People searching for a basement waterproofing service typically get presented with several companies to choose from, the majority of which all offer similar options and costs. Of course, you can differentiate with your style, brand, reviews, and presentation, but given the same core service it’s important to efficiently utilize the paid search controls at your disposal to maximize your leads and minimize reduce waste wherever possible.

There are certain controls that paid search managers have available to improve results over time. We’ll walk through the most important settings and reports, along with any limitations. We’ll also show why expert paid search setups are important for waterproofers, and then why easing off it to a more automated, AI-based bidding model makes sense. The result? Increased leads and more efficient campaigns.

For many reasons, PPC Assist’s Pay Per Click management model is a perfect fit for waterproofing business owners.

PPC Assist Scorecard

The overall score for the Waterproofing Industry is 8.8/10. The PPC Assist management model has controls in place for each factor that goes into the scorecard rating.

• Fast Decision Process: The urgency behind the search for a waterproofing service varies depends largely on the situation people find themselves in. For example, people who have experienced one or more flooded basements will often make a quicker decision than someone who just has a basement that is frequently damp. Rain or snow melt water leaking through your foundation requires attention right away. On the other hand, someone who is worried about future basement wall issues due to leaking water might take their time deciding upon a waterproofing contractor to hire.
• Measurable conversions: Like most service-based companies, waterproofing leads are mostly going to be phone calls and form submissions. PPC Assist can track both types of leads from your website and then hone in on the keywords that are driving referrals most efficiently. Calls coming directly from the ads themselves can also be measured.
• Niche Negatives: There is a high availability of niche negatives in the waterproofing industry. Here we will be excluding searches for off-the-shelf sealant products, basement cleaning service queries, non-local queries, and searches that indicate the user intends to waterproof their home on their own.
• Low Seasonality: There is a small amount of seasonality in Northern states due to winter weather, however search volume overall for the waterproofing industry remains fairly consistent throughout the year. Water issues can occur in all four seasons of the year due to rain, snow melt, river or creek flooding, and low-lying residential areas.
• High CPCs: The waterproofing industry is competitive and management fees should not be based on click costs. PPC Assist’s flat fee management model makes the most sense.
• Keyword Consistency: Waterproofing and related keywords are very consistent. Trends and innovation rarely impact keywords and overall search volume in this industry.

Industry Insights

The market for waterproofing isn’t complicated, but there are a few important things to consider when targeting the different types of water issues that people may be dealing with.

Most of the volume comes from generic “waterproofing” and “basement waterproofing” searches, which can be a combination of people looking for a company to waterproof their basement or foundation along with people who are researching how to handle a water issue on their own.

Users adding a modifier to their search to specify a certain type of waterproofing – typically basement, foundation, crawl space, floor, ceiling, French drain, sump pump – can mean more relevant leads for your company. We structure accounts in a way that allow you to put more emphasis on one area or another.

Depending on the types of water issues you want to target, we alter the strategy and ads to focus on the business areas where you want leads. We can even focus on targeting specific waterproofing services to certain areas.

Which leads us to location as the other important industry consideration (we’ll cover this in more detail further below). Users sometimes search by service location. We use negative lists of cities/counties/states that your company doesn’t serve (or that we are not targeting within the campaign).

Overall we want to make sure we target the specific types of waterproofing you want leads for, along with the locations that you want to service. With effective conversion tracking in place and an occasional review of the search term report, campaigns can run effectively on the AI model without constant management. This makes the PPC Assist model an effective fit for waterproofing companies.

Approximate CPCs (Cost per Clicks)

Google’s estimate for generic waterproofing and basement waterproofing queries shows top of page bid estimates start at $3.77 to $6.55 and rise by 6 times as much for the absolute number 1 position. That can get expensive fast. These costs, however, are highly dependent on how competitive your service area is and how aggressive you want to be with lead generation.

If your budget is very limited, you can bid lower and attempt to maximize the amount of traffic to your site from the ad campaign.

