larrybloodworth
Forum Replies Created
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Google Calendar does everything you wished for and a whole lot more. It’s accessible from your smartphone, and all employees can see what’s on the agenda without bugging service writers.
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I’ve been managing my own AdWords/Bing/Yahoo advertising for 8 years. The biggest mistake most SEO/SEM gurus make is that they don’t use conversion tracking in Google Analytics to let business owners know if their ad campaigns are even working!!!
I mean, get real, what’s the point of spending ANY MONEY if you don’t track conversions by using goal pages in GA? What’s the purpose of the ad? What’s the purpose of your website? How much money does a Facebook like make you? What do you want people to do, who click on your advertisement?
Ultimately, you’d like for the person who clicks on your ad (Zero Moment Of Truth) go to your website and be impressed enough to pick up the phone and give you a call, right? If that’s so, then you need a way to track that. And I’m not talking about just a simple tracking number. A keyword-level tracking number.
With a pool of dynamic numbers, you know what keywords convert into phone calls and which ones don’t. We are a transmission shop and we discovered the keyword “transmission” (both singular & plural) is a great ClickBurner, but they don’t convert into many phone calls. The few phone calls we do get are very low quality calls. All calls are both automatically scored by machine and recorded for manual scoring, if you wish.We quickly learned our #1 hot keyword is “transmission repair”. Although it doesn’t receive near the clicks that “transmission” does, 80% of the clicks result in a phone call. But once the phone rings, all shops are equal. It’s what we do on the phone that determines if the can convert the caller into an appointment (First Moment Of Truth). We learned counting clicks was all wrong and more importantly, the wrong metric altogether.This is because the so-called “experts” have dozens of industries, dozens of businesses, and thousands of keywords to contend with. They can’t possibly do as good of a job as a business owner who can babysit the account everyday. It is my belief that one of the most profitable activities a shop owner can be involved in is managing his own PPC campaigns on a daily basis. If not, you’re letting foxes run the chicken coop.Count Calls, Not Clicks -
This post is for the shop owner who is website and internet savvy, but doesn’t know programming, SEO, or SEM. We use Odesk.com. It is a global community of freelance webmasters, programmers and SEO/SEM gurus who either work by the hour or by the job for a fixed fee.
We have spent thousands with several freelancers. Philippines, Pakistan, Ukraine, and Indonesia to name a few. We had a complete mobile-friendly website built for under $500 bucks. Can’t beat that.You can hire people to write for your blog, respond to E-mail, or basically do any task you can think of. All you have to do is come up with a specific set of written instructions. Check it out and see if you don’t get hooked like I did.J. Larry Bloodworth, CMATCertified TransmissionsDraper, Utah 84020P.S. We spent $60K with Google last year. -
We are a transmission shop. We do mostly transmission and drivetrain-related work and no general repair. The jobs we get are pretty repetitive to us. We quit using hourly rates and the labor guide years ago. We charge by the job and not by the hour.
Just like in general repair, if somebody had to do a water pump or timing belt on the same type of vehicle over and over they would get pretty quick and pretty good at it. We beat the labor guide so bad because of that phenomenon, I got tired of explaining it and dropped the hourly charge concept because I think it is antiquated. Most techs can beat most times unless it’s a first time repair.
When we have to charge an hourly rate, like insurance companies or extended warranty companies, we do charge $125/hr. But even then, some of them say “We only pay $XX per hour.” We have a choice of getting the difference out of the customer or letting it go. We make that choice on a case-by-case basis due to the fact that the number of hours is sometimes so great that we don’t worry about it.
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Your shop liability insurance should have a product liability clause in it. It covers loss of property or life if one of your techs messes up. Use it judiciously because your rates will go up when you make a claim.
I’ve used it before and if the loss is $3K or lower I just eat it.
J. Larry Bloodworth
Certified Transmissions
Draper, Utah -
We can reflash most makes and models. A few seem more challenging like some of the Euros like BMW, Mini, some Mercedes, and Volvo.
Volvos require a minimum of Windows 7 with lots of RAM and hard disc space.
Some Mercedes we can reflash and the ones we can’t, we blow the $125 and have them do it for us.
BMW’s are a pain and take hours. Unlike say, a GM, where you can select which modules you want to reflash, BMW reflashes EVERY module whether you like it or not and that can literally take all day. First few times, after 2 or 3 hours, I thought it wasn’t working and took it to the BMW dealer and had them reflash it for me. It was then that I learned I was just being impatient. If I would have left it alone all day or all night, it would eventually reflash everything as well as making sure the CAN-BUS was working.
