Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an essential part of any business in any industry, and equipment rental is no exception. 

In the spirit of the old adage “what gets measured gets managed,” you first need to know exactly what you want to measure, and why those specific KPIs are the most impactful. Is it driving revenue? Customer happiness? Retaining customers and expanding with them? Winning new ones? Managing cash flow and optimizing asset utilization?

So here’s the scoop on KPIs – how they work, what your options are, and which ones you need to be tracking if you’re in the equipment rental business.

Table of Contents

1. What is a KPI, and How Is It Used?
2. What Makes a Good KPI?
3. The 3 Key Types of KPI for Equipment Rental
4. What are the Top 5 KPIs for an Equipment Rental Business?
5. What Are the Top 5 Financial KPIs in Any Rental Business?
6. What are the Top 5 KPIs for Sales and Marketing in an Equipment Rental Business?
7. What are the Top 5 KPIs for Customer Satisfaction for Rental Equipment?
8. Construction Equipment Rental KPIs
9. What Software Tools Should I Use to Manage KPIs?

A Quick Refresher: What Is a KPI, and How Is It Used?

The fundamental principle underlying key performance indicators (KPIs) is that you need something measurable. You can’t estimate or just feel things out in the world of business.You need to know what works and what doesn’t if you’re going to succeed.

KPIs are the specific data points you’re using to measure your success. While revenue is a huge part of it, there are other things along the way that you also need to measure to make sure you’re able to make that revenue. 

In equipment rental, margins can become tight, and breaking even on equipment is important. It’s a unique industry with unique needs.

Whether you’re looking into equipment rental KPIs, regardless of the equipment type, the common factor is that the factors that they represent are going to be solid and measurable.

So what makes for a good KPI, one that’s worth measuring?

The right KPIs will have certain characteristics:

• Owned. People in your equipment rental company need to be responsible for overseeing, measuring, and refining KPIs. It needs to be obvious who to talk to if you need something relevant to them.
• Understandable. Everyone working at your equipment rental company needs to understand what KPIs you’re using, and how they’re measured.
• Actionable. You need your folks to know what to do to influence your KPIs. It needs to be something you can take action on.
• Measurable. This is a big one. It has to be something you can directly measure and quantify. It can’t be something soft and vague.
• Leading. Good KPIs help you predict and enhance how well your business does in the future.
• Timely. You need to make sure you can keep the data for every KPI consistently up to date. (Our software is designed to help you do this.)
• Strategic. KPIs need to be tied to something very important – your vision for your equipment rental business. How do you want to grow? Where do you want to be in five years? Do you want to expand your fleet? To grow and hire more employees? To make more money?

These are the most important aspects that, for your business, will help you figure out the right KPIs. A good KPI should meet these criteria.
KPIs aren’t just about where your company is right now. They’re about where you want to go.

The Three Key Types of KPI for Equipment Rental

There are three subtypes of KPI that are important for you to track:

1. Core business KPIs
2. Sales and marketing KPIs
3. Customer satisfaction KPIs

 

All of these are important for making sure your equipment rental business is successful. We’re going to break these core KPIs down category by category.

What are the Top 5 KPIs for an Equipment Rental Business?

The nature of a rental business model brings its own unique challenges. You have to manage things like availability and booking, not just inventory alone. Margins can become strained if you’re pricing your equipment wrong, or struggling to track your equipment.

Because equipment rental has these specific elements involved, you need to measure different things than a company that outright sells its product, or a business that offers a service rather than a product per se.

Here are the top KPIs that tend to bring the best results in the world of equipment rental:

• Return on Investment
• Net Profit
• Time to Break Even
• Stock to Rental Ratio
• Income to Maintenance Ratio

Now, there are also other KPIs to track, which are more geared towards your sales and marketing efforts. You’ll read about those a bit further down.

The five above are the most important ones for your core business operations. 

Whether you’re renting out heavy construction equipment or general tools and light equipment,, these are the ones that really matter. 

Here’s a rundown of each of these KPIs – what they mean and why they matter.

Return on Investment

Return on investment (ROI) is a KPI that sees use across pretty much any industry, including yours. Why? Because it’s important. Indispensably so.

