’t happen with you either. You make a customer so happy they stick around forever because you do the right things. You deliver a client experience.

John Clendenning [00:49:39]:

You wear uniforms, you show up in a Nice, well marked van. You look professional, you have a routine in the home, you have a good follow up routine, you have a good client retention system. You’ve built the Marketing that runs your company, right? There’s, there’s an entire blueprint for this. So if, if a lot of that sounds like, oh my gosh, that’s a lot of work, John. I just want to go out and clean carpets here. That’s the Carpet Cleaner is the guy you hire. Even if you happen to be him right now or her, the Carpet Cleaner is the person you hire. The business owner knows this stuff.

John Clendenning [00:50:14]:

So building a PPC campaign that meets the tech savvy homeowner standards. How to structure your pay per click campaigns, Conversion tracking is a must. What that means is every single person that reaches out to you, calls you, messages you, starts a chat, you have to go back, you have to be telling Google that.

John Clendenning [00:50:47]:

So you’re, you’re, whoever’s running your pay per click for you. Again, this isn’t all just built into smart ads. Click a button and off I go. This is the sophistication of knowing how to do this. You have to put coding on your website, you have to, you have to put special numbers, you have to do a bunch of stuff. You have to teach Google their algorithm, their AI that this person called, that this person called, these people didn’t call. You have to teach them what happened when they got to your landing page. If you do that, Google can find more people like that, right? The AI and the algorithms can help dial in around your parameters, right? So the next level of conversion tracking is do they actually book a job? Not just did they call you but then did they book a cleaning and we’re satisfied clients that even teaches more.

John Clendenning [00:51:39]:

So your campaign must be broken into smaller ad groups targeting the various services that you provide. So your text ads match what the person types, right. So again we’re getting into intent based with AI, but it’s still, you have to make sure that as that whole transition is happening now with Google between traditional and AI that you have all of your keyword ad groups set up really, really, really well and you understand them and you’re monitoring, you’re tracking them and you know what themes like you’ve got ad groups, smaller ad groups around themes and stuff like that. Some people even do what they call scad, single keyword ad group. I like themed keyword ad groups better. But just so you know, you want to show that you have a strong understanding of keyword match types. Right? That’s the difference between broad match versus modified match, phrase match, that kind of stuff. Right.

John Clendenning [00:52:28]:

So you don’t want, and you don’t want to forget about negative keywords.

John Clendenning [00:52:32]:

That there alone is the biggest thing is negative keywords. So if you’re targeting keywords that generate a click because they think they’re buying a product or they think they could find a rental machine, that’s a problem. You need to write compelling ad copy that speaks to your ideal customer profile, what they want, and will entice them to click on you. It’s tiny classified ads. If you’re as old as me, you remember a guy by the name of Don Lapre. I think he ended up going to jail, but he ran a course on how to have tiny classified ads that make you millions of dollars. Right. Selling all kinds of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:53:06]:

Right. He was the tiny classified ad ad guy. Well, that was in the 80s and 90s. Tiny classified ads are pay per click. They’re tiny classified ads. The headline, the copy below, it all has to be influential. It has to speak to the right person and, and get rid of the wrong person. We fix 99 carpet cleaning.

John Clendenning [00:53:29]:

Kind of a neat title for the people that don’t want to pay 99 and kind of get a chuckle out of that and go, you know what, I get what they’re doing there. And yeah, you know, I’m, I’m a more discerning person. I don’t want to hire the 99 call the carpet cleaner for my million dollar home, my two million dollar home on the golf course. That’s not who I’m hiring. I’m not hiring the discount guy that, you know, shows up with, you know, baggy pants and, you know, underwear sticking out the back and, and, and, and, and, and right. And you know, a greasy van that just leaked all over my driveway. That’s not who they want. So do you know who your ideal client is? Ideal customer profile.

John Clendenning [00:54:04]:

Now you know how to run your entire business. Leverage ad extensions. So these are things you can turn on that allow your ad to be bigger, that have more things. Right click like that you can have click to call extensions. They’ll still charge you, but somebody calls the, the call extension or the, the you’ve got service Extensions, a bunch of different stuff like that. So you want to make sure your ad extensions are all on and you want to have, you want, you want to have land visitors on a solid, well thought out landing pages that are built with a B split testing. They’re tested to convert and they’re constantly being tested. Constantly being split tested.

John Clendenning [00:54:41]:

Is this going to convert better than that one? So one person lands on this landing pace, the next person lands of that. Once you’ve got statistically significant volume of people to both, there’s a winner. Something that the headline worked better, the offer worked better, the layout worked better, there’s ways to dial it in. We dial in across all of our hundreds of clients in the cleaning world, carpet cleaning specifically, but we do maid service and, and other cleaning services as well. Home cleaning services.