Then we get a BMW mini. Waited all day and part of the next. It, too went to the dealer. In addition to plugging into the OBD2 connector, you have to have a jumper wire between pins 6 and 8 (if I remember right) I have never seen an OB2 connector need a jump wire to work. You do on Minis. 🙁
J. Larry Bloodworth
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The Profit, Restaurant Steak Out, Restaurant Impossible, and there’s others. I watch every episode.
J. Larry Bloodworth
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We’ve been using QB for everything since 2000. Love it. We use no other shop software. QB allows us to create our own forms, queries, and reports. It handles payroll, taxes, the works. And it’ affordable. We have a 5 user license and couldn’t be happier.
Familiarity has a lot to do with it too. The learning curve of any software is tough and that’s the main reason we would never switch from QB to some vertical market app.J. Larry Bloodworth -
Google Calendar has all the bells and whistles you need and it’s free. It can be accessed from anywhere including your smartphone. Wouldn’t be without it.
J. Larry Bloodworth -
We’re a transmission shop and don’t do general repairs. We run into the same thing when R&R guys masquade as a rebuilder. They flush themselves out pretty quick.
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“We charge by the job, not by the hour.”
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We make a short video of every transmission job we do, then upload it to YouTube. We then E-mail the customer telling them what we found, include the YouTube link and attach their estimate as a .pdf. 95% close ratio.
50% of the OK’s are by reply E-mail. We are currently approaching 2K videos on YouTube. It’s a real Show-N-Sell. It’s cumbersome in high volume shops, but all we do is transmissions and nothing else so we have the time.
Nothing fancy. We use those $150 Flip cameras that have their own built in software. I think we are up to 4 of them now. Great for road tests, too.
J. Larry Bloodworth
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We pay a lot for rent. Most say too much. You can cut back on advertising, but you can’t cut back on rent. 50 million vehicles drive by our shop each year (137K/day).
Before you say $8300/mo. is way too much for 3K sq. ft. of shop space, consider this: Our 4 bays crank out $1.5M/yr. on a 5 day work week after being open for only 4 years.
I got the idea from Roy H. Williams in Austin. You can either read the article or play the audio at:
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Have the customer go to OdysseyTransmission.com and read the stories. They will find the 2002 is the worst. They can add their name to the list.
J. Larry Bloodworth ASE CMAT Transmission Specialist
Certified Transmissions
Draper, Utah
CertifiedTrans.com
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Other transmission shops in our area have all the other transmission shop’s names as keywords. I think that’s wasting money. One of them has complained to Google. So, nobody is using their name anymore. Not that it really mattered to begin with. I guess they think they may be stealing business from another shop by using their name as a keyword. I don’t think so.
I have neither complained to Google nor used any other shop name. What can they do when a car make is part of a shop’s name? http://www.wernersmercedes.com/
It will be interesting to say the least.
BTW, Google posted a video about 2 weeks ago that had a lot of good tips about driving phone traffic from a web site. I shared with other members of a tranny forum I’m on a lot and I was surprised to learn nobody had ever heard of having a separate mobile vs. desktop campaign like they mentioned in the video.
I separated mine well over a year ago and they explain why around 12 to 13 minutes into this 24 minute video –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhAlPtnU438
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Did you use Lexus as a single keyword? Or in what context if it was used in in a multi-word keyword?
I have every major car make followed by the word “transmission” as a keyword and the only one I was Google-slapped on was Mini. No great loss. Maybe that will all change tomorrow, but I don’t see how they can do that when describing a vehicle a shop works on.
To me, that’s restraint of free trade and also infringes on the right to repair act. Because we have different experiences on this, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not localized by the dealer’s complaints to Google.
Google does have a system in place to where if any advertiser believes another advertiser is using their name as a keyword, they can fill out an online form and Google will check it out and make the offending business remove the complaining business’s name from their keyword list. I believe that’s what happened to me with Mini because there’s only 1 Mini dealer in our state and we have taken several transmission jobs out of their shop.
If Google wanted to take any or all car makes out of the entire global keyword lists, they could do so. That’s why I believe it’s localized by the car dealers who complain to Google; and why I have a different experience than you.
Larry
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I believe running a logo of a carmaker that may hold water, but just the name, I disagree. To believe that is essentially to believe in the mattress police. You know, the cops that arrest you for tearing off the label off the end of your mattress under penalty of federal law. Yeah, right.