ROI is pretty simple: it’s the profit from your investment divided by the input costs. It demonstrates how much money you’ve made compared to how much you’ve spent.

This tends to be the primary KPI for just about any kind of business.

So how do you guarantee a good ROI in the rental industry? One major way you can do this is by focusing your fleet on high ROI equipment.

If you’re getting a low ROI on a piece of equipment, it can mean one of two things:

1. You’re not charging enough for people to rent it, and you need to raise the price.
2. The market is saturated, driving down the prices.

Market saturation can happen with all kinds of different equipment. It’s too widely available, with too many people offering it, and the high competition drives down the price. This means it takes too long to break even on the cost of the machine.

Look at ROI on each type of equipment you’re renting out. Look at what the market landscape might be like. If an item has a consistently low ROI, it might be time to discontinue offering it, and focus on the items in your fleet or inventory that are actually making you money.

Net Profit

“Profit is its own reward.” – the Ferengi aliens from Star Trek.

Optimizing your cash flow and profit leads to long term viability and success.  This is as true for equipment rental as it is for traditional retail, a restaurant, or a law practice. 

Time to Break Even

How long is it taking you to break even on the cost of a piece of equipment you bought?

How many times do you need to rent it, and at what price, for you to make your money back on what you spent to buy it?

If you’re not pricing your equipment right, or you’re buying at too high a price, you may need to reassess how you’re investing in that equipment, and what the market for it looks like.

One way to reduce the time to breaking even on equipment is to strategize carefully about who you’re buying it from. For most pieces, there are multiple companies that make the same kind of product. For example, both John Deere and Caterpillar offer very similar equipment.

Make sure you’re getting the best deal on what you’re buying, so it doesn’t take as long to recoup the expense.

Utilization Rate

Utilization rate is another KPI that you have to track in equipment rental. Maximizing time on rent is a critical path to running an efficient, profitable rental company. . 

What it means is this – how much of your inventory is on rent at any given time?

It’s the total number of pieces of equipment in your inventory, divided by the number that are typically rented out at any time.

You want this number to be low. If it’s too high, that means that you have excess inventory.

Utilization rate is incredibly important in the equipment rental business. But it’s especially integral to heavy construction equipment, where downtime is even more costly given the higher price points and dollar value of equipment.

We talk a little more about utilization in detail about this further down. Click here to jump to that section.

Income-to-Maintenance Ratio

Equipment rental businesses have significant maintenance costs. It’s just part of this kind of business. Any kind of equipment – boats, bulldozers, bounce houses, any of it – undergoes regular wear and tear when your customers use it. 

The income to maintenance ratio shows whether your revenue can cover your maintenance costs. It’s your income divided by your maintenance costs over any period.

One effective way to offset your maintenance costs is to charge customers extra – in the construction rental space, this is often 10-15% on top of the total – in exchange for a damage waiver. 

That extra income can help you build a buffer fund that can cover the cost in a worst case scenario.

Especially for equipment that gets rented out long-term, it’s essential for the customers themselves to perform routine maintenance and keep your equipment in good shape. 

If they aren’t doing that, or something goes wrong with a rental for that reason, this ratio can get out of hand fast. 

Another way to help mitigate maintenance and repair costs is to make sure you document the condition of each piece of equipment, with photographs, both before and after each rental period. 

That way, if they didn’t pay for a damage waiver and they’re at fault for serious damage to your equipment, you have photographic proof that they damaged it – smoothing out the process of sending them the repair bill. 

These are the most important for core business operations. Now let’s talk about sales and marketing.

These five are The Big Ones. But there are others as well. 

What Are the Top 5 Financial KPIs in Any Rental Business?

Debt to Equity Ratio

The ratio of debt to equity – that is, the total amount of debt that your company has, divided by your total equity – is a key indicator of how much financial leverage you have.

For equipment rental companies, an ideal ratio is generally considered to be around 3% or lower. This, however, is relatively uncommon. Many rental companies report ratios totaling as much as 50-70%.

