Google Ads for Funeral Homes

Rob Heppell: Welcome back to the Funeral X Podcast. I am Robin Heppell and I’m joined with my Funeral Results Marketing business partner, JJ. Hey there, JJ.

JJ: Hey Rob.

Rob Heppell: How’s it going today?

JJ: Life is good, right? We’re all living the dream.

Rob Heppell: We are. Well, this is good. We’re getting close to the spring here. Although I know in Arizona, you guys don’t see many differences in the seasons, where we are, we yearn for the spring.

JJ: Yes. We usually look for January, February, and March to just be repeatable, and that just never happens.

Rob Heppell: Yes. I don’t think other places up north here, near the 49th parallel, want any repeat of December, January, February.

JJ: Yes, there’s usually not much sympathy with my statement.

Rob Heppell: Hey, today, I think we’re going to go into, we’ve had some questions come in about Google Ads and getting it set up for a funeral home and getting it set up for online cremation. And I thought maybe I just run through like a best practices, like a 101 getting it set up. There are obviously going to be more advanced things to do, but obviously, we’d like to help folks out with these services. But I think just even having a better understanding, it’s good to know at least what you’re getting into, whether you do it or not versus being totally oblivious to all the things that go on inside those accounts. And as you know, it continues to change. Google keeps on changing the tactics they’re trying. They are getting more artificial intelligence working and machine work in there. And it doesn’t always favor funeral homes. So I thought I just run through that and maybe feel free to ask questions as we go, as you are a funeral home owner yourself in an online cremation business.

JJ: I think it’s definitely a valuable thing to go through. My first introduction to Google Ads, Rob, as you venture into explaining to everybody what it does, was for me it was like 2006 and I was asking my neighbor about it. And I said, “Do you do it?” He says, “Well, it’s very much part of my business.” He had an online training business. I said, “Well, how much do you spend?” I felt like a big guy. I spend 2,500 a month in ads spend and had these keyword campaigns I was constantly refining. And he said he spent about 30,000 a month. It just floored me.And I’ll tell you what it was. It was a lesson though in something that, in sales, we don’t see the big picture sometimes. And that’s determining how much is the… I think you have the overall, you have [ROAS] I think you call, but the cost for the acquisition of the customer or whatever it is you’re selling. And so for him 30,000 a month translated into exponential growth for his company. And I think we can all get blinded by costs and not realize what it’s doing for our business, but as you know, and I’m sure you’re going to share, I mean, there are certain things you need to be aware of because if you’re spending, I’ll use 2,500, if you’re spending 2,500 incorrectly, then you’re not getting the returns and you’re just blowing money. But you’re feeling good because you got Google Ads. I mean, there’s definitely a trick to it and I learned a lot from you. So I think it’s a good episode.

Rob Heppell: Yes, you bet. Funeral service is different than so many other offerings, whether it’s something that’s completely online or even if it’s like a pair of shoes. And if you’re trying to sell those shoes, “I could probably buy a couple of pairs of shoes, and then maybe down the road, I’ll buy like another pair.” And it’s repeatable. And once they dial that in, it just becomes a… Whether it’s a cost for acquisition or return on advertising spend, you just know and it’s math and it goes back to this analogy, there’s a marketer in Florida named Dean Jackson who just made it sound so easy. And you can either have a slot machine for your marketing or you could have a vending machine. And he says, “A slot machine, you put the money in, you pull the lever, and you don’t know what makes it hit, what doesn’t. And you can’t replicate it.” It kind of goes back to the John Wanamaker quote of, “50% of my marketing is working. I just don’t know which 50.”… Where if you can get your marketing dialed in, and this is a really direct response to marketing if you could get that dialed in… So there’s a vending machine and in this case, let’s call it like a first call for like online cremation and we’ll say it’s $1000. So if there’s a vending machine with 31st calls that pay $1000, wouldn’t you go and pay $100 to get those out? And just do it until you reach your capacity or even a 150? And that’s your ROAS. So my ROAS would be 15% if I pay like $150 and I get back something that will pay me $1000. And then, I obviously have to service it.