John Clendenning [00:55:07]:

We split test so much that our starting ad land or landing page and our starting ads are dialed in and then we nuance it from there for the local community. So you want to be that specific. It is a math problem, like it’s psychology plus math. So don’t even think about spending another penny on pay per click until you have conversion tracking in place. Hopefully I’ve made that case.

John Clendenning [00:55:32]:

Right. Dynamic number swapping is a big part of this. So you want to make sure that when somebody lands on a landing page, somebody the number swaps so they, where they came from determines organic versus pay per click traffic, landing pages, all that kind of stuff. You want keyword pools. So what that basically means is the number swaps based on keywords, it tracks it all back. Google knows which search phrase got that phone call and it’s all part of a dynamic number swapping technology. You want web form tracking. If you’ve got web forms or chats on the website, you, you want to make sure that that information is being attributed back to the Google Ad source.

John Clendenning [00:56:09]:

So there’s a lot of technical involved in that. And then you want to make sure that everything’s built into your Google Ads campaign to determine which ad groups, keywords, all of it are working. And then you’re constantly sifting through that, hours of sifting through that you do not want to set it and forget it provider or service. Because all of this takes attention, you know, the ideal customers coming through, you know, service terms that AI and other things aren’t going to know. All right, so again a rental machine, you still might have gotten a click, but the way it’s worded should be a negative, right? Those kinds of things, that’s got to be your attention’s Got to be there. So the most important key performance indicators, what are you watching? Your daily budget. Too small of a daily budget and you don’t get enough, you won’t even get enough clicks to generate a phone call. So your, your daily budget and your total spend that, that it actually spends.

John Clendenning [00:57:10]:

Right? You want to, you want to be in the sweet spot. Usually I’ll show you, I can show you a little bit of a, a calculator that we built that gets you, that helps you figure that out. But ideally, because we know that we’re getting click through rates of 15 to 20%. Google says 20% on average. You expect keywords to like, like, so impression impressions to clicks, that’s one rate, about 4 or 5% clicks to phone calls, that’s about 20, 15 to 20% of all clicks turn into an inquiry. The rest of them, they just back out, do something else, forget we don’t know. But that’s, that’s just Google’s standard numbers, right? So that adjusts, you know, if you don’t have enough of a budget, Google just turns your ads off after one click. Cost per click.

John Clendenning [00:58:00]:

In Carpet Cleaning, 35 to $55 in most marketplaces is pretty good.

John Clendenning [00:58:43]:

And I go, yeah, I’ve got all my numbers, I don’t need yours. And they’re like, oh my gosh, John, nobody does this.

John Clendenning [00:58:57]:

And I’m going, well, some people should, because I can now speak honestly to the ads and here’s what I’m willing to do, right? So being an intelligent business owner. So again, I, I didn’t Go to college. This, this is all I want to, I want to learn what I need to know. I own a business. I need to know how to run it, right? So 35, $55 upholstery, a little bit less cost per click, a little bit less competitive. So it’s a little bit less average cost per lead, tile and wood floor, usually a little bit higher actually. And then you want to know what your internal investment is. You want to be at that three to one.

John Clendenning [00:59:33]:

Spot. If you average, if your average job, you’re really good at upselling, your average job is high, or your conversion rate from phone call or form fill to job is high, above 40%, maybe above 50%, your return investment will go up. Right. So let me see what we got on the next screen. Yeah, before I do that, let me, let me show you this. So this is a calculator I just built. So we, we had a, a.

John Clendenning [01:00:01]:

Excel version of it. And I just built this and put it, put it up on our website so you can go to Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters.com PPC calculator. Again, it just went up two days ago. So ultimately this is something we walk our clients through.

John Clendenning [01:00:25]:

Google tells us that you want to get four to five clicks. You know, you need about five clicks to get one lead, right? So Google knows that your budget is going to be $40. Five times eight, five clicks to get one lead. If your website is converting at 20%, let’s say it’s at 15. Let’s just say like your landing page, 15%. Pretty good. Some people, it’s only 10, 12%. Go look at your numbers.

John Clendenning [01:00:52]:

Let’s say it’s 15% and your booking rate is 40% of your calls. And your average job is only 275 like we saw. Right. So now you’re at a 2.8 to 1 return on investment. You spent $40 a week, $200. So. Or sorry, $4 a day, $200 weekly budget, right. About 8,800, $900 a month.