Realistically, you may want to consider taking action if your debt to equity ratio exceeds around 20% or so. The more aggressive your company is about financing business growth with debt, the more open it becomes to the potential for financial problems. 

Aging Accounts Receivable

This KPI refers to the number of accounts that have long payment times, and ideally, this metric should remain as low as possible.

A reliable invoicing solution like Quipli can help you with managing timely invoicing and payments. 

You can also implement financial measures to help offset these problems, such as late payment fees, strict terms for financing, a discount for early payments, and other measures to help lower this metric.

Rental Rates & Revenue Generated

This metric assesses the total equipment revenue for a specific time period – often daily – versus the total amount of equipment revenue paid and rented during that time frame.

This helps benchmark results by day, month, quarter, and year. 

Financial Utilization

Financial utilization is a very important metric for rental businesses’ finance and accounting departments. You want your equipment out on rent enough to generate adequate revenue to cover its expenses and loan debt.

That said, though, too high a utilization rate can also increase the equipment’s general wear and tear, driving up your maintenance and repair costs. 

As an example, if you have a $25,000 piece of equipment that’s bringing in $23,000 per annum, it has a financial utilization rate of 92%. 

While rates do vary depending on what kind of equipment you specialize in renting, typical recommended targets for financial utilization are around 65% for national enterprises, and 100% for small local rental businesses.

What Are the Top 5 KPIs for Sales and Marketing in An Equipment Rental Business?

For your core business to succeed, you need to make sure people know about you. You use sales and marketing to achieve that goal.

Your business needs customers in the first place. These KPIs are how you make sure you get them.

Change in Rental Business Value

Is your business worth more now? Take your total assets minus your debts at any point and compare them at different points in time. Has your business been growing consistently?

In the equipment rental industry, one of the biggest things you need to account for is depreciation. This is especially true in the construction rental industry, or any kind of vehicle rental.

Construction equipment, boats, and similar items depreciate quickly over time – just like cars do.

This needs to be accounted for in your financial calculations. The more time passes, the lower the ROI gets.

Equipment Rental Growth

Rental growth is a key sales and marketing KPI for the equipment rental industry. 

It’s measured by taking the difference in revenue between this year and last year. Then, you take that number, and divide it by last year’s revenue.

If your business is doing well, you should get a result of at least 10%. 

Customer Acquisition Cost

Your customer acquisition cost shows how much you’re paying to get new rental customers. 

Any advertising and marketing incurs costs. This also applies to your sales team and your marketing agency. 

You need to make sure that your sales and marketing campaigns and strategies are bringing in more money than you’re spending on them.

To calculate CAC, divide your total costs for sales and marketing. Then, divide it by the number of new customers that you’re successfully getting from those channels over a specific period of time. (Like a per month, per quarter, or per annum.) 

This will give you your cost per new customer that you’re getting.

How much are you spending to bring in each new customer who rents from you? Are they spending more than you’re paying to get them to rent from you?

Further on, we’re going to talk more about business-to-business construction equipment rentals. This involves different methods of acquiring customers than most business-to-customer rentals, like wedding equipment rentals or kayak rentals. 

Click here to find out more about CAC in B2B construction equipment rentals.

Marketing Revenue Attribution

Marketing revenue attribution is the measure of how much of your marketing spend goes to securing which equipment rental sales you’re making.. 

You can determine this by finding out how each customer found you and dividing the totals by total market spend.

So let’s break this down. Basically, you’re looking at the data from each type or channel you’re using for marketing and sales, and seeing which ones are bringing in the most revenue because they’re leading to most rentals. You’re comparing your spend for each campaign to the revenue it produced. 

This makes sure you’re not spending your budget in the wrong places.

Traffic-to-Lead Ratio

So you’ve got marketing campaigns going. People are visiting your website. You’re getting clicks and traffic. That’s great!

But it’s not the whole story. You’re an equipment rental business, not a media company. 

Traffic is worthless unless it converts. 

You don’t just need people to visit your website. You need them to actually rent something from you. 

Take your site’s total traffic, and divide it by the number of actual equipment rental sales that result from them. 

This should be a low number. If the number is high, that means that people are visiting your site, but they’re not converting into actual customers. 