JJ: Well, that’s what I like about it. It’s quantitative if it’s done right. That’s what I learned from you. And I think the other benefit of it is, again, the metrics that you get that show you how people are finding you and how they’re responding to the clicks and the click-through rates and how much time on a page, and those keywords that you dial in that end up translating it to words, to me that you always want to be built into the content on your website, which I always found fascinating. I mean, it’s really, when done right, I’d be surprised. I’m surprised when I hear funeral businesses that don’t do Google Ads because it’s so valuable and you can control it on-off. But what you learn from it in itself is enough as far as how your customers are finding you.

Rob Heppell: Oh, for sure. Yes. And we’ll get into it. I meet with my Google rep every other week and we go through and we kind of have this battle. I think it’s them, it’s not me, JJ, but I’ve gone through probably half a dozen Google reps because they like every quarter… Although my current guys have been around for six months and we talk and they start talking about, “Oh, let’s use maximize conversions.” And I’m like, “Well, we’ve got a problem because the way Google thinks what a conversion is and what we think a conversion is at a funeral home, are two different things.” So they think a phone call is a conversion. And I’m thinking, someone’s phone in the funeral home and they want to know what time Mrs. Jones’s visitation is or where they can send flowers. And we don’t want to pay for that or we don’t want to pay for people searching for obituaries. And they don’t get it. They kind of get it and we laugh about it, but it’s funny because they’ve got their talking points.And I don’t know, maybe I’m one of those people that like, “Oh, we got a new guy. So we’re going to put him in through the funeral guy and see how he can do.” Because there’s all this pushback. And that’s, I think, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this. It used to be… You could figure it out and you could do it on your own, but yet, now you need to be so on it that if you’re not, you can totally change the way your Google Ads account works because they give you recommendations all the time. And the recommendations are for them to make more money and they think of you second. But they just, “Oh, let’s add some more keywords.” Well, if you are in Scottsdale, and they want you to… They say, “Oh, you could advertise in Tucson as well.” “Well sure I could, but I’m not serving anyone in Tucson.” And Google doesn’t see it. And I’ll give some examples as we go through. But one last-

JJ: Certainly, when you’re doing it, the other thing I’ve learned is the difference between… You mentioned it, what you call to action or lead when you’re selling shoes, as opposed to a funeral home. I mean, there are just certain things that are inherently unique to the funeral business. So it was a big lesson for me. And then, the other thing is when you have, like my business, I’ve got a traditional business in the low cost. And how do we prevent ourselves from competing against each other? And how far out do we reach on one versus the other?… And it goes back to what I’ll always say when we have these podcasts is, for the owner, you log in to this account and you’re like, “I’ll just do this myself. I can do this” So, then I look like a business valuation guy, looking at how these businesses are run. I’m like, “This person is not… They’re not utilizing their time in the right way. You outsource this stuff. That person needs to be on the community and developing their people and doing all the things the leader should do.” And so, I don’t know, anyway, this one I’m passionate about. So I’m glad you’re doing this.

Rob Heppell: For sure. And I think too, JJ. Make sure you jump in as we go through and ask some pointed questions, and I’ll go deep into where the thought process was, of coming up with some of these strategies. And the last thing of the overview is, if it’s starting to work, there’s going to be a natural ceiling of people searching for funeral homes in a certain location or cremation in a certain location. There’s going to be a natural ceiling. So if we could get the ads dialed in, we’d want to make your budget as big as it can be, without your ads big, without running out of the budget. Because there’s only going to be 1000 searches for funeral homes in Scottsdale or whatever.And we do need to make sure we dial those in because Google’s made it really sloppy out there. But if you were to say, “Oh, now that my ads are working, I’m going to double or triple my ad spend.” And you would get double or triple the results because again, there’s going to be a natural ceiling. Whereas if you said that to those yellow page guys, I don’t know what they’re doing nowadays, but probably not selling yellow pages, but if you were to say, “Oh, can I triple my ad spend with you guys?” It’s not like you’re going to triple your business because there’s still a finite of calls in every location.