We spend about $8/click, $4K/mo. with Google alone and have about a 2.4%CTR and our average position is 1. We dominate our market by the old fashion way: we advertised our way to the top. The top 3 search engines are fully responsible for well over half our business. I can’t say how it would work for general repair, but for the transmission business, it works like gangbusters. And we list all the names of the car makes we work on and use them as keywords, too. It’s the wild, wild west online. Few rules and laws; and the few they have, are difficult if not impossible to enforce.
J. Larry Bloodworth
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Alan Ollie Gelfand Pres. wrote:
> How much do you spend on PPC per month.
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> Do not use PPC
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> Using Phone tracking Yes
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> 500 to 750 ________
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> 1000+________X______
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My wife and I do our own website and SEO/SEM for our transmissions-only shop and have been for the last 4 years. The only people we pay are Google and MSN (Bing/Yahoo).
We bought our way to the very top of all 3 search engines and that’s the only places we care to be. We have learned to never pay to be on anybody else’s website. We learned this by counting the quantity and quality of the calls, not the number of clicks. That’s worth repeating: Count calls, not clicks.
“Traffic”, “Clicks”, “Visitors” and similar terms are simply the wrong metric. We have nothing else to sell online but a free phone call. If you can tell how many phone calls you’re getting from a particular advertiser or search engine then you’re ahead of 98% of the other automotive businesses.
If you have a pool of dynamic phone numbers, that allows you keyword level call tracking. In other words, you not only know what search engine the call came from, you know what keyword drove the call. There’s a lot of keywords that generate a lot of clicks and few or no phone calls. I call those “click-burners”. They are almost always 1-word keywords.
Conversely, there’s keywords that don’t get a lot of clicks, but a very high percentage turn into a phone call. Moreover, there’s some keywords that have a better than average chance to turn into a very high ticket. Like “Dodge diesel transmission” or “Duramax transmission”.
One-third of our phone calls are now coming from mobile devices. A mobile website should be an abbrieviated version of the regular website and have only 1 page with click-to-call and a map that when clicked, starts the user’s navigation app.
I don’t know how much of all of what I just said applies to a general repair shop, but it sure does apply to a transmission shop.
Thanks,
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Matthew,
That’s real exciting information. I never knew that. Thanks.
We’re a transmissions-only shop and primarily market via PayPerClick. We don’t count the clicks; we count the calls. It’s of paramount importance that we know what keyword drove that phone call.
I’ve also learned some keywords are “click burners”. In other words, they get lots of clicks, but no phone calls. The few calls we get are very low quality leads. Ironically, “transmissions” is one of the “click burners”. I would have never figure that out if I didn’t have keyword call tracking.
Check out MongooseMetrics.com for your clients. We’ve been with them for about 2 years and they make us money. I hope this helps.
J. Larry Bloodworth
Certified Transmissions
Draper, Utah
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We forward the phones to our cell phone and answer 24/7 due to the big ticket nature of transmission repair. Whether we answer the phone or miss the call, all calls are E-mailed to us with the voice mail attached. Even if they don’t leave a voice mail, we have both the CallerID and DID numbers to give them a call back.
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I know what you mean. I just came back from a marketing symposium in Monterey, CA. and I was surprised only about 50 people were there.
Of course a marketing guru was there and discredited what I had to say. He came right out and said there’s no way to know what keyword triggers a phone call. More hogwash.
Everytime our phone rings from somebody clicking on our PPC ad on Bing, Yahoo, or Google, I know not only the keyword, but also the search term, and all the other data contained in the ?UTM JavaScript tag that’s on the tail end of the URL. Additionally, the CallerID data as well as the phone call itself is recorded and logged.
This guy charges $5K for a website and $300/mo. web hosting makes it sound like he’s good. It’s sad to see stuff like that. The SEO/SEM field didn’t exist in the 90’s and now it’s a multi-billion dollar business.
As a business owner, it’s my job to make the phone ring and people comee in the door. That includes SEO/SEM. As an update to what I posted 6 months ago, we now spend $5K/mo. on our online efforts.
We’re on track to do $1.5M in sales this year out of our 4-bay shop. A large part of that is due to our online marketing activities.
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Yes, we’ve compared it and nothing comes close to AdWords for generating phone calls with interested callers wanting to set a diagnostic appointment.
There’s too many variables for that to be taken as a blanket statement. We are not a General Repair shop. We are a transmission shop that does complete transmission and drivetrain repairs.
Second, anybody not using dynamic call tracking will never be able to accurately track the difference.
Third, I can’t control who calls us in Organic and I can in PPC.
There’s a lot of other reasons, but the biggest reason is probably that we’re a transmission shop and most of our customers are not repeat customers due to the nature of transmission repair, in of itself. The best we can hope for is a referral and we have a lot of those. 85% of our conversions are first time callers and/or first time visitors.
