Slippery Rock Gazette

What’s the Most Effective Ad Platform for My Shop?

Stephen Alberts

Countertop Marketing

What’s the Most Effective Ad Platform for My Shop? I get this question often. Usually, it’s paired with, “How much should I spend on ads?” so I’ll cover that as well. If you want more retail jobs for your countertop shop, there are many platforms where you can get more website traffic and leads. The problem is, a lot of these sources of traffic aren’t the best fit for shops.

I’ll order them where I think you should start. Here are 3 important points to think about before you start setting up campaigns.

How much is your marketing budget?

You need to think of your overall budget. You’ll want to figure out your ad spend budget and also a budget for someone to manage the ads. You might be handling this yourself or hire a company to help. Most companies charge around 1-2K/mo to manage ads for companies. Your ad spend should be separate. I would start at about 1K per platform to start.

How is your website?

There isn’t an easy way to say this. If your website isn’t all that great, then I would not waste money on Google ads. You pay per click with Google ads so if you are sending traffic to your site and it’s not good, then you will waste money. Before running Google ads, redesign your website.

How is your follow-up process?

I see this problem all the time. Shops come to us to get more project leads, we get them more, and then their sales process isn’t great so it’s not as successful as it could be. Use a CRM (we have one called STONE ENGAGE but there are dozens of others) and manage leads that come in. Follow up with leads on the phone, email, and text.

Facebook and Instagram

I put Facebook and Instagram at the top of the list because I think most shops should start here. The reason is that a lot of the shops I speak with usually need some type of website redesign. On Facebook and Instagram, you can run ads without homeowners having to go to your website. You can get leads right inside their platform.

As for a budget, I would start with $1,000 per month, here. You can always scale up if the ads have a good lead cost. On Facebook and Instagram (you run ads from FB and they also show on IG) you set a daily budget. So about $30/day is a good place to start, which is just under $1K/mo. Give it a few months to run before saying it doesn’t work. Also, if you are getting leads and they are not converting into jobs, take a look at your sales process. A lot of the time it’s not the leads but the follow-up process, as I mentioned above.

Google

Next on the list is Google. If your website is in good shape, you can start testing ads on Google. Google search ads are text ads that appear at the top of a search page. When someone clicks your ad, you pay Google a fee. In the countertop industry, it’s usually around $5/click, or so. Popular terms are “granite countertops,” “quartz countertops,” and “countertops near me.” There are dozens of different terms that a homeowner will type into Google to find you.

As with FB and IG, I like to start at around $1,000 per month. If you can bump that up to $1500/mo that’s even better. The problem is if your budget is too low, your ads will not show all day. It works the same as FB/IG where you set a daily budget. So if your budget is $30/day and you get 6 clicks that are $5 each before lunchtime, then you hit your daily budget and your ads will no longer show for the day. In most markets, $1500/month will allow you to run ads all day long.

You need to test and tweak it, as with any paid ads campaign, so be patient and let it run for a few months. You need to give it a chance to produce results. This is going to sound odd, but DON’T LET GOOGLE SET UP YOUR ADS! Google wants the campaign to work because you will stay with them each month and spend money, but they also want you to spend money. So a lot of times when “Google ad experts” help you set up a campaign, it will be optimized to spend money fast. So, beware…

Platforms I Don’t Recommend

If your budget is unlimited, then test away! But if you have a $5,000 per month budget available, then I would put $1,000 into FB/IG, $1500 in Google, and then you either have more budget to put into each – or hire someone to help.

It’s been my experience that these platforms do not perform all that great for countertop shops:

Yelp: We have tested this platform, and the leads usually aren’t all that great. Plus, the leads are very hard to get out of the system and into another system.

Houzz: Like Yelp, you could get some leads, but shops that have gone through the Houzz program usually have not seen very good results.

Angi’s and Homeadvisor: These platforms will send a bunch of the shops the same leads, so right off the bat you are competing with other shops. I would stay clear of these platforms.

In the end, Google and FB/IG can help your shop grow the retail side of your business. Get them set up and managed correctly, be patient, and track your results.