JJ: Well, that was it. And even like, I go back to my buddy who was spending 30,000 a month. I would hope, and knowing him a pretty smart guy, my guess is that he might have reduced that as he learned that or outsourced it as an owner. He might have learned that spending 20,000 or 15,000 was getting the same results. So you kind of want to stand up and puff your chest out and say, “Hey, I’m spending all this money on Google ads.” Well, you may be foolishly doing it.

Rob Heppell: Well, and that’s the one reason why, when we set up our pricing, we have just a flat management fee and that’s what it is. And we don’t tie it to your advertising spend because a lot of marketing companies out there will tie it to a percentage. So if you spend, say $3,000 a month, and then they’re going to charge you a 15% override on that for a management fee, then that’s $450 a month.

JJ: Yes, that’s not the correct incentive plan.

Rob Heppell: Yes. Because it’s in their best interest to keep getting you to spend more in your budget, wherewith us, we want a budget that works, and then you’re paying us to make that as efficient as possible. And we continually work on those and make those accounts as efficient as possible. So now, I think, and we might even have a series of these, but today I thought let’s start at the beginning, and we’ll start with the basic account setup and what’s the right way to do that. And we’re going talk about at-need. Because at-need and pre-need, when you’re marketing, especially with Google, are two separate things. You can’t do it all at once. So it’s best to separate it up.

And so, the first part is, we’ve set up the account, we’re going to then select what type of campaign type we want, what network are we going to put the ads on. And we want to use the Search Network. So, that is the term that we use, when someone goes and types in Low-Cost Cremation, Seattle, then they’re searching and they’re going to see the results. And the first two or three or four listings on the Google result’s page are going to be the ads. And then you’re going to have the map and then the organic listings down below. So, we’re wanting it to be searched. We don’t want it to be Display, which is the Display Network, is where there’s an image. And that’s better for pre-need when someone’s reading sports and all of a sudden there’s an ad there telling them that they better prearrange otherwise they’re going to let their families deal with this big burden when they die…. So, we want to Search. And then we get into the bidding process. And when we choose to bid, I think it’s best to start with the manual cost per click. And Google has all these other automated ones where they’re pushing you for maximizing clicks, maximizing conversions. But the problem with that is that it’s based on how they define it. Now over time, we can, together, we and Google can really fine-tune what is a conversion and what’s not a conversion. But they’re going to see phone calls or if someone filled out a contact desk form, like as a conversion. And that could be something very minor to us, especially phone calls, because they don’t understand how many phone calls a funeral home gets, over the course of the day, that is without buying intent, without looking for a funeral home. It’s more community service. It’s either dealing with a family or dealing with people who are going to be attending that service.

So we’d like to start with the manual cost per click. As you get going though, they keep pushing you back to maximize conversions, because they want to take control. Then we want to set the location. And this is where I see a couple of examples of people getting a little greedy because they’ll, “Oh, you know what? Maybe I could expand our region a little bit from Conventional Wisdom funeral homes serve, maybe a 3, 5, 7-mile radius.” I find it different, as you go west of the Mississippi, the market areas are a little bit bigger than out east. But there’s that natural area that a funeral home can conserve. And they’re probably not going to unless you offer something amazing, they’re not going to drive past 4, 6, 10 other funeral homes to get to your funeral home.

So it’s best to work on your own backyard first and not get too greedy. Now, when we’re doing online cremation, we’re going to make that a little bit bigger because especially distance within reason isn’t as much of a factor. Now, there are a few things though to realize, like I’ll see it here. So I’m located in Victoria Bridge, Columbia, we’re on the west coast of Canada, and where I am when I’m looking up my window, I see San Juan island of Washington State. And we actually have clients here in Victoria. And there are people across the water in Washington State who’ve just put a radius that they’re going to serve 30 miles around their funeral home. Not only are we across a body of water, that there’s not like regular ferry service, but we’re also in a different country. I’ll even pick up the phone and say, “Hey, I’m only trying to help you save some money here. But you’re jacking up the bid costs with my clients, and you’re never going to serve a single person here. So, can you just exclude that?”

And sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But on the flip side, for my clients, we totally exclude everything across the water, because we know the client here can’t serve them. Don’t make your area too big and also make sure that you’re excluding certain areas. I see this too, when there’s like a river city, and then to try to get to the across the river as a crow flies, it would be a mile or two. But to drive around and to get to a bridge, it might be a 15-mile drive or more. And you may not want to do that. So you do want to make use of those location settings and include the areas that you want to serve and then exclude ones that you don’t want to come up with at all because it can too. Google is going to make it, so that if people are in the area or their search is regarding people in that area, it may get a little commingled there.

So the better the boundaries, the more control you have over your account. And that’s the whole purpose. Once we have more control of the account, we can then make sure that we spend as much as we can, to get in front of everyone that has blind intent for a funeral home or online cremation.

Then we get into the campaigns; and this is probably the first thing to look at when you’re building these up. And we like to start out with four campaigns: We’re using the search campaign; then we’re going to have a funeral campaign for funeral search words; we’re going to have a cremation campaign for cremation ones; we’re going to set a brand campaign; and we’re going to set a competitor’s campaign. It’s very easy to lump all those together…. And the problem is lots of people—especially for a funeral home that has been around for a while—lots of people are going to activate brand searches.

So they might just be searching for Menke Funeral Home. If they’re searching for Menke Funeral Home; you still want your ad to show up because you could have a competitor bidding on your keyword. Now competitors can’t put your name in their ad but they can bid on your keywords and try siphoning traffic away.

But another thing that you really want to focus on is making sure that if someone’s searching for a brand campaign and they’re in their own account; you’re going to get two things: One is a very high click-through rate (CTR). The kind of baseline is 3%–4%. Depending on what we’re bidding on—what type of campaign—we like between 5%–10%, or obviously higher—the better.

In our brand campaigns consistently—we’re at about 25% click-through rate now—which means Google creates an ad rank that we’ll get into later on. What’s happening there is since the website is all about Menke Funeral Home and the search is about Menke Funeral Home—no one else would have the same level of keyword density or optimization score or quality score as you would.

So where a competitor bidding on Menke Funeral Home may pay $5 per click—you might be in first place—and your ad costs only $0.50! We see this quite often! You don’t want paying $5 per click for those brand searches if you had them commingled all together.

But then we’ve elevated that click-through rate—the same yet opposite is true for competitors.

You don’t want competitor keywords coming up in your general funeral cremation campaigns because they probably aren’t going to click on your ad—and so that’s going run your click-through rate down because there’s going be more impressions of your ad.

I don’t have to explain this too much further—your click-through rate basically tells how many times out of 100 your ad gets clicked! So if it shows up 100 times—if we’re using benchmark of 3%—that’s three clicks out of 100 impressions.

Now—we see some competitor campaigns where those click-through rates are really low—and that’s fine—it’s almost like being part of garbage campaign! The ads are worded differently if they want switch—or obviously want compete ethically as well.

Then we have our main campaigns—and what we’ve had do lately—is starting for our funeral campaigns—we now use cremation as negative keyword for funerals—and vice versa!

I’m going tell little story here: Google has started taking funeral—cremation—cemetery—and obituary—all as synonymous words! To us—they’re four totally separate parts of what we do! It’s not right!

Here’s an example: There’s high-end funeral home in Toronto called Humphrey Miles—and we’ve got client offering online cremation! We’re bidding on cremation Toronto—and things like that! We were getting—and this kind evil part Google because whole ‘Do No Evil’—you don’t hear much about anymore!

Here’s an example: There are searches for Humphrey Miles—not Humphrey Miles Funeral Home—not Humphrey Miles Toronto—just Humphrey Miles! And our client who’s bidding on cremation Toronto—their ad comes up! Google knows Humphrey Miles—they know Humphrey Miles is funeral home—and know our client bidding on Toronto and cremation!

So areas are same! Without taking extra measures—they’re seeing funeral home and cremation synonymous! In this example—they couldn’t be further from truth!The person who clicks on ads getting wrong experience because didn’t get Humphrey Miles! Google should never put our ad up there anyway!

What we’ve done—not only…and this other kind evil part! If put in word obituary as negative keyword—they misspell it—they let go through!They won’t let obituary go through because if block with negative keyword—but if misspell it—and it’s not in negative keywords—they let go through—which just wrong!I would like have little chat with someone there—to say “So what are trying get at?”