More specific waterproofing searches, including those qualified with “service”, “company”, or “near me”, typically offer higher quality clicks and can be more expensive. More general keywords may be lower intent, but less expensive. Targeting specific/niche keywords can provide better cost-to-quality ratios, rather than just generic “waterproofing” or “basement waterproofing”. So if you have a specialty, we’ll want to feature it.

9 PPC Tips for Waterproofing Companies

Here are some tips to help you minimize waste within your campaigns. These 8 tips ensure high quality, highly relevant traffic is driven to your landing pages from your ad campaigns.

1. Location Targeting

Google and Microsoft seem to have a very loose idea of “interested in” when it comes to geographic locations. We’ve seen clients in major metropolitan areas get a significant amount of international and out-of-state traffic for local services just because people have searched for places like NYC, LA, Chicago, or Atlanta in the past. Don’t make the mistake of targeting people who have shown interest in your targeted locations.

 

Be sure to choose “Presence” when selecting targeting options. The “Presence or interest” option allows traffic from outside of your targeted location. We’ve seen accounts use this setting and end up receiving a lot of international traffic along with ad clicks from other states or cities outside of the desired service area. As a local service provider this is something you really don’t want.

If you want to use the “Presence or interest” setting to expand your targeting, you can. Be sure to use negative location exclusions aggressively for your campaigns, which is something you should do anyway. For example, if your company is located in Boston, consider adding negatives for surrounding states, which would effectively just extend your reach to more rural Massachusetts and people who might be willing to travel to Boston.

This can get more complex for the basement waterproofing industry. Sometimes people will qualify their search with a zip code or city for the location where the work will be done, so you should be prepared with negative keywords to fight any irrelevant traffic.

By default, we exclude a number of countries from all campaigns that have high populations and frequently show an interest in the US (e.g. India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Canada, etc).

As part of the negative keyword lists, we also recommending excluding people searching for waterproofing services “in” an undesirable country/state/city/neighborhood, or even zip code.

2. Conversion-Focused Landing Pages

Maximizing conversion rates is an important aspect to being successful in paid search. We see a lot of waterproofing companies driving expensive traffic to websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices or don’t have simple, effective call to actions.

Increasing conversion rates from 4% to 8% (or 16%) when the stakes are this high is invaluable.

Basement waterproofing is not always intuitive for homeowners or business owners, so explaining the process and services can go a long ways in convincing a user to call or fill out a contact form.

The specific waterproofing options you offer are very important, so some detail is required to convince the user that you’ll be able to meet their needs. It’s important to feature relevant information quickly and near the top of the page. This will give the user confidence and enough information to fill out the form or give you a call.

So if you are targeting specific services, for example “sump pump installation”, it’s best practice to have a service page describing the options and process, along with before & after photos and testimonials from previous projects.

On those pages, make sure your forms are short and easy to fill out, and that there is a clear business phone number on the website (especially for mobile).

Further content regarding your waterproofing services and company may be of interest to more research-oriented users and is best placed below the fold.

3. Conversion Tracking

At PPC Assist, our management strategy relies heavily on effective conversion tracking to operate successfully. Utilizing “big data” AI-driven optimization relies on the algorithm being able to differentiate between a good click and a bad one.

Tracking fresh contacts is vital, which for waterproofing companies typically means landing page form fills, contact form fills, click-to-calls, and calls from ads. During onboarding, we’ll make sure all of these are set up and tracked via Google Tag Manager.

If your waterproofing company allows for online appointment booking and checkout, that’s an even higher quality data point that we’d want included in optimization and decision making. We can even assign values for different service fee or order sizes to try to focus on more valuable leads.

If you’re using a third party to handle appointment scheduling or e-commerce, that can sometimes present a challenge from a tracking perspective. You’d need to evaluate the conversion tracking options of each 3rd party tool you’re employing and figure out the best way to get that data into Google or Microsoft Ads, along with Google Analytics, Meta, and any other data sources you may be using.