John Clendenning [01:01:16]:

You had 105 clicks. Sixteen of them reached out to you. Why? Because that is your web, your conversion rate, your cost to get somebody to reach out to you is $53. That’s right. In that 35 to $55 range. Really good. And you booked because you only book 40%. You booked six jobs, right? And you have your cost per sale.

John Clendenning [01:01:39]:

It cost you $133 to buy a customer, right? Now that was supposed to be 275, not 375. Let’s do 275, our lower end guy. So yeah, not even two to one ROI. There’s, there’s problems, right? $133 to buy a customer, only $275 from the first job. But if you’re good at maintaining them lifetime value, maybe they are worth 5,000. Is it worth spending $133 to get a customer that you can turn into a client that sticks around? Right? So your total revenue was 1700 bucks. You know, maybe enough to pay your mortgage. Your net profit though, is only $893.

John Clendenning [01:02:16]:

So your pay per click campaign cost you $840 a month and it made you $890 profit. You’re going, John, that sucks. Why would I do pay per click? Let me show you.

John Clendenning [01:02:43]:

If and on the quote, you book at 95% because you’re in the home, right? And if, and if you can’t book the job or the quote, you book the information. You get their email address so you can send them all the information you talked about. If they are calling around now, you can drip on them and tell them happy customer stories and get them back. So now you got conversions in place. So let’s say you’re converting at 50%.

John Clendenning [01:03:04]:

Right? Now you’ve got a 3.3.7 to 1 ROI. Hey, now we’re starting to get good. We made $2,200, $1900. The only thing we changed was our average job and our ability to book on the phone. We didn’t change anything else. The spend was still the same. Everything else is still the same. But now we’ve got a net profit of 2,200 bucks.

John Clendenning [01:03:28]:

Now you say, okay, well now what if instead of one lead a day, which is one booking every two days, is there enough room for me to get three leads a day? Right. The 3.7 to 1 ROI is still the same. We’re not changing that because this is still the same. Maybe, right? But maybe we want five Leads a day. Maybe we want ten leads a day so that we book five jobs every day. Because we have, we’re in a big market, we’re in Dallas, Fort Worth, we’re in, you know, Chicago, we’re in like, you know, in a big market and we have enough crews and all that. Well, now look at it. Not the, the ROI is still the same 3 to 1, but our investment is now 8,000amonth.

John Clendenning [01:04:08]:

Now you start seeing that $2 million Carpet Cleaner we’re talking about plus 2 million, right? Because they spent 8, 9, 10,000 on pay per click. But that generates them $31,000 in revenue. Very close to our other numbers. Right. But 22,000 in profit. We go back to one lead a day, $2,000 in profit, up the spend.

John Clendenning [01:04:31]:

11,000 in profit, 20,000 in profit. Because they can now scale.

John Clendenning [01:04:39]:

So to structure the pay per click campaign campaigns were broken in smaller ad groups targeting various services. So you might have a brand campaign for people that type in your name, right? You might have a campaign that you can test with your competitors. So when people are typing in the competitor’s name, just see if it works. You’ll notice that your competitors are targeting your name sometimes more often than not, if somebody knows somebody’s name, your brand campaign is not a bad one to run. It’s the cheapest clicks you’re going to get and it gets people who are going to looking at the very top of Google or now in that AI overview you can make sure you get your name in there, right? You want to have your main focus campaigns around Carpet Cleaner, office cleaning, Carpet Cleaner, Geo. So you’re going to have like around your main service. So Carpet Cleaner your main service. There’s a bunch of ad groups you’re going to need that are separate.

John Clendenning [01:04:45]:

Having a dashboard or having a team that can tell you how many leads came from the service, how many, what the total investment was, what your average cost per lead is, that’s really good. That’s right, that’s below that 35 to 55 that we talk about. What the click through rate is 4.7, trending towards 5%. This client’s doing really, really good. The average cost per click versus cost per lead. See how many clicks they need to get a lead. Obviously they’re really good data. Somebody should be running the data for you and telling you how to dial it in.

John Clendenning [01:05:15]:

They should be listening to your calls and telling you how to book better or use somebody like Rachel at the Clendenning Studio that answers phones for Carpet Cleaners and books, maybe better than you do, or at least books while you’re on the road, all those kinds of things, right? So you want to understand what your true roi. Track the source of every book job and qualify the exact revenue that each one generates. Right? You want to know the true ROI from returning customers. Your return investment should be like 15 to 1, 20 to 1. So that’s why there’s a value in Marketing to your database at all times. Right? You want to have, you know, SEO, you want to have, you know, maybe real estate leads coming from, because you have referral partners, right? You have all of that kind of stuff. So pay per click, not sure why the word SEO or it’s either, but pay per click, things like that, how many leads, how many booked sales, what’s the revenue? You want to really know your true roi.