JJ: Suits them well though doesn’t it?

Rob Heppell: Well yes! You know what? There comes point where we’ll put with so much! Like what’s our other option? Unless someone just says “I’ve done no more Google ads—we don’t want!” Not only are heavily using negative keywords for our cremation campaigns—like funeral—cemetery—and every misspelling! As you know lots people spell cemetery with an A or two in there! So—we put all misspellings in there!

And so traffic coming through funeral campaign—the traffic coming through cremation campaign—are specific! We’ve gotten granular—and this where just can’t do this off corner desk anymore! Your eyes need be on it—you need focused!So that’s campaign setup—the main four—and then maybe we’ll have different campaigns different markets because then again dial-in location settings and things like that.T

hen next thing want do—the goal improve ad rank! Ad rank is bit formula Google looks at—where guy named Hal Varian—I believe his name—is Chief Economist there—or was! There videos how people actually bid—it takes into what was talking about brand—why could actually get top place without paying much!Basically—they’re looking at ad format! How much using up tools Google gives? Are using two or three headlines? Are using two description fields? Are using all different ad extensions? Like call ad extensions—location snippets—site links—pricing extensions? If you’re using all those things—Google rewards utilizing their tools!

Then also there’s—we briefly talked about earlier—landing page! We would notice this—a funeral home—and if they’re bidding on funeral homes let’s say Batesville Indiana—they’re bidding Batesville Indiana funeral homes—they land webpage all about funeral homes Batesville Indiana!Well there’s correlation there! Now if same company puts their cremation campaign homepage that’s almost all about funerals very limited about cremation—even same landing page will give different quality score different keywords!

So we’d make sure then cremation searches would go cremation page—that’s same reason why brand gonna do better because they’re gonna have brand name landing page lot more often than any…none their competitors gonna have competing funeral home’s name page!So—that’s another thing look at! They’ve got landing page quality score—we’ve got using all extensions—and then click-through rate! Higher click-through rate—the better it is for account—because Google will think “Well your ad if more people clicking it must good ad!”And so we’re gonna give little benefit too—all those together gonna give ad rank! If high ad rank versus competitor—even though they’re outbidding depending discrepancy—your ad actually may outplace them!So that’s something look at!

Then other part makes happen—that we’re not gonna get into here—is actual writing ad—you wanna make sure you’ve got an ad attracts people who want services!We also use ads repel people who don’t…. Often we’ll use some ads saying “Has someone died Austin Texas?” They’ll be like “Oh that’s kind harsh!” I’m like “Well—you know what?” We can say passed away—or however wanna frame it—but what we’re getting at trying get little yeses!If someone hasn’t died—they’re gonna scroll past it! Maybe they’ll still look—we use this brand ads too! Like if someone died someone says “Oh Yes Someone’s died!” They click—we have other contacts around ad!That someone who want—but we’re also if someone hasn’t died people gonna go “Oh no No one died!” They’re not gonna click your ad—that’s what want also if we’re not serving them as funeral home or cremation provider—we don’t want that click!So that’s power text ad—I think we’ll go deep into later series.

JJ: Well I think—it certainly shows amount experience you have doing this! How long have been doing Google ads? Like management setting them up—all kind stuff?

Rob Heppell: Yes—I think around 2011–2012! What’s funny—a friend mine—a co-opetition John Callaghan—is funeral marketer—in kind 2006–7–8—I was really big SEO! That how talked about met—you picked phone called me said “Hey how come you’re outranking me?”

JJ: That right.

Rob Heppell: But, I was big on SEO at the time and even using an online video and things like that. Because at that time you could manipulate the rankings with your YouTube video and then direct them to the website. And John was really big on AdWords at the time. And it was funny because over time we kind of switched. And now, one of the benefits that we have providing websites is, we build all our websites from the ground up with SEO. So they have that strong foundation and that takes up about 20, 25% of the overall factors of local SEO. But even though it’s 20% and there’s other 75, 80% of other things out there like backlinks and directory listings and things like that, online reviews, you need that 20, 25% foundation.