These KPIs are the key to honing your marketing efforts. Next comes customer satisfaction.

Tracking these KPIs can help you bring in new leads. But what about returning customers?

What Are the Top 5 KPIs for Customer Satisfaction for Equipment Rental?

Customer satisfaction is unbelievably important for equipment rentals. 

When you’ve got a customer that needs to rent a piece of equipment, there’s a strong chance that at some point, they’re going to need it again.

You want them to come back to you – not go to a competitor because you didn’t give them a good enough customer experience.

Keeping your customers satisfied means more return business, so keep a close eye on these customer satisfaction KPIs for equipment rental companies:

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value refers to how much revenue you expect from each customer. A satisfied customer will come back when they need you again. 

Divide your total revenue by your total number of individual customers. (All of them ever, not just the new ones.) 

This gives you an average for how much money each customer usually spends with you. Are they coming back repeatedly to rent from you again? Or is it a low number suggesting that most of your customers are a one-and-done?

If you’re renting to businesses, not consumers, then CVC plays an even bigger role.

Click here to read further down, about customer lifetime value in B2B construction equipment rentals.

Social Media Engagement

Social media. It’s been here for 15 years, and it’s not going anywhere. Businesses need a real presence there.

Your social media traffic numbers can indicate how your customers react to your business, and these values are available through any social media platform.

Now, social media engagement is a complex thing. A lot of companies try to measure traffic, or followers, or other stuff that doesn’t matter. These are called “vanity metrics.”

You could have 500,000 followers and get nothing but crickets. 

You want people to like your posts, to comment on them, to share them. You want people to actually engage and talk back and forth with your brand, not just hit “Follow” then forget about you.

Satisfied customers tend to add you on social media. And guess what, if those satisfied customers are sharing your posts with their friends, they’re probably going to reach out to you next time they need to rent a piece of equipment. 

Net Promoter Score

You can measure this KPI by asking customers how likely they are, on a scale of one to ten, to recommend your business to a friend and average the results.

One way to implement this is by creating a customer satisfaction survey to send to people after they’ve rented from you. (Quipli can help you do that.) 

If you’re B2B, you might also consider having one of your sales reps call customers individually, to ask them for feedback about their experience.

Once you have enough of this information to work with, the next step is to analyze it. Compile your findings into a report.

Are customers happy with their rental experience? If not, why not? Are there any common recurring customer complaints or issues?

This information can be extremely valuable in helping your business grow and improve over time. If there’s anything you need to work on or fix, this is a great way to find out about it.

Customer Reviews

You can find customer reviews for your business on multiple platforms, and tracking those scores is a great way to gauge overall satisfaction

All of us have, at one point or another, decided against buying something from a company because they had a lot of bad reviews. The last thing you want is to be that company. 

You generally want to make sure your total review score across various platforms – Google searches, online directories, your website – is at least a 4 out of 5. 

Customer Churn Rate

This rate is the percentage of your customers who are first-time customers. A lower churn rate indicates more repeat business.

If your churn rate is too high, you might need to change what you’re doing to make sure that people come back again.

With that said, though, the hard reality of the business world is that you’re always going to have churn. You could be the best business in your entire industry, the creme de la creme of equipment rental, and you’d still lose the occasional customer.

You can work to lower your churn rate, but it’s never going to hit zero.

What you can do to offset churn, though, is to set goals for your sales team. Have them bring in a set number of new customers per month or per quarter. You need an influx of new customers to replace those that leave.

Construction Equipment Rental Business KPIs

Construction equipment rental businesses are a distinct and important sector within the equipment rental industry.

So far, we’ve mostly been talking about equipment rental in general. But if you’re renting out backhoes and bulldozers, well, that’s a totally different matter than someone who’s renting out kayaks or party equipment. 

If your business rents out heavy construction equipment, this section is for you. This sector comes with its own unique needs, and there are some additional KPIs that you need to be measuring. 

A big one is utilization. The more that a given piece of equipment rents out, the more money it makes for you. If it’s just sitting there in your warehouse and no one’s using it, all it’s doing is eating up your money. 