John Clendenning [01:06:13]:

So to structure the pay per click campaign campaigns were broken in smaller ad groups targeting various services. So you might have a brand campaign for people that type in your name, right? You might have a campaign that you can test with your competitors. So when people are typing in the competitor’s name, just see if it works. You’ll notice that your competitors are targeting your name sometimes more often than not, if somebody knows somebody’s name, your brand campaign is not a bad one to run. It’s the cheapest clicks you’re going to get and it gets people who are going to looking at the very top of Google or now in that AI overview you can make sure you get your name in there, right? You want to have your main focus campaigns around carpet cleaning, office cleaning, carpet cleaning, Geo. So you’re going to have like around your main service. So carpet cleaning your main service. There’s a bunch of ad groups you’re going to need that are separate.

John Clendenning [01:07:04]:

Secondary services are going to be separate ad groups, right? Targeted with their own budget, their own or their own split of the budget, their own. You’re watching the ads, you’re watching their negative keywords. Like a really good setup. And then you want to make sure that you have secondary, your service areas, your secondary cities or regions where you want to track performance. You might want to set them up as separate ad groups so that it’s not blended. So if you have, you know, a main town, say you live in a town of 20,000 people, right next to the town of half a million people, right? You’re going to want to have that service area, the town of half a million people and your town of 20,000 people separated so that you, you know which how your campaigns are performing separately in each area. So there’s a lot of nuance again, that doesn’t happen when you click give Google your money, give them your credit card and go figure it out. For me, it doesn’t work.

John Clendenning [01:07:55]:

That’s why people turn off pay per click. Keyword types matter. So used to be called modified broad. They changed it to phrase match. So you got broad match, phrase match and exact match. It just means that even on exact match, Google doesn’t do it exactly anymore. Like it’s still. They’ll let it drift.

John Clendenning [01:08:13]:

But it used to be that it had. They had the person had to type exactly that in Phrase match means that the phrase works, right? So any, anything that has that phrase contained in it, even if they say and type other things and then broad match literally just means Google guests. To guess you’re telling us carpet cleaning, whatever broad match, we basically don’t recommend it at all simply because if you’re trying to do keyword discovery and find new keywords and stuff like that. Yeah, maybe as an, as an investment to try and find dialed in phrases and stuff like that, you might want to run broad to find things you might be missing on. But unfortunately, any variation of the order and words and you know, carpet cleaning, spot remover. Yep, you’ll show up for that as well because it’s broad, it’s all over the place. So you want to really pay attention to negative keywords. Really pay attention.

John Clendenning [01:09:10]:

If your negative keyword list isn’t 2 to 3,000 words by now and you’re running pay per click for more than a year, you’ve got a problem. You don’t have the right negative keyword list. You got to be adding to it all the time. So that people, things that people type in that are definitely a hard no, even if it’s just one word in the mix of a whole bunch of words is definitely anytime that word shows up or that whatever is a hard no. That, that it’s. We know it’s a rental machine rug, Dr. Bissell. You know all those kinds of things.

John Clendenning [01:09:38]:

Most PPC agencies I’ve seen don’t know Carpet Cleaner well enough to ever dial that list in.

John Clendenning [01:09:59]:

A generalist agency has never done it long enough or well enough. They will be spending all kinds of your money trying to figure that out and they probably won’t even pay attention. You need to write compelling text ads that, that resonate with the type of customer. Entice them to click. You tell them exactly what you want them to do. If you had, if you have had a special offer for the service that they search and reference in the text ad, all the better, right? Again, but we’re not giving discounts and deals. We’re not three rooms in a hall for $99. But if there is something that you can put in, like a really compelling mafia offer kind of thing, tell them about that.

John Clendenning [01:10:35]:

Let them click through to the landing page to see everything about it. Give them one decision, right? Call, chat, web form. Like that’s why landing pages work so well because if they’re on your website, they can now click around and get lost and get confused and then the phone Rings and they’re done right on a landing page. You got one thing to do. Reach out to us or go away. You’re going to get more people reaching out to you if you give them that one thing to do. Don’t offer too many options. Don’t try and take them to a landing page and go, oh, by the way, we also do upholstery cleaning and tile cleaning.

John Clendenning [01:11:04]:

Does your house smell like pee? It’s pee prevention month, Pee removal month for your Carpets. Get them on the upholstery cleaning and the tile cleaning later.

John Clendenning [01:11:28]:

You’re trying to influence them and get your Marketing out there over time.

