Q&A: Should you turn off PPC spend when your self-storage facility is at capacity?
Calcumate’s CEO, Joshua Webb, spoke to the Managing Director of YBA PPC, Laura Moxham, about what to do with your pay-per-click marketing spend if your self-storage facility is already at capacity.
Does it always make sense to pull the plug as soon as you’ve no units to offer?
Transcription
Laura 0:04
Yeah, sure, I mean, that would be the logical thing to do, right? I don’t need any more clients, we can’t be at capacity, let’s just let’s just, you know, cut. But actually, there’s a few things just to consider. So firstly, when you’re at capacity, you will still naturally have that attrition. So of those clients that are leaving, you know, you still need to backfill to bring these new clients on. So it’s good to understand your numbers and look at how many clients and, you know, leads and inquiries you need, but just consider that you will have that natural attrition. So that’s the first thing. So there is a reason that you still need to have your ads maintained and visible. Secondly, also is just to make sure that your brand is available, because if somebody is looking for self storage, and you’re not advertising there, and your ad spend has deteriorated, and you’ve used it all up for the day, because you’ve maybe cut down your spend, you know, they’ll only be able to go to your competition or like your competitors.
So therefore, you just don’t get your brand out there and recognise when people are searching. So also a little bit more technically, but you could, the alternative is you could turn it off and not have your ads running, as we just said logically. But that doesn’t play into the hands of Google, Google wants to know that you’re committed to spending, you’re committed to that platform to generate your leads and inquiries. And if you cut things, you then have to get yourself back into the eyes of Google that you are an advertiser, and you do want to be seen by the people that search on Google. So what I’m trying to say there is, if you’re not in it, Google will just kind of drop you down. And then when you want to come back into advertising again, you’ve then got to bring your spend up, and ultimately, it costs a little bit more. So that’s another thing to consider. The other thing from a much more technical perspective, is Google advertising is to do with bidding. So you bid on your keywords to be at the top of Google. Now, there’s some automated bidding strategies that you can use, which say to Google, right, we want to pay a certain amount for a lead, you know, we want to pay 15 pounds. For a lead, for example, that’s like a phone call, or somebody filling out a form. So you can use that kind of bidding strategy.
Now, if you then pause your ads and don’t spend the money, then Google will go, Oh, I’ve lost all that knowledge. And that insight, I don’t know how I can then get your ads shown to the right people at the right time. So it kind of messes with the computer’s head if you like. So depending on how you’re using Google ads, without getting too technical. It’s, it’s not working in your best interest to be able to do that. So you could either turn it off, but my recommendation would be to turn it down slightly. So you’re still visible, not as much as usual. And you’re still in the game, you’re still there.
Joshua 3:02
Gotcha. And then if I was to start to decrease my spending work, what would be your approach? Without knowing what my campaign looks like? Should I just be going to the highest level and then just decreasing it by 10, 20, 30%? Or should I be a bit more targeted, and how I’m cutting corners.
Laura 3:20
So there’s a couple of things that you could do, you could lower your daily ad budget. So let’s say you want to spend 100 pounds, sorry, 1000 pounds a month, you then divide that by, say 30. And that will give you the daily ad budget. So let’s say for argument’s sake, it’s 10 pounds a day, you could just reduce that to say seven or eight pounds a day or whatever is relevant, but drop it down a notch. So you could do that. Or alternatively, you could change your, your ad schedule, so you could be receiving less, less hours during the day, there’s a number of different things that you could try out.
Joshua 4:02
Okay, so it doesn’t need to be as blanket as you know, change it from 10 to seven, I could go for a few different things. Couple of different styles too.
Laura 4:11
Yeah. So you can check, you can reduce your, your bids, so that you’re not quite as high up, you could reduce your daily ad spend, you could reduce some of the parameters. So it could be you can tighten up the locations, you could tighten things up. So it’s a little bit a little bit smaller. The also the other thing is how long are you going to not need the leads for you know, is this a long term thing that okay, we really can’t take anyone for three months, because we know our business so well. And we know that we will hold on to them that long. In which case, you know, it could be that in three months. You could you could turn it right right down. But if we’re talking about, say, a month, six weeks, I really wouldn’t do that because it will break some of the history and the data that you’ve built up with Google.
YBA PPC is a boutique Google and Facebook Ads agency in the top 3% of agencies for Google in Europe and is a official partner supplier to the Self Storage Association and its members.
Laura is offering a free 30 minutes strategy session – simply email [email protected] and mention Calcumate