You can use google adwords to get leads pretty effectively. I think carpet cleaning is a pretty expensive keyword if I remember, as a matter of fact I turned it off for now. My niche is more office cleaning and plan to do the one-offs for my customers. I will tell you some great stuff I learnt while starting my campaign. Number one read and head. Search the web and figure out what is going to work for you. When I first started with adwords I was getting plenty of impressions but zero clicks. So I read and figured out the problem. It was the ad and you can do a seperate ad for each campaign. If you do a campaign for different types of carpet cleaning, whatever. But the add that you use for that campaign has to get the attention of the people that might want your service. Ask your self why people want thier carpet cleaned and that is what you use. You dont want that initail line to be your business name. That does not get attention, unless your name happens to be "I'll make your carpet look like new", now that might catch my eye, I dont know you will have to make that decision. Or the add could be "Experts at stain removal".
The above gets your click throughs but all that does is cost you money, you have to get the request for infomation or a quote. Most places I that I did my research with call this next part a "Call to Action". Dont be shy, you paid for them to come to you site ask them to request information. What I found is that you need a good "landing page". After I came up with the adds that were getting me the click through I was not receiving any leads and again I started reading. How do I use a "Call for Action" and have an effective "landing page". I developed pages that are only accessible through my adwords campaign, and I do just that, ask them to click right away if they are interested in my services and then they click a link that leads them to the page that they are interested in. I found this lead to about a 25% request for information on my click throughs.
To answer some of the other questions. You can target you adds to a specific area. Google will let you select a place that you want to start and you can target within so many miles of that. So what happens is computers with IP addresses out of the geographic area you select will not get impressions of your adds. But the computers within do get the impressions, that stops someone from Ireland or Scotland even seeing your adds never the less click them.
Fradulent clicks are a problem and google does try to prevent them and monitors them the best they can, but from what I am reading it is pretty much hard to stop. But, what I can say is that most of the fraudulent clicks come from the content network. I did not completely shut it off but lowered my bid on content network to .10p and I do not have that problem (I don't think lol). I was getting a lot of clicks from the content network and no follow through, that is why I decided to turn it down. But if you target your area that gives less impressions to people who might give you fraudulent clicks.
Now my opinion of adwords, it is great. My master franchisor was not to enthusiastic when I said I wanted to start my own website. I knew I needed to keep costs down because I am just starting out. So I bought Front Page for Dummies and designed my own site and expanded from there, I have learned so much about meta tags and stuff that I had no idea about 2 months ago. I spent a total of 110 GBP for a domain and 2 years web hosting, I spent 9 GBP on my for dummies book and so far about 70 GBP on adwords, and I have recieved around 50,000 per annum in quotes in the last month off of it. I will have to let you know later how much converts to contracts. I will tell you that 44,000 of that is 2 contracts. I have converted 3000 per annum so even that pays for it. I have turned off my adwords for a while to see how the others come out because if I get lucky (cross your fingers) I will have a lot of time to dedicate to the other sites to get them up to snuff.
I do have a PDF file that google sent me and it is called something in the order of adwords for Dummies and I found it a bit useful.
I do not do any computer stuff for money, but if you want me to look at your site and suggest some adds and call to actions then just e-mail me and when I get some spare time I will take a look. If you designed your own site then I can explain better the landing pages I designed and why.
Oh yeah, if it helps any, you can also set the clock on your ads, my adds are targeted towards business so I do not have them on during the late evening and on weekends, that saves me some money on clicks that would not convert also.
Long I knw but I hope the info helps and if you want the PDF file for Dummies let me know