John Clendenning [01:11:51]:

Yep. So make your ad pop with call outs. Again, this is a call extension. So the phone number will. Google will. If somebody just calls that number and never clicks on the ad, they’ll count that as a click. But make sure you have extensions in there. Right.

John Clendenning [01:12:05]:

Like these are other extensions. Like.

John Clendenning [01:12:08]:

Right, Call out extensions about us. Let’s see if that’s good on this one. Yeah, your location. If you’ve got an address or a shop, you can have that as an extension. You can have pages on your website as extensions as well. So you want to make sure that you’re using extensions everywhere you can. So if you can see here how the ad jumps off the page when you’ve got these extensions turned on. These guys don’t.

John Clendenning [01:12:32]:

Which looks better, our client or the other guys? The Home Depot and John Clendenning. And so on.

John Clendenning [01:12:47]:

So get 50% off sanitizing, right? So 10% grout color seal, free rug pickup, $75 off next appointment. When they click on that, what does that mean? What is your minimum charge? What are you doing? Have you tested all of this stuff? Right, so you take them to a landing page, you split test offers, you split test headlines, you split test and you dial in what resonates with Them at the time of year and what they’re thinking of. So you know your ideal customer, understand the psychology of marketing and math or hire somebody who does. If you had to land visitors on solid, well thought out pages that are built to convert, you want to make sure they are built to convert. You want to make sure you’ve got forms, you want to make sure you have, you know, again, 50% off deodorizing on any cleaning. Reach out to us, start a chat, make a phone call. All of this teaches Google if people are interested in that. You want to make sure that the pages are built to convert and the offers have been tested.

John Clendenning [01:13:51]:

And you want to make sure that they look great on on on mobile as well, right? You’ll be surprised if you look at Google Analytics. Oh, everybody comes to my website on mobile. Go look at your Google Analytics. That’s not true. There’s still a lot of people that maybe start on mobile. The smart people, the.

John Clendenning [01:14:12]:

Leaders, the rich people, the people that more affluent, spend more time in college, university, read more and end up actually looking for something and then moving on to their computer later to do the rest of the search or the rest of the understanding. You’ll see that as well. People in an emergency need it quick. People that are looking for that replacement for the rest of their life, they want to try and find their guy, their gal, their service for the rest of their lives if they can. Those people are, you’ll notice 50% of your traffic will still be on desktop devices. Also the people sitting in their offices and stuff like that as well during the day. So how to accelerate your lead throw with paid ads.

John Clendenning [01:14:56]:

Conversion? Tracking your campaign must be broken in smaller groups. This is just a recap. You want to make sure you have understanding of keywords and match type, write compelling ads, leverage ad extensions and have landing pages. Right? Those, any of those are key insights. Think of who you’ve got working with you right now. Are they doing all of those things? If they’re not, that might be why you’re not a happy camper with paid ads. Paid ads are just one pole in the water. It’s not the only thing you do.

John Clendenning [01:15:23]:

So here’s client with a Carpet Cleaner ad, duct cleaning ad, call only ads again, all of the different ad groups broken out all different reasons. Average cost per click. Look at how low we’ve got some of these with quality scores, well under $3.

John Clendenning [01:15:55]:

There’s that one sitting. Oops, let’s go back a bit. That one’s sitting at $4. But look, the, the average across all of them is 297.8percent click through rate. Got a really high one on this, but a little bit lower on the duct cleaning. Right, but the click through rate, how many clicks did we get? How many impressions? What was the total spend? And the average cost per lead phone call that came in? Right. Cost per inquiry. If they only booked at 30%, they would have made 4 to 1 ROI because their average job is $600 across carpet, duct, area, rug, tile.

John Clendenning [01:16:36]:

Lifetime value of 37 customers who are, you know, paying 10, 5, 10, $20,000 if their average job is $600. These are 15 to $20,000 customers over the lifetime value. Right? So we’re, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, not just the $21,000 per month.

John Clendenning [01:17:25]:

So questions asked your PPC provider, if you’re doing it or if you’re doing yourself, ask yourself this, how much of my budget goes to ads versus spend versus management fees. Those should be separate. What type of tracking will are you, do you have in place? Do you do.

John Clendenning [01:17:42]:

Call tracking, web form tracking? If you don’t have web and conversion tracking.

John Clendenning [01:17:49]:

You’Re at a major disadvantage. You can’t teach it. That’s, that’s necessary. And you, do you have a way of determining how, how many phone calls are pay per click vs organic? Like is it different numbers, all that kind of stuff? How will my, how are we tracking the key performance indicators that we talked about? Will there be a live dashboard? Will there be reports? Will we break it down? What are the key metrics? What are the costs? Right? Are you asking these people this stuff? Do you see this from your provider? Will you be setting up specific landing pages? Will you be split testing? Can you share those results?