For most companies in the waterproofing industry, tracking leads is enough. However, if you’re investing a lot into paid media ($5k+/month), you could take it a step further and feed lead quality data back into your acquisition sources. You could use lead scoring, differentiating between Leads vs MQLs vs SQLs, or even assign a conversion value to leads. Once you have enough data, you can optimize for qualified leads rather than all contacts.

Optimizing for qualified leads rather than simple contacts or form fills helps campaigns optimize for the right users, which gives you an advantage over advertisers who are optimizing for any contact. But it’s quite a bit more work, so most companies in the industry avoid this level of complexity.

4. Comprehensive Ad Extensions (Assets)

Ad Assets allow for more creativity, but the main idea here is to take up as much real estate on the search engine result page (SERP) as Google will allow. Not using these leads to smaller, less compelling ads with lower quality scores, lower CTRs and higher CPCs.

Location Assets – Your Google Business listing is important, and it should be integrated into your account as an extension. Map listings can be powerful, so make sure this is optimized and added to your account.

Call Assets – Get users to call you immediately, but only schedule these to run when someone can answer the phone.

Callout Assets – These allow for some creativity and allow you to differentiate from competitors. Try to be specific with callouts at the campaign or ad group level. Talk specifically about what sets your waterproofing company apart from others.

Sitelink Assets – The more pages you have on your website, the more options you’ll have here. This allows you to be specific with Sitelink Assets, using not just service pages and contact pages, but also relevant resources, subservices, or even testimonial pages.

Structured Snippets – Waterproofing companies will typically use these to display the different services that they provide using the “Service Catalog” snippet. You can list Basement Waterproofing, Foundation Waterproofing, Crawl Space Waterproofing, French Drain Systems, etc. Include the services you prefer to provide to customers. You’ll need 3 extensions to run structured snippets.

Image Assets – Images draw attention to the ad and should be used in all cases. Keep in mind these appear quite small on search pages, so nothing too complicated. Just make your image is clear and high-quality.

Video Assets – Add these if you have useful, informative videos uploaded to YouTube. Who knows how Google will promote video assets in the future. As video continues to grow, utilizing this type of asset will be important in getting the attention of your target audience.

Promotion Assets – Offering a discount for waterproofing services? Using a promotion asset will highlight it on the search page and bring a little extra attention to your ad. However, this does require a more active approach to management.

For all ad assets, it’s important to be as targeted as possible with them. That often means ad group or campaign level extensions (depending on your structure) rather than account-level extensions. The more you can speak directly to the needs of the user and differentiate yourself from competition on the SERPs, the more likely you’ll get those clicks and conversions.

5. Extensive Negative Keyword Lists

The importance of extensive negative keyword lists has moved way up the list of importance over the past few years. As Google and Microsoft have gotten more and more liberal with their keyword matching definitions, unintended targeting of certain search queries has become rampant. The only real way to combat this is with negative keyword lists.

At PPC Assist, our negative keyword lists are immediately applied to current campaigns. This often results in immediate savings that more than cover our costs.

Still, we’ve seen unrelated or loosely-related searches creep into phrase match campaigns that we really don’t want to be targeting. For example, “basement waterproofing paint”. You need to think hard about these types of search terms and whether you should really be targeting them. For our campaigns, we recommend negating them to keep search terms as highly relevant as possible.

Location negatives are very important here, excluding zips/states/cities/countries you don’t service.

Other negatives that we recommend applying include specific words that would disqualify someone. Keywords such as free, cheap, hiring, job, and PDF can typically be negated.

One factor to consider is whether or not to target competitor brand names. Some companies and agencies love to do it, others consider it a big no-no. By default, we don’t exclude competitor brand names, but we do recommend breaking them into a separate campaign to analyze their effectiveness (if you want to run them).