Another thing that differs is how you approach customer acquisition cost. Customer lifetime value is much higher with B2B construction equipment rentals than it is for B2C companies.

We’re going to talk about each of these in detail.

Utilization Rate: A Key Factor for Construction Equipment Rental Success

Your utilization rate is basically a measure of how many of your machines are currently on rent, versus how many total you have in your fleet. 

You don’t want that number to be too high, with equipment collecting dust in a warehouse instead of out there making money for you. But, you don’t want it to be too low, either.

A good utilization rate to shoot for is 70-80%, with 75% being about ideal for construction rentals. 

If your utilization rate is lower than 70%, then you’re not bringing in enough customers relative to how much equipment you have. Solving this could mean bringing in more customers through better sales tactics, or it could even mean selling off equipment that doesn’t have high enough demand to justify its cost.

But if it’s over around 80% or so, that’s also a problem. 

Keep in mind that not all of your equipment is just sitting in storage. 

Some of it might be under repair. Let’s say 5%, as an example.

Other equipment might be recently off rent, but undergoing routine maintenance before it can be rented out again.

That leaves 15% total that’s out of commission temporarily. This needs to be accounted for.

Too high a utilization rate means that you might not have a piece of equipment on hand when someone calls you asking to rent it. They’re not going to wait, so you essentially have to turn them away. 

And the last thing any business wants to do is to turn away paying customers.

New deals can come in fast, especially if you’ve got a good sales team. A 75% utilization rate is perfect for keeping plenty of equipment on rent and making money, while still having enough inventory for the new customers that come in.

Fleet Age

Another KPI that’s relevant for heavy construction equipment rentals is fleet age – the general age of the vehicles in your rental fleet, in comparison to when the units first went into service.

This metric plays into maintenance for used and refurbished construction equipment, as well as for determining the value of your fleet in light of depreciation over time.

Fleet Apportionment

This KPI measures the partitioning of your fleet into a “base fleet,” and then an “other fleet” category.

“Base fleet” should generally refer to equipment that has rental activity across multiple time periods (e.g. weeks, months, quarters, or years). “Other fleet” generally includes changes to your equipment fleet – that is, units that were added, or that were sold off or eliminated. 

This can give you meaningful insight into changes in revenue, and can also help you improve utilization data by restricting to your base fleet only. 

Customer Acquisition Cost: The Power of a Great Sales Team

When people talk about customer acquisition cost, they’re referring to both marketing and sales. But the type of business you’re running, and the kind of customers you have, makes a big difference in where and how you’re acquiring those customers.

Let’s get real: you’re not landing that $2 million deal because someone saw a Facebook ad, or read a blog post on your website.

At that kind of level, in B2B construction rental, you’re looking at using knowledgeable professional sales representatives to cultivate real relationships with prospects and customers. 

Paying a top-tier salesperson salary and commission brings a higher CAC than, say, running some Facebook ads. This cost, however, is well worth it if you have a strategic sales process in place.

Customer Lifetime Value: Building Long Term Customer Relationships

In construction equipment rental, you need to build long term relationships with satisfied customers who keep coming back to you.

For B2B rentals, you’re looking at a much higher CLV than with B2C rentals. You’re building a relationship with another business.

If you lose a customer – due to messing up with a rental, or your equipment failing unexpectedly – that means you’re losing a lot of money. 

When you’re working with contracting outfits as a B2B renter, you need to be extremely responsive to customers. Sometimes, if something goes wrong, you’ll lose a lot less money if you take a short-term loss and do something like compensate them or pay to fix the problem. 

Losing a customer in this industry is something you absolutely want to avoid.

What Software Tools Should I Use to Manage KPIs?

The most important aspect of implementing KPIs is to track them accurately and reliably. 

A good way to do that is to use software that’s specifically designed to manage every aspect of your equipment rental business.

At Quipli, that’s where we come in. 

Tracking by hand, juggling multiple apps and spreadsheets, can be exhausting and hard to maintain. Quipli puts everything in one place, from inventory tracking to digital marketing and business growth.