John Clendenning [01:18:30]:

Will you be leveraging all the ad extensions?

John Clendenning [01:18:34]:

What are our target for cost per lead and return on investment? Are they helping you with Your booking percentage and your average job size to make the ROI make sense. If your average job is $125 and your booking percentage is 20%. Do not do pay per click. You will not make enough money if you don’t retain any of your clients beyond the first cleaning. Well, some of them come back. How many? I don’t know. Don’t do pay per click. You got to run a good business.

John Clendenning [01:19:03]:

And a good business means you know how to influence more people to book more of them at prices higher than your competition and you know how to keep them. You have those in place, you’re a beast. You can now do omnipresence marketing. You can now grow a company. There’s a lot to do to this, right? So you need good providers and good, good vendors and good coaches to help you grow a business. So what makes our campaigns a little bit better or different at least? Strategic segmentation obviously. Right. We know how to split out of ad groups.

John Clendenning [01:19:35]:

This is another view. This is an older view of one actually. Um, some of the other ones you saw were a little bit newer, but we listened to all the calls. That’s what our call logs look like. So in a tough or uncertain economy, you must be omnipresent. You have to be found everywhere. Pay per click is just a core pole in the water. It’s one of them. You need 20, 30, 40 poles in the water way. Pole in the water is way to get 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 inquiries per month from that source. Not trying to get 100, 200 calls from this one thing, right? Oh, I tried flyers, it didn’t work. I tried Facebook ad, it worked for a while and it didn’t work.

John Clendenning [01:20:01]:

Anybody wants to go deeper with the data, it’s right there on the screen. And we have those conversations and we’re constantly optimizing. There is no set it and forget it around here. Frederico, we call him Ton. He’s a small guy, I don’t know. He goes by the name Ton. That was his choice, not mine. His friends call him Ton.

John Clendenning [01:20:16]:

But tonight is, is, is our director of paid ads. He is a media buyer. He’s got statistical, he is university degrees is in math and stats and all of that stuff. And he understands influence, he understands psychology. That’s the ideal person to run a department that does this. Hours are spent every single week inside our clients accounts with all of this stuff.

John Clendenning [01:20:59]:

You have to understand it costs money. You invest well and your returns are outsized. Right. If you go with the cheapest financial advisor, do you think you’re going to have great returns. If you go with the financial advisors that handle, you know, 100 million dollar billion dollar portfolios and it happens to be your brother in law and you pay him really, really well and he does a great job because he’s very expensive. Do you think your return, your, your, your output will be better? So not saying you have to go with the most expensive guys on the planet, but what you want to do is you want to make sure that the people that are doing the work are actually doing the work.

John Clendenning [01:21:47]:

They couldn’t even take their family out for dinner once for that price. It’s not enough time. You need hours to do this well. So our dashboards look like this as you know, so we can show leads and returns and stuff like that. This is another view. This is an older view of one actually. Um, some of the other ones you saw were a little bit newer, but we listened to all the calls. That’s what our call logs look like.

John Clendenning [01:22:10]:

So in a tough or uncertain economy, you must be omnipresent. You have to be found everywhere. Pay per click is just a core pole in the water. It’s one of them. You need 20, 30, 40 poles in the water way. Pole in the water is way to get 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 inquiries per month from that source. Not trying to get 100, 200 calls from this one thing, right? Oh, I tried flyers, it didn’t work. I tried Facebook ad, it worked for a while and it didn’t work.

John Clendenning [01:22:38]:

I tried yext, it was, you know, yelp. It didn’t, it worked for a bit, then it didn’t work. So you’re trying one thing at a time. You’re putting one pole in the water and going that pole. Did it work enough to generate a 3 to 1 ROI? Oh, I don’t know. Well, if you did know that, what was your average job? What was your booking percentage? What was your roi? Cool. Keep it in the water. Put another pole in.

John Clendenning [01:22:58]:

Let’s get more by the way, let’s do organic because that’s the 10, 15, 20 to 1. Let’s do repeat referral marketing. Let’s get your database coming back, right? Build poles in the water. That, that, that, that capture the, and these, these first time customers that you can turn, build a relationship into long term repeat and referral clients. Omnipresence means that you’re connecting every, you know, every lead touch point. In a tough economy you can’t rely on a single interaction to close the deal. People need to see, see you know your brand. It used to be 11 times zero.