6. Search Partners

The vast majority of Search Partners are not really search engines. The content and quality of these partner websites varies greatly. They are also more prone to fake, spam or bot traffic along with invalid clicks. Parked Domains are also part of the Search Partner network, although these can be excluded at the account-level.

For basement waterproofing and other local service companies, we recommend disabling Search Partners unless your budget is large enough to support the additional volume from these Non-Google websites.

If you do decide to run on Search Partners, it is important to monitor how much of your ad spend is being allocated to these websites. You should also keep a close eye on the quality of your form submission contacts.

7. Remarketing

Since waterproofing services aren’t always based on an immediate and urgent issue, like being locked out of your house or a furnace that doesn’t work, retargeting can be an effective tactic. Remarketing results largely depend on the length of the decision making process for potential customers, so be sure to set the audience durations (length of time you continue to advertise to website visitors) accordingly.

We typically recommend remarketing for all basement waterproofing companies with enough traffic to qualify (100 user minimum). Making a visual impact and continuing to reach users during the decision making process are reasons enough to test retargeting.

We don’t recommend keeping users on remarketing lists for a long period of time. This can affect your ability to get to minimum distribution requirements. 30- and 60-day durations are too long for most service-based industries, and we tend to opt for 7-14 day targeting. That said, you need to set it large enough for eligibility.

Remarketing can also be done through other channels. Rather than just retarget on the platform you’re advertising on, you can expand reach to social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram in particular), or other Display and Video ad networks.

8. Time Restrictions / Bid Adjustments

If you have a small budget, it’s best to restrict ad times to when you can answer the phone or respond to messages/chats. The larger your phone number call to action (CTA) on the website, the more this matters. If most of your leads are coming through your form, there’s less urgency to do this.

Keep in mind if many of your competitors are ignoring late night or early morning traffic, click costs can be much lower during that time. So instead of eliminating bidding, consider using bid adjustments to allow for inexpensive volume if it’s available (users can always leave a message or fill out a form).

9. AI for Search Ads Expansions

Coming soon to Google Ads accounts are AI search expansions. It’s touted as something amazing a new, but it really isn’t. All Google is doing with this is taking away your ability to target keywords specifically, and instead opening up the funnel to anything relevant that they see fit to.

For example, if we’re trying to target users ready to convert by targeting “basement waterproofing company”, instead of just targeting people like that who are searching for a company, Google is going to basically ignore the level of purchase intent and target anyone who might be in the market for basement waterproofing services. That would mean they might target “my basement is leaking” or “my sump pump isn’t training”, which we’d typically consider higher funnel searches.

At PPC Assist, we generally advise embracing Google’s optimizations and focusing on the end goal of driving quality leads at solid costs. Like it or not, it’s the direction Google is headed. So we focus on feeding it effective conversion data and helping you deliver results based on it. If you’re not using a strategy like that, you’ll need to expand your usage of negative keywords to exclude anything with higher funnel intent.

Summary

The waterproofing industry is competitive and can face steep local competition and high CPCs. As Paid Search evolves, it’s important to evolve with it. At PPC Assist, that’s exactly what we’re helping home service companies do.

Many agencies charge a high percentage of spend for Pay Per Click management, which doesn’t make a lot of sense when click costs are high and budgets are low. Even worse are companies charging $500+ management fees on monthly budgets of less than $1k. We’ve seen it over and over. With the increased effectiveness of AI-optimized tools and bidding, it makes more sense for basement waterproofing companies to use a model like PPC Assist rather than active management.

Regardless of what ongoing costs your company pays for Google Ads account management, an effective setup is absolutely crucial in order to achieve success. The tips above focus on setting you up for success from the start, structuring the account well and reducing wasteful spend as your account runs. There are some benefits to ongoing help (including seasonality adjustments), but for companies in this industry our on-demand model makes a lot more sense than a high retainer fee.

If you’re interested in learning more about PPC Assist, check out our PPC for Waterproofing or PPC for Home Services pages, or view our pricing to see how much you can save on management. You can also request a free review of your account!