Pest control: marketing revenue up 217% in four months

The challenge

A pest control company with three locations across Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island. It spent about $10K a month on ads, run by a generalist agency that also marketed movers and appliance stores.

The reports stopped at the top of the funnel. The agency reported clicks, impressions and traffic. Nothing connected those numbers to booked jobs. No channel had its own call tracking, and the CRM showed no lead source on any record. The owner's only measure was a rule of thumb: about $10K in ads brought in about $30K in sales. Nobody could say which channel produced it.

The website was big but invisible. It had 270 pages, and only about 20 of them ranked. Only the homepage ranked for local service searches. Organic search brought in about 116 visits a month.

The ad accounts ran on autopilot. Google Ads ran as one general pest campaign. Someone searching for bed bug treatment saw the same ad and landing page as someone searching for mice. In May, that campaign returned $0.71 for every dollar it spent. Local Services Ads brought about 30 leads a month at about $70 each, and nobody marked or rated the leads.

The strategy

Close the loop first. I judged every call and form from its transcript, then matched each lead by phone to closed jobs in the CRM. A daily dashboard showed revenue by channel from April on.

Rebuild the site for search. A new site launched in March. I tuned about 85 service pages to the words New Yorkers actually search, like "exterminator", and published about 45 blog posts.

Split Google Ads by pest. In June I built a pest-specific campaign with 22 ad groups. Each pest got its own ads, its own landing page and its own negative keywords. The old general campaign kept falling, so I paused it in September.

Open new map listings. A company with one Google Business Profile can only win map searches near that one address. I helped the company open two more: one for its Long Island office and one in Brooklyn. Each new listing got its own call-tracking number, a base of directory listings, full service descriptions and two posts a week. Revenue is reported per listing, so each one has to earn its place.

The results

Revenue is matched job by job to a tracked lead. Revenue with no traceable source is left out. Revenue per ad dollar is all marketing-sourced revenue, including free map and organic leads, divided by ad spend.

The pest-specific campaign returned 1.4x to 2.0x every month. The general campaign fell to 0.42x before I paused it. Google Ads as a whole went from 0.71x in May to 1.69x in September.

The new Long Island listing went from 2% to 59% of the local map for "pest control" in four months. Its average rank went from 11.9 to 3.9. Map listings became the biggest revenue source, up from $8.7K a month in April to $39.6K in August.