Google Ads for businesses that sell complex equipment
When a buyer is finally ready, they search. At that moment you are either on the page, or somebody else is.
The sale is decided before you know it has started
A complex purchase is specified, compared and shortlisted online, often months before an enquiry reaches anybody. By the time the phone rings, most of the deciding is done. The supplier who was findable during that stretch is on the shortlist, and the one who was not is being compared to.
The urgent version is simpler. When a machine fails, somebody searches and rings the first credible result. Not the best company in the category. The one they find.
In this market, almost nobody is bidding
We check the Google Ads Transparency Centre by hand for every business we research. Of the last forty equipment suppliers we looked at, thirty-eight were running no Google Ads at all, and on most of the search terms we tested there was not a single advertiser bidding.
That is unusual, and it will not last. An undefended position is the cheapest it will ever be, because you are not paying to outbid anybody. The first competitor in your category to notice takes the calls, and the price goes up for everyone who follows.
We wrote up how we check this, and why a zero is the most dangerous number in a marketing audit.
Tracking goes in before traffic. Always.
This is the part most accounts skip and it is why most accounts disappoint. Before a dollar is spent we make sure a phone call, a form and a quote request can each be traced back to the search that produced them. Without that, you are buying clicks and guessing, and in a market with a sales cycle measured in months you will guess wrong for a long time before you find out.
Built to be judged on money, not on faith
Set up properly
Search only, on the terms a buyer actually types. No display network, no automatic expansion into traffic you never asked for.
- You only pay when somebody clicks
- Targeted to the area you actually service, so no calls from three states away
- Search terms taken from your buyer's language, not your product catalogue
- Budget controlled, and you can pause it any week
Every enquiry traced
Calls, forms and quote requests all attributed to the search that caused them.
- Call tracking, so you know which ads produce phone calls
- Form and quote-request tracking into your CRM, not an inbox
- The search term behind every enquiry, not just the keyword you bid on
In enquiries and dollars
Not impressions, not reach, not a position score.
- Cost per enquiry, month on month
- What is in the pipeline and what it is worth
- What we would change next, and why
The four we hear every time
The question we always ask is who was running it, and could they tell you which enquiries it produced. Nearly always the answer is no, because the tracking was never set up. If nobody could see which clicks turned into phone calls, then nobody could switch off the half that was wasted, and the account slowly taught itself to spend on the wrong things.
That is why we set up tracking before we spend anything. It is not an upsell, it is the only way the second month is better than the first.
That is a good position and we would not change it. The question is what happens in a quiet month, because referrals are the one tap you cannot turn on. They arrive when they arrive.
Paid search is the tap. It is there for the months when the phone is quiet, and it costs nothing when you pause it.
Almost every business tells us this and almost none of them are right. The person who signs the purchase order may never search. The engineer writing the specification, the maintenance manager whose machine is down, and the procurement officer checking there are three quotes all do.
The audit shows you the actual search volume for your own category, so it is a question we can settle with data rather than opinion.
Less than you think to find out whether it works, and the honest answer depends on what one sale is worth to you. If a machine is $40,000 and you convert one enquiry in four, the arithmetic is very different from a $900 spare part.
We would rather start smaller than you expect and grow it once it is paying, than take a big budget and have a difficult conversation in month three.
Find out what we would change, before you pay us anything
Free, no lock-in contract, no obligation. Just a straight look at where your marketing is leaking and what it is costing you. Worst case, you keep the video and fix it yourself.
Takes about a minute. Video back within two business days.