Everything you need for your business to thrive, all in one convenient, easy-to-use app you can access from anywhere.

With Quipli, tracking your KPIs has never been easier.

Touch base with us any time to find out more about what Quipli can do for you.

MANAGE YOUR KPIs WITH QUIPLI’S RENTAL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Searching for tips to increase revenue for your heavy equipment rental business? Want to grow your business but aren’t sure where to begin? Need to reinvigorate your marketing efforts using proven tactics?

If any of these questions describe your situation, our list of construction equipment rental business ideas can give you some direction.

Here are ten surefire ways to help your rental business flourish.

1. Make Sure Your Product and Category Pages Have Good On-Page SEO

One of the first and most crucial steps to growing your business is ensuring your category and product pages are easy to find. You can accomplish this by reviewing the on-page search engine optimization (SEO) of both page types. 

On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing elements like keyword usage, content length, and location targeting (name-dropping the areas you serve). By leveraging on-page SEO, you can make your category and product pages more visible on the first few pages of top search engines like Google.

2. Keep Your Brand Top of Mind with Regular Email Campaigns

Most customers that rent heavy equipment do so on a recurring basis. With that in mind, how do you guarantee that past and prospective clients think of your brand first when they need to rent construction machinery?

While there are many ways to keep your business top of mind, launching regular email campaigns is one of the most effective approaches. You should be keeping up monthly email campaigns to remind clients about your services and notify them of potential deals, inventory changes, and other useful info.

For your campaigns to be effective, you’ll first need to build a mailing list. You can gather email leads by publishing a monthly newsletter and encouraging users to sign up when they visit your site.

Once you’ve compiled a list, create separate audience segments and target each group based on their rental needs and equipment preferences.

3. Analyze Poorly Performing Products and Look for Possible Solutions

Do you have a particular product that rarely gets rented? If so, you should begin exploring why. Is the equipment priced too high? Explore how to determine your equipment rental costs or is there simply not enough demand for a certain type of machinery in your area?

Once you’ve determined why a product is underperforming, you can explore possible solutions. If the rental cost for a piece of machinery is excessive, consider running a special for a few months to see if it remedies the issue. Conversely, if demand is too low, consider reducing your inventory of that particular type of machinery.

4. Automate Your Booking and Inventory Management

You can easily automate inventory management and booking processes by investing in a technology solution like Quipli. Doing so will make it easier for your clients to find, reserve, and pay for the equipment they need, leading to increased sales and higher total revenue for your business.

You can integrate Quipli into your existing website, which makes it easy to start using. Alternatively, you can build a whole new website powered by Quipli’s inventory management technology.

Regardless of which route you take, Quipli’s powerful platform is guaranteed to remove friction from the rental process and help you sell more.

5. Invest in a Dedicated Rental Business Management Software Solution

While Quipli’s core functionality is to automate booking and inventory management, it’s a dedicated rental business management software solution, meaning it merges with your point-of-sale technology, makes renting easy, and provides detailed insights into renting trends and available inventory.

Quipli includes POS tools, rental business software, inventory management capabilities, and e-commerce storefront features among its many outstanding features. Put simply, it’s the ideal software for managing your rental business.

6. Get Creative with Your Social Media and Content Marketing

Construction equipment can be tough to market. Consequently, you may struggle to come up with ideas to highlight your machinery rental options. But with a little creativity, you can stand out from your competitors and attract new clients. 

Check out these seven equipment rental marketing ideas to get more inspiration and valuable food for thought.

7. Invest in PPC Campaigns

Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are a great way to generate leads and rapidly boost sales. Strategically investing in PPC campaigns will enable you to supplement your SEO efforts and grow your business.

While there are several ways to launch and manage PPC campaigns, Google Ads is the most popular method. With Google Ads, you can create several different types of campaigns and precisely target potential clients in your area. You can set customized per-bid clicks and have total control over your marketing budget.

8. Offer Training on How to Operate Machinery to Users

Sometimes, potential clients will fall by the wayside because they’re not confident in their ability to operate machinery. You can recapture these potential leads by offering on-site machinery training.

