I got this email notification letting me know that someone left a comment on my channel and this person subsequently deleted the comment and so I’m gonna hide their identity and stuff but I thought it was a really good comment. They brought up some good points and I thought it was worth chatting about for a minute. So I’m gonna read through the comment and then give my own comments on the comment.
So the first thing he said was my google ads do not work like before I get clicks on youtube now and I don’t have a youtube channel and I’m wondering if I’m getting clicks tied to other platforms because I’m listed with HomeAdvisor platforms and related ones but not google search anymore. Now, my company runs google ads for companies across the country and I’ve noticed in the last year so a huge decline in the performance of google ads. It might be related to the fact that there’s more spam happening these days.
Pretty much anywhere on the internet, you’re encountering more spam but especially on google because anybody can do a search and see your ad and click on it and since you have to pay for that, you notice those clicks and I’ve just noticed a lot in the last year that a lot of those clicks appear to be spam. They appear to be fake because we can see in google analytics how long someone spends on the website, what buttons they click on stuff like that. And we’ve noticed that an overwhelming majority of the people clicking on those ads spend zero seconds on the website they don’t click on any pages like it just looks like bs traffic.
And so, you can see if you’re getting a bunch of crappy fake clicks then you’re wasting your budget on those, That’s not surprising.
I’ve been noticing the same thing about showing up on youtube. I think this person’s running display ads which are google’s, you know, if you’re on a website or something, you see those little ads everywhere and those are google display ads. So, if you’re doing that, then google’s just gonna put you all over the internet so that’s that might be where those are coming from.
Then he goes on to say isn’t it unfair to have multiple lead companies with virtually all leads going to HomeAdvisor and Angie and these companies are making it hard for the small guy to advertise because they dominate the ad space and they seem to have a monopoly. This is something I’ve been saying for a while now and it’s really frustrating and it was frustrating to me six years ago as just a regular contractor trying to market my company because I noticed even back then that the whole google search page was full of HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List and Houzz and Thumbtack and all these companies. It was making it really hard for me to get my company to show up and these days it’s even worse.
What he then says is I did some research and all these ads are coming from and are owned by a company called Ad Practitioner projects LLC and so what he’s talking about if you do a search for like I don’t know ex. bathroom remodel in your city, it is most likely one of the top ads you see are going to be this a company called Pal and Sons and Pal and Sons, if you click on it it’s just a page with a picture of this guy and his two sons and there’s a form and it says that they’re voted best in this city. If you fill out that form, your contact information gets sold to Angie leads and Angie Leads sells it to contractors and you’ll be getting calls from people that got your information through Angie Leads.
I actually called and talked to this guy and he’s discovered other companies like Pal and Sons and this is not a real company. It’s just meant to look like a real company. He’s found other ones there’s one called like Jensen brothers or Jensen and bros or something like that and basically what this guy discovered on his own and is something I’ve been looking into for a while is that there are all these websites across the internet where all these companies running ads on google and all over the place and if you fill out the form on any of these websites or ads your co your information ends up with Angie Leads or you know one of those companies. It’s like all roads lead to Angie, no matter where you are on the internet your stuff is, it’s going to them and if you do that google search now bathroom remodel in your city, you’re likely to see Angie Leads, HomeAdvisor over and over and over again. They’re running ads and they’re in the organic search and you’ve got Pal and Sons, Jensen bros and they’re all roads lead to Angie. You can say that they’re monopolizing the front page of Google and that’s exactly what they’re doing and it’s really it’s just frustrating. It was frustrating to me when I was just a contractor and it’s frustrating to me now as a marketer that works for contractors and the only way around it that I’ve been able to find so far is Google Maps.
That’s the one place that these companies can’t monopolize and luckily at least, for now, that’s where consumers are looking because consumers are catching on to this too. People don’t want to use Angie Leads anymore and if you read through the comments on some of my videos you’ll see homeowners coming on to say that. They’re having a bad experience this way and that they filled out a form somewhere and had a bunch of contractors calling them and all this stuff. I’m just trying to get the word out to you that it’s difficult uh as a contractor who doesn’t have time to research this stuff and go through trial and error.
It’s difficult to know what to do and it’s easy to be preyed upon by these companies that will call you over and over again and try to sell you this dream. This is what’s going on in the current state of the online space for home services and so if you watch this far you’re probably concerned about this or you’ve experienced some of this crap before. All I can say is get on Google Maps. Get your profile made, get reviews on that and at least for now, that is the one place that you can show up as a local business where you don’t have to compete with these national companies.
You don’t have to compete with all these other companies that are crowding out real businesses and selling leads to HomeAdvisor and I hope that’s helpful. If you have anything to add to this please throw in the comments, if you have any information you want me to check out I’d love to learn more about this and hear your experience.
