Should Industrial Ventilation Distributors Run Google Ads?

You’ve paid for Google Ads before. The bill came every month, the phone rang about as often as it always did, and nobody could say which ad brought in which quote request.

Or you’ve never tried them. You’ve heard they don’t work for distributors, or you never click ads yourself and doubt your customers do.

Google Ads can work for industrial ventilation distributors. It works when your ads show up for the exact products your buyers search for. When it’s done right, you can see which ads make your phone ring.

Heinlein Supply, a Chicago industrial ventilation distributor, cut their Google Ads budget from $3,555 a month to $343. Since then, they’ve gotten more leads than at any time in the company’s history.

For distributors and reps, ads work best alongside SEO for ventilation equipment distributors.

Is Google Ads worth it for industrial ventilation distributors?

Google Ads is worth it for industrial ventilation distributors because it shows your products to buyers at the moment they search for them. When a facility manager or mechanical engineer searches for a make-up air unit, an air curtain, or a centrifugal blower fan, your ad takes them to that product’s landing page, where they can call you for a quote.

3 things to set up before you spend on Google Ads

1. A landing page for each product line

A landing page is built for one product line, like make-up air units or air curtains. It asks the visitor to do one thing. In our experience, 9 times out of 10 that thing is a phone call.

Without a landing page, the visitor ends up on your home page. They can’t find what they searched for, so they leave. If your whole site needs work, see web design for ventilation distributors.

2. Call tracking

Call tracking tells you which calls came from your ads. Without it, an ad call looks the same as a call from a customer who already had your number. Asking every caller where they found you is not a reliable way to find out.

3. Someone to answer the phone

Have someone pick up during business hours. If an ad call goes to voicemail, most of the time that caller goes back to Google and calls the next company on the list. Whoever picks up first wins the order.

What Google Ads costs an industrial ventilation distributor

Write Good Code charges $750 a month to manage your Google Ads. You also pay Google for the clicks. This is called ad spend. For industrial ventilation distributors, we recommend an ad spend of at least $1,000 a month.

Setup costs $199 one time. It covers call tracking and your first landing page.

If we built your website, there’s no setup fee.

What the $750 ad management fee covers

The $750 covers up to 4 campaigns with up to 2 ad groups in each, for a total of 8 ad groups. It also covers up to $5,000 a month in ad spend.

Extra landing pages cost $250 one time. Clones cost $99. A clone is a copy of one of your landing pages, changed for a similar product.

Want more campaigns or a bigger monthly ad budget? We go over the new price with you first. Nothing changes until you agree.

Why more ad spend rarely fixes a campaign

Putting more money into a campaign that isn’t set up right is throwing good money after bad. If the ads have no landing page, weak headlines, or the wrong keywords, a bigger budget only buys more wasted clicks. Fix the campaign first, then spend more.

Want to know if your ads are profitable? Put your ad spend, quote requests, and profit margin into our ROAS calculator.

To see what your website, SEO, and ads cost together, read what marketing costs a ventilation distributor.

When to run Google Ads yourself, and when to hire help

Running Google Ads yourself isn’t hard, but it takes time. There’s a learning curve, and learning will cost you money. How much depends on how much time you can put into it.

While you learn, you’ll hear a lot of conflicting advice. Google Ads reps call with changes they recommend, and every YouTube channel has a different method. That’s why it pays to hire someone who specializes in Google Ads management for industrial ventilation distributors.

Common Google Ads mistakes we see

The most common mistake is one campaign with 50 or more keywords for products that have nothing in common. Clicks come in, but nobody can tell which product they came from. Our keyword clustering tool splits a keyword list into 1 ad group per product.

The second is the location setting. Google’s default, “Presence or interest,” shows your ads to people outside your territory. Switch it to “Presence” so only people in or regularly in your territory see them.

The third is skipping negative keywords. Without them, homeowners searching for repairs use up your budget. Our negative keyword list has ready-made lists of words like residential, repair, and DIY to block.

4 questions to answer before managing Google Ads yourself

Manage your ads yourself only if you’ll check them every week. Your reports should answer 4 questions:

1. How many calls came from the ads?
2. How many of those calls were real leads (conversions)?
3. Which keywords brought in real buyers?
4. Which keywords wasted money?

If you can’t answer these today, you’re paying for ads without knowing what you got. That’s when hiring someone pays for itself.

Google Ads management with no long-term contract

When you work with Write Good Code, there’s no long-term contract. You sign a short agreement with no end date. You pay month to month and can stop anytime, with no cancellation fee. Your ads send people to pages on your own website, and you own all the data.

How we get your ads running

First, we set up call and form tracking. Next, we build a landing page for the product line you want to sell first. Then the ads go live, and quote requests usually start within 1 to 2 weeks. Every month you get a short report that answers the 4 questions above.

Learn more about our Google Ads management. Do you make equipment too? See Google Ads for industrial manufacturers.

Find out if ads fit what you sell

Book a no-cost call. We’ll look at the products you carry and tell you if ads make sense. If they don’t, we’ll say so.