I'm going to level with you, Pest Control:

Is not sexy...but 800% growth with online sales is sexy!

Is extremely competitive, especially online.

Requires best practices to Outwit, Outlast and Outperform your competition.

In this article I'm going share what few in your industry know to:

1.Get a MAJOR competitive advantage.

2.Grow online sales and leads by 250% or more.

3.Be the next success story using a system that took countless months to perfect.

Bad New: Your Website Is Slow…and Hurting Your Business

Let's face it, mobile technology can be unreliable and over 50% of your website traffic comes from a mobile device. People using mobile phones expect pages to load in 3 seconds. Yes, three seconds is the new seven seconds. If a web pages takes longer to load than 3 seconds, people hit the back button as much as 53% of the time. Even worse, one out of two mobile phone users are expecting a webpage to load in 2 seconds.

Does your company spend money on pay per click advertising?

You may be, as Andrew Greess says, "spraying money down the drain" with your pay-per-click advertising.

If you are an average website, then your website page loads in 19 seconds on a G3 mobile connection. Even more surprising is that 77% of mobile websites take 10 seconds or more to load.

Think of how many sales and new prospects are lost every day because websites have a bad mobile phone experience? LOTS!

Are you concerned about how fast your website is on a mobile device? Take this test to learn moreand get a free audit of your website.

If you are running pay-per-click ad campaigns that link to a slow website, then you truly are "spraying money down the drain.”

Here are some tips and recommendations that we have learned by running advertising campaign experiments with companies in the pest control industry.

Case Study Results from Experiment #1: eCommerce Website Running AdWords

In this experiment, 50% of all traffic was coming from a mobile device and the balance from desktop. We created a split test which means we spit traffic coming from an online ad (in Google AdWords). Half of the traffic was sent to the eCommerce product page on the website and the other 50% was sent to a new mobile-friendly product page

Problem to Solve:

Even though 50% of all traffic was coming from a mobile device, only 20% of the sales were resulting from a mobile device. Our mission was to validate if the existing eCommerce web pages were preventing sales due to a bad user experience on mobile devices.

In the first three months of running this experiment we found that indeed we were losing sales as a result of a poor mobile phone experience. The less than mobile-friendly e-commerce product pages were hurting online sales.

Our campaign experiments resulted in a 250% increase in campaign conversions (online sales) in the first few months and currently are seeing 400-800% increases with specific campaigns for online sales using this new landing page format.

The landing pages we built for this experiment loaded in less than 2 seconds. Our conclusion to this successful experiment was that this equation below works works:

Fast-loading mobile friendly-landing pages + pay-per-click campaigns = unlimited online sales growth potential.

See the end of this article for the technical details of this case study.

Case Study Results from Experiment #2 - Lead Generation Using AdWords in Pest Control industry

In this case we ran tests using a similar strategy as above but instead of driving online sales, we were measuring lead generation results, specifically for pest control related services.

Following similar tactics as experiment #1, we developed mobile friendly landing pages to see if we could increase conversion rates with existing AdWords campaigns going to the main website. The overall mobile website speed was 8 seconds to load. This is definitely above average but not perfect. It is estimated that 28% of traffic (and leads) are being lost due to the site speed.

The results of our tests showed a 250-500% increase in conversion rates for campaigns using landing pages that were more mobile-friendly over sending to the main website landing page.

There were a significant number of campaigns that were built for specific pest control services and were optimized for specific cities. To build landing pages for all of these campaigns would require a lot of work to building.

In this case, we built a landing page tool that creates fast loading and mobile-friendly pages using content from Google AdWords campaigns. This content matching technic helps to increase each campaign's quality score. If you are not familiar with what a quality score is, Google uses this to determine how frequently your ad is seen but most importantly can lower your cost per click. The bottom line is you can get more leads while spending less money.

Here is what we learned using this landing page strategy:

1.Increased overall AdWords quality score and helped increase the overall conversion rate on these campaigns.

2.Reduced overall campaign cost by lowering cost-per-click.

3.Increased online leads without increasing the AdWords budget.

If you would like to to improve the results of your Google AdWords campaigns as much as 250% or more, give us a call at 480-818-6468 or contact us to see if your business is a candidate.

DIY Section: For the Techies That Want To Learn More Details on These Experiments

AdWords Campaign Experiment #1: eCommerce Site with AdWords

1.Get baseline metrics for the percentage of traffic that comes to your site from desktop, mobile, and tablet.

2.Create a split test of your ad campaigns in which one webpage goes to your website landing page and the other campaign is directed to a new mobile-friendly landing page.

3.If your business sells products online, then look at the percentage of desktop sales versus mobile sales in relation to the amount of traffic that your site gets for desktop versus mobile.

4.Quite simply, you can estimate how much money your business is" spraying down the drain" due to a poor performing mobile website and or landing pages.

We built the new landing page using a Google AMP and PWA framework. Pages built in this format load in 1 to 2 seconds and are a more simple and streamlined webpage to make the mobile user experience fast and easy to use.

If you are not familiar with Google AMP, here are is a link to learn more.

For DIYers, run this test and see what happens.

AdWords Campaign Experiment #2: Pest Control Lead Generation with AdWords

1.Similar to experiment #1, get started by getting baseline metrics for the overall percentage of traffic that comes to your site from desktop, mobile, and tablet.

2.Create a split test of your ad campaigns in which one goes to your main site landing page and the other campaign is directed to a mobile-friendly, landing page.

3.Pick campaigns that are your top performers for lead generation so that you have a good baseline metric to compare and make sure that these services have no seasonality to them that would influence results when running the experiments.

4.Look at the factors as it relates to the landing pages; load time, number of pages viewed, time on site, etc.

Most people do not invest into a specific landing page for each AdWords campaign because it can be very time-consuming. Thanks to machine learning and business intelligence technology, building landing pages for each AdWords campaign has become a lot easier.

See if your business is a candidate for getting a 250%+ increase in sales/leads with your online ad campaigns by completing our digital marketing questionnaire. 

Guest Post:

Matthew O’Brien is the CEO of MINT Social. MINT Social is a digital strategy firm with a niche in the pest control industry. Their interactive agency is focused on helping businesses grow their online presence through best -in-class digital strategies including websites, social media, search, mobile applications, desktop applications and effective paid advertising strategies. To learn more, visit http://www.MINTSocial.com.