John Clendenning [01:23:34]:

Moment of truth. ZMOT is what Google called it. Go back and look up the report. Used to be 11 interactions with a brand before they even considered calling the company or choosing the product off the shelf. Now they’re saying that that’s well over 20 in our hyper, hyper.

John Clendenning [01:23:51]:

Advertised world. So lead nurture is your superpower. You got to nurture these, these people. Follow up smart to maximize every opportunity. The fortune is always in the follow up. Following up with your clients, your customers turn them into clients. But also following up with people that inquired, chasing them. Right the fifth contact, the sixth contact, not the first.

John Clendenning [01:24:13]:

It’s not one call and done. So you need to have a system in place to, to chase them. So when they come in, they get emails, they get text messages, they get phone calls. You check. Hey, just you reached out to us a couple days ago on our pay per click or local survey, whatever on a phone call. Just wondering if you’d like somebody to pop around and, and provide a healthy home audit assessment for you. Absolutely free and complimentary. In fact, not only is it free, we’ll pay you for it.

John Clendenning [01:24:39]:

It’s a whole different strategy. We talk about a different day. So speed is king, speed to lead. So you want to be connecting within one to two rings. You want to be connecting to anybody who reaches out on a form or chat within one minute, two minutes max. That’s not you in the truck doing it. Then you need people, you need help. That’s not AI.

John Clendenning [01:24:58]:

It’s not going to do a great job. You need people, you need help. Automate the chase as much as you possibly can. So you speed to lead. Live humans get involved, have a bit of AI and backup when you can to jump it back to the human. But people don’t wait anymore and then automate the chase. Have multi touch. Everywhere they go.

John Clendenning [01:25:17]:

Oh no, I mean package like in good, better, best Carpet Cleaner. Good, better, best upholstery cleaning. Good, better, best tile cleaning.

John Clendenning [01:25:41]:

I know almost all of them. Business owners in the Carpet Cleaning world that run at that level.

John Clendenning [01:26:25]:

I’ve met them over my 30 years and my 20 years of consulting and, and speaking on stages and all that kind of stuff. I’ve interviewed them on the podcast. I, I know these people. I’ve consulted people to get their way up there and made them realize and when they finally started putting the things in place one at a time, take a deep breath, get it put in place, then put the next thing in place. All of these things. Maximizing ROI makes your pay per click work better. Marketing your reputation, your reviews, your happy customer stories all over the Internet, all over social media makes your pay per click work better. Makes your your door hangers and your yard signs and your, your every door mails and everything else work better.

John Clendenning [01:27:04]:

…you now know what 90, 95% of all small businesses and cleaning businesses don’t know about that one channel alone. Why pay per click has such a value in the mix of a proper Marketing routine.

John Clendenning [01:27:34]:

Google’s AI powered search is making pay per click essential. If you’re not in pay per click in 2026, you are left behind. AI is changing all of that and the way search is working. Your brand visibility is key.

John Clendenning [01:27:50]:

Adapting to new customer journey the new customer journey is they’re not typing in the way they used to. They’re asking questions differently. So what, what are they’re asking questions to their Alexas and their series and stuff like that as well. And all of those are becoming AI powered and smarter as well. Omnipresence done right, you need to connect every single lead touch point. Even in tough economies they need to see you everywhere. You’ve got to be joining like the Chamber of commerce and charity barbecues and joining the community, all that really good stuff of running a really great business. You got to do that as well.

John Clendenning [01:28:23]:

That’s what I meant by when the economy gets tough, you double down. You do more of the shoe leather stuff that doesn’t maybe cost you a ton of money, but you, so you can afford all the rest of the stuff and you just build this omnipresence as everybody else comes and goes in business, you last the longest and then lead. Nurture is your superpower. How you follow up determines how successful you are.

John Clendenning [01:28:47]:

Period, Full stop. How well you follow up with your database are you contact them every week or every month or not at all if you’re not at least in touch with your database once a month.

John Clendenning [01:29:00]:

I fear that you haven’t figured out what business you’re in yet. You are the marketer of cleaning services and the outreach officer first, everything else second. Because that’s where all your money is. That’s the millions. And again, 99.9% or more of all cleaning companies and small businesses don’t figure that out. They haven’t learned this lesson. So you know, trust me now, believe me now, believe me later. But at some point you’ll come to that realization if you want to, if you want to turn the corner or you already know it and you’re going amen brother to me right now because you’re, you know this.

John Clendenning [01:29:41]:

So what are your takeaways? What are things that you are going to do right now? Around pay per click, around AI, around all the stuff we talked about. Write them down. Implementation is the only way. It’s everything. That’s a little training program we have called Implementation is Everything because businesses, most businesses fail not because they don’t have the ideas I just gave you a whole ton of them, but because they don’t do anything with them. You have to have a system to implement. You have to learn it. We don’t get born with it.