So, what hurt me at the time, JJ, and eventually with funeral results marketing, our websites were ranking so well organically just from the way we built them on the WordPress platform, and we’ve talked about how SEO-friendly WordPress is. My selling point of the websites was that they were SEO-friendly out of the box. So it was really hard for me to sell SEO services. But everyone, as you said, unless you’re in a town by yourself and there’s no one else there, everyone should be using Google Ads with a very specific focus.

So yes, that’s where it came from. And now, I guess been a decade where I’ve really seen the amount of information that we used to get from Google, and now they keep taking that information away. Before, we could find out what searches were people finding on our website, whether it was Google Ads or SEO, like organic searches. And now, on the SEO side, they take a lot of that information away. And they’ve taken some of that information away on the Google Ads side. And I don’t think that’s right, because if you’re paying for something, you should know what you’re paying for. But anyway, it’s the way Google operates and we don’t have full control over that. We don’t have many options.

JJ: Another thing I want to get to, I know we’re running long, so definitely, we got to continue this on Google ads, there’s just so much to it and so many just questions I think people would have. But there are learning it and then there’s being trained in it by Google. And you went through that. Explain how that works. Because you’re Google certified, explain how what you are with as it relates to this.

Rob Heppell: Yes, you bet. Now in the beginning we didn’t have to… Like I just learned. And a guy named Perry Marshall was like the first guru of Google Ads. And bought his book and read it and have followed his training as well as others, and participate in a couple of masterminds specifically on Google ads. And then though, as we got bigger, competitors were getting certified in part of the Google partners program, and that’s kind of evolved over time. But there are three factors that go into your becoming a Google certified partner. So you need to get your certification, and we’ll get back to that in a sec, you must have so much ad spend. So you can’t just get it. You could be Google certified and have your certification. It doesn’t mean that you’re a Google partner.

To be a Google partner, a certain percentage of people on your team need to be certified as well. And then you have to have a monthly ad spend of a certain amount of money. And I’m not sure what it is if it’s like $30,000 or $50,000. We’re way past that, so I don’t keep up with that. So, what you have to do, and I just re-certified recently where you take a test and there are lots of guides to learn, to get ready for it. And you go through the process and I believe you have 70 minutes to go through 50 questions and they’re kind of scenarios. There are those questions back in like grade five, grade six, where if Mary’s walking down the street and she’s got two loaves of bread and there’s like 20 slices of bread in each one. Like those kinds of equations. So they’re not like that, but they’re similar to that. If you’re trying to sell these types of shoes and it’s Black Friday… And so they have these kinds of little scenarios.

And then you have to choose like, “Okay, what kind of bidding style would I want? What are the different factors?” So Yes. And they make you re-certify every year. And it’s easy for me. I do kind of go through because we use, for funeral homes, I would say we probably use 50% of what Google search offers. And there’s another 50% that I don’t usually use. So I’ve got to bone up on that part. But I’m in contact with them. Every other week we’ve got a standing meeting and it’s good. I think it just shows, just like a number of things, that there’s a commitment. And if you didn’t have it, the first thing that I would say is, “Well, why don’t I have it?” And they have it for others too. So we’re certified in Google search but we’re not certified in, there’s a shopping one. Like if you have an online store selling shoes and stuff, there’s the video one and there is a display one. So there are different certifications that you can get as well.

JJ: Well, there’s no doubt. And I would challenge and I know you challenge me even more at whether Google works for your company. I think that how you set that up, how you, to your point, the negative keywords and what you get searched for and not search for, if you will, and how you control that, keeps Google in check, so they just don’t keep sending you invoices. Because it’s pretty automated. I mean, you just keep getting those credit card bills and if you’re not following it, it can get really out of hand, if it’s not converting it, that return on investment is, that ROAS that you talked about. So, very valuable content for sure. I appreciate you sharing even with me. It’s good to know.