The sales funnel goes like this:>> -click on the ad–> Visit our website -call for an appointment–> We set the appointment – Diagnose the vehicle–> Write the estimate – sell the job–>
Pretty straight forward. We never did more than $386K/yr. before we discovered AdWords PPC. That was in 2009. Like most, we thought it was too expensive.
Now we’re at $1.5M/yr. for a $40K/yr. investment. All out of rinky-dink 4-bay shop. I’ve made posts about this before. It’s old news by now.
If you don’t accurately track your conversions, there’s no way to tell and you’ll never ever spend the money. That’s what everybody else is doing by measuring the wrong metrics. Traffic and clicks are irrelevant; you use phone calls as your metric. Google call tracking. Ga-lottsa companies to pick from.
Sadly, nobody will do it; or they want to debate about it.
Count Calls, Not Clicks,
J. Larry Bloodworth
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John,
While what you say is true, we find we get a lot of bang for our buck by using Google AdWords to gain the #1 absolute top listing in our category.
Our definition of a conversion is a phone call, so we’re able to track the ROI on PPC by the use of call tracking. While PPC may not be for everybody, I believe if anybody was to track it like we do, you’d soon discover the amount of new customers you get is directly proportional to you Google & YouTube PPC bill.
We quickly learned the more money we pumped into Google, the higher our lead count, and the subsequent sales, that go with them.
The cost per phone lead is less than half of the conventional Yellow Pages, whether in print, or online.
Larry
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Tom,
You can use a free service that crawls the web 24/7 and will alert you by E-mail within 24 hours of any posting, anywhere, with your name, shop’s name, or any other name, or person you want to keep an eye on.
It’s called Google Alerts and it uses the same web crawlwer Google uses to index the web. And like I said, it’s free.
Go, Go, Google!
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Gary,
You’re too nice of a nice guy. A lot nicer than I’d be. The deadline is too late too keep The Grinch Who Stole Christmas from the Keyes family, away.
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Lee,
Not having a budget may simply mean you are happy where you are at.
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It depends on how much they ask. Most either don’t ask because they are told that’s the purpose of the RDI, to write an estimate,-or- they’ve already called around.
We had a guy last week that was a hard nose that wouldn’t take anything unless it was a firm written estimate with the transmission still in his truck. So we shot the estimate with the maximum possible hard parts, electronics, and bored & sleeved case and it end up at $4K for a Ford Ranger. Of course we never saw the guy again, but that’s OK, for every one we lose there’s 4 we get.
It’s never peaches and cream at any shop but I think we have it better than most. We have a good market area and a good economy. I Can’t complain a bit.
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We sell off the RDI method. Check out our website at http://www.CertifiedTrans.com and under our FAQ page it answers the question “What’s A RDI?”. Click on the link to our YouTube channel and you’ll see RDIs in process.
We shoot a Show-N-Tell video of every transmission we do. I’ve been giving a 5yr./50K warranty since ’85. No big deal unless you’re trying to sell transmissions and everybody in the neighborhood is giving their work away. That’s way it always is. It’s no different here. That’s why our competition is starving to death. They give their stuff away and wonder why they run out of money at the end of the month before they run out of bills.
We give shop tours, no negative signs like (Employees Only) on the shop door. We’re a destination for school field trips and the like. We run a very transparent operation and simply sell the work just like general repair has for a century: labor plus parts.
It’s when you comoditize what you do like rebuilding starters, alternators, and engines, (or price off your competition) is where you run into trouble. Thing about it is, the transmission is the ‘last frontier’ with automotive engineering and that’s the only place left to get any big gains in MPG. The engineers don’t know what they are doing; they are just making their best guess with 6,7,8, and 9 speed transmissions. Making it up as they go along.
And like always, us transmission guys will always be there to fix them for what has always been the VERY FIRST BIG TICKET REPAIR on any vehicle, bar none.
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$1444 labor, plus parts for most. About $3200. Some more, some less. Dodge diesels $5-$6K. Chev P/U $2500. Prices are really all over the map. Transfer cases are around $1K.
You have to remember that out of those 25 or so tickets a week, half of those are minor stuff where the transmission never comes out of the vehicle. Solenoids, sensors, electrical, fluid & filter changes, leaks, and stuff like that.
Some weeks, it’s like EVERYTHING is minor. 30 tickets and only 1 rebuild. Other weeks, only 19 tickets and 18 of them are major rebuilds. It’s no different than GR: Feast or famine.