John Clendenning [01:30:12]:

Our parents don’t necessarily know it and teach it to us. You need a system. You need a process that allows you to get a little bit better every single day. The key to growth is to take immediate action on one high impact shift.

John Clendenning [01:30:27]:

Marketing is not a side activity. It is the business that you’re in. You’re the marketer, the general contractor, the marketer of your cleaning services. So what does that mean? You have a role to play and the vendors you hire help you until you’re at a level where you can bring it in house millions of dollars, the Vendors that you hire.

John Clendenning [01:30:50]:

You understand where they fit in. You and them work together. The consultants that you bring in help you pull this all together. I’ve never met a very successful business that hasn’t had consultants and mentors and all of that as well. Business. The best businesses are not the best operators. They’re not. They are the best marketers who then need to refine their operations because they market so well.

John Clendenning [01:31:14]:

Stuff breaks and they have to fix it. The way things work, the way their technicians work, all of it has to be thought through thoughtfully. That becomes your job. Commit to one major marketing shift this week. What Top 3 Paper Click Initiatives do you need to implement now to hit your 2020, sorry, 2026 goals.

John Clendenning [01:31:33]:

Right. We have a thing called blueprint for success and that is the entire blueprint to build a million dollar cleaning business. It’s part of our million dollar growth plan. Right. I think I showed you anyways. Nope, maybe I didn’t show the million dollar growth plan anyways. Part of our million dollar growth plan. We know how to do this.

John Clendenning [01:31:50]:

It’s what I did myself, what I helped my buddies do, what I consulted for years, since 2007, been consulting on this. Worked with a franchise or a licensee network to help them build up to hundreds of millions of dollars and sell to a large multinational while running all my own cleaning businesses because I never had to work in the business after about 1997, other than the odd time I’ll jump in and go help the guys on a, you know, a 20,000 square foot city hall commercial cleaning. Yeah, I’ll show up, I’ll, I’ll run some equipment for them and do stuff like that, that’s fine. But that’s just to get out of the office and out of the, out of my, my, my route, my driving around my grassroots marketing outreach. Right. So this is the way to do it. You market to generate leads, to generate referral partners. You market, you create funnels, you market to generate direct contacts.

John Clendenning [01:32:48]:

You have marketing messages and scripts when you answer the phones and all that kind of stuff. And then you market before you show up for the job or the quote to indoctrinate them. And then you do the, you while you’re on the job, the technicians are marketing. Everything they do is like Disney. They’re on stage, they’re performing an experience so that they get, they get that wow moments so that they get repeats and referrals and tips and, and reviews and happy feedback and then you retention market the crap out of them for repeats and referrals and recoveries and reactivations and the whole cycle goes again. There is a lot to running a profitable business. You just have to learn it one step at a time.

John Clendenning [01:33:31]:

We have what we call the best known cleaner omnipresence marketing system. It sets up your core foundation. There are seven, these are six plus the seventh is nurturing six digital marketing avenues and then nurturing which is kind of more in the background.

John Clendenning [01:33:48]:

Go to CarpetCleanerMarketingMasters.com Schedule Fill out the little survey.

John Clendenning [01:34:24]:

Somebody on a team is going to reach out to you for a quick conversation. If you fit, if you’re a good fit, if you’re looking to grow, if you have the right mindset, the right approach, you’re done doing the old way that everybody else does and you’re ready to do it the right way.

John Clendenning [01:34:45]:

We’ll jump on a call and we’ll have a conversation about that. We will do a deep audit of your competitors and and you and your marketplace. We’re going to find the gaps between where you are, where you want to be and why there’s a gap and how that gap will never be filled on its own. And need to strategy, need strategies to fill that gap. And we’ll talk about those strategies. That’s all we do. We hop on the phone for an hour or so, 90 minutes like this call, 90 minutes and we go through you and your business.

John Clendenning [01:35:13]:

But CarpetCleanerMarketingMasters.com schedule if you’re new here, if you’re one of our clients that jump on these all the time just to refresh and remember what we do for them and learn and all that kind of stuff. Thanks for joining us but in the meantime we won’t be seeing you till after Christmas.

John Clendenning [01:36:08]:

So let’s put a year plan in place. Let’s talk about that. We’ll deal with that next session. So keep an eye out for those alerts and the dates and stuff like that. In the meantime, thanks so much. Appreciate all of you for showing up. Take care and we’ll talk again soon.