Rob Heppell: Yes, for sure. And they’re smart, like even how they build, Jake is smart. They’re not sending you a $2,500 bill at the end of the month. They’re hitting you with $500 increments or sometimes [crosstalk]. Okay. So I got one last part to cover up. I think that would be good for today. So the last thing is the negative keywords. And we’ve talked about this a little bit. Like, you can create negative keyword lists, and we’ve got a master list of over 500 words now. So, that would have like an obituary and all the misspellings, pet cremation, dog cremation, cat cremation, everything, every type of animal I’ve seen sneak through unless you make sure that it’s a definite negative.

Then other things that we come up with, and I and the team are on this all the time. When there’s a famous person that dies, people will start searching for their obituary or funeral services. So two examples. One was George Floyd’s funeral. And as soon as we see that come in, we immediately put a name like that, in our master negative keyword list. And then also like Prince Philip, the queen from England, when her husband died, same thing, because there was like Prince Philip funeral and things like that. So we immediately put those names in there as well. Also, like courses, training, careers, job postings, all those things that, without those in there, would trigger that off. We’ve talked about entering in the competitor’s negative keywords. We’ve talked about putting in, creating a separate list for your brand keywords. So in your brand’s campaign, you don’t want to activate your brand’s negative keyword list, but you do want to activate that in the other three campaigns or any other campaigns.

And another thing is making sure that you put in the different locations. So we’ve got a list of all, I think it’s the top 300 cities in the U.S. and top 50 cities in Canada and all the states and provinces. And we enter those in too as negative keywords, obviously, except for, we wouldn’t enter in Sun City and Arizona for you or AZ. Now, one thing though, that’s funny is, you need to make sure that you exclude putting in the abbreviations for Indiana and for Maine because lots of people search for funeral homes in Sun City and also cremations near me. So those two, like IN and ME, we want to make sure that those are not negative keywords. So anyway, that’s just a little thing that I’ve quickly noticed when we were putting these things together. Well, we need to make sure that if someone types that, the search gets through.

JJ: Well, I think, what it tells me when I first saw that list, when we started doing our work together, I was like, “What is this?” And you explained to me what it was and the buildup of it. I’d like to think, anybody that is doing Google Ads, especially if they’re centered in funeral service, has that because you’re not just doing it because you enjoy collecting lists. I mean, it’s saving your client’s money and making sure that these customers are coming. And that time on those side to click-through rate, all those metrics that you look at, but ultimately that they become more engaged with your business. It was really something I had no idea about creating such a list and constantly building on it. So, kudos to you and the team.

Rob Heppell: Well, thanks. And then as we part here, Jake, just one thing that if I could stress to folks, don’t be searching your ads all the time. Just be very careful. Maybe once in a while do a little Google search for how you’re ranking. But some people and they search every day. And they’re looking at their ads, their competitor’s ads. Sometimes they even click on their competitor’s ads. They won’t click on their own ads. But what’s happening is that your click-through rate runs down. So if you search for those searches 10 times a day, that’s 300 searches in the month. You will have an effect on your click-through rate if your ad’s not getting clicked. And I’m not saying click on your ad, but there is a tool called the Google Ad Preview Tool.

And so if you want to look at how your ads appear, you can go there and search it. And your search isn’t getting tracked. It’s not appearing as an impression. So it’s just preserving it. And the nice thing is you can search even from your desktop. What it looks like on a desktop, what it looks like on a desktop, what it looks like on a mobile or a tablet? Even if you wanted, if you have a couple of different locations and you’re in one, you could see what a search looks like in a neighboring city. So, therein Scottsdale, you could see what a search is looking like in Sun City, without being in Sun City. So, that’s a just-

JJ:Well, you’ve got all these tips and secrets, I’ll just go and vote that we talk about your knowledge of Google online search and SEO in another episode as well.

Rob Heppell: Sounds great. Okay. Well, that’s what I got for today, Jake. So thanks for hearing my little-

JJ: No, well done. That was very interesting.

Rob Heppell: Cool. Okay. We’ll come up with another topic in the next week or two and get on there. Thanks for listening, JJ. And I’d like to thank you as well for spending your time with us today. As we’ve said before, our goal is to share our experiences and insights in the hope that it may help other funeral professionals like yourself to run profitable and meaningful services and companies. Make sure you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral X Podcast until the next one. This has been JJ and Rob Heppell.