The Landscape Designer Campaign That Didn’t Work (And What Did)

We once ran a campaign for a landscape designer in Pennsylvania that we were sure we had figured out. We knew her service, we knew her area, and we knew how to build a Google Ads campaign. On paper it was a good plan, and it did not work.

I am telling you this one first because most people only talk about the campaigns that worked. The ones that did not are where we learned the most.

What went wrong

She was a designer. Her work was planning outdoor spaces. But when you advertise on Google, you are not choosing people. You are choosing words, and Google decides who counts as a match for those words. The system kept placing her in front of people searching for general landscapers. Mowing, mulching, cleanup, the crew that shows up on Tuesday.

Those are not her customers. Someone who needs a lawn cut is a different buyer from someone who wants a yard designed, and the two do not think alike, spend alike or search alike. We were paying for clicks from people who were never going to hire her.

So we did what you do. We tuned the keywords. We tuned the bids. We tried pretty much everything. We did that for almost three months, and nothing really converted.

Why we kept going

That part is on us. At the time there was no real advertising platform on social media, so that was not an option, and Google was the tool we had. We believed one more adjustment would fix it. Every week we found something else to tune, and every week it felt like we were close.

If you have ever kept a project going because you had already put so much into it, you know the feeling. Our time is our life, and so is hers. Almost three months of her budget and our effort went into something we should have questioned sooner. What would we have seen if we had asked, in week three, whether the channel could ever work for her?

What did work

Direct mail. We stopped trying to find her customers by what they typed into a search box and went to where they lived. We picked the high-end communities in her area and sent an every door direct mail piece to every home in them. The piece itself was simple: a before and after of work she had actually done. No clever headline was needed, because the pictures made the case.

About 6% of the homes responded. Of those, she closed almost 70%. After three months of searching for the right click, one mailing to the right streets did what the ads never did. It was an older tool, and for her it was the right one.

I should say that this is not a story about Google Ads being bad. We have a client, an estate management company, that focused on Google Ads alone and went from about $300,000 a year to almost a million in its second year. Same platform, different customer. The fit was the problem, not the tool.

What to take from it

So here is what we do differently now. Before we choose a channel, we ask who is on the other end of it. When someone types these words, or sees this ad, or opens this envelope, are they the person who hires this client? If the honest answer is “sometimes”, that is a warning sign. And we decide in advance how long we will test before we call it. You can read how to think about that in Choosing Channels by What a Customer Costs, and about where Google Ads fits in Google Ads for Local and Service Businesses. If your best customers live in a certain kind of neighborhood, traditional channels like direct mail may still make sense.

The channel that everyone uses is not always the channel for your customer. How would you know if yours is the wrong one? How long would you let a campaign run before you asked? And who is actually on the other end of your ad?