Providing operational and safety training courses will create an additional revenue stream for your business, and it’s also a great way to provide your clients with exceptional customer service.

9. Don’t Write Off Traditional Marketing Channels Like Broadcast Advertising

Digital marketing is undoubtedly the best way to get the word out about your business, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect other time-honored marketing channels.

If you’re looking for cost-effective ways to extend your reach, consider investing in billboards or radio advertisements. These media will help you connect with old-fashioned and less tech-savvy customers looking to rent heavy machinery.

10. Rent Seasonal Equipment in the Off-Season

Rounding out our list of construction equipment rental business ideas is a practical tip for expanding your inventory.

If you’re interested in adding new machinery to your lineup of rental options, consider purchasing seasonal equipment in the off-season. For instance, you might buy a snow plow in mid-July rather than waiting until the dead of winter. By thinking ahead, you stand to save thousands and free up revenue to pursue other growth opportunities.

Creating a Thriving Rental Business

There are tons of great construction equipment rental business ideas you can use to expand your reach and generate more revenue. To maximize the effectiveness of your efforts, however, you need a great equipment rental business plan and the right technology in place. You need a solution like Quipli.

Quipli’s equipment rental software lets you streamline the rental process by providing equipment rental website templates, collecting payments online, and offering a frictionless experience to your clients.

Learn About Quipli’s Construction Equipment rental Software

Have you been wondering what sort of ads rental companies should be running in order to attract new business? 

Interested in marketing your rental company on Google using paid ads but have no idea where to begin? Been searching online for things like “Google Ads rental companies,” but coming up with meaningless results?

Although it sounds like you’re on the right track, the entire concept of engaging in paid online advertising can seem mysterious and daunting if you’re new to digital marketing. But if you want to grow your business, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the basics of digital marketing and branding.

While there are many different ways to engage in paid online advertising,  Google Ads is the strongest platform for rental companies to bring in quality leads and get more bookings.

With that in mind, we’ve put together this beginner’s guide on Google Ads for rental businesses. Here’s what you need to know about what the platform is, why paid search ads are important to the success of your business, and how to design Google Ads strategies that get results.

What Are Google Ads?

Google Ads is an online advertising platform that allows you to pay for marketing space on the Google search engine. 

Specifically, these ads are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs), at the top above the organic results. (Organic results are regular Google search results that are selected by their search engine’s algorithms.) 

There are usually up to four text ads total, each marked with a small “Ad” label. 

When you pay for won’t be charged for your ad unless someone clicks on it, even if your ad was one of the three that were displayed. 

You can customize your per-click bid, as well as your weekly and monthly budgets. Once you have hit your spending limit, your ad will no longer be displayed. 

Why Paid Search Ads Are Important for Equipment Rental Businesses

By using paid search ads, you can generate almost immediate traffic — assuming that you are winning bids, of course. Ads displayed on the right queries can bring in a lot of valuable leads. 

Paid search marketing should be a core part of both your short and long-term growth strategy. If your company is new or simply in the process of growing its online presence, PPC marketing provides an opportunity to generate leads while you wait for your search engine optimization strategy to mature. 

After your SEO campaign has begun producing results, you can continue to use PPC to boost your total web traffic. 

What You’ll Need Before You Get Started

Google has lots of free tools that you need to take advantage of before you start using Google Ads. 

First off, you should create a Google Business Profile account. This account links to services like Google Maps and displays key information about your business, such as your address, hours, phone number, and website. You can even use your Google Business Profile to track site traffic generated from Google services.

Additionally, you need to create a Google Analytics profile. Google Analytics provides powerful insights into the efficacy of your SEO and PPC efforts. You can track traffic volume, leads, ad views, and much more. 

Lastly, you will need to sign up for a Google Ads account. All of these accounts are interconnected and will be accessed using your Gmail username. However, you must set up each account separately before you can start using Google Ads.

Finding Your Target Audience

Google Adwords PPC advertising revolves around audience targeting. If you are not targeting the appropriate audience, the results of your Google Ads campaign will be underwhelming. 

When running the ads, you bid on relevant keywords – things someone would search for if they’re looking for the kinds of products or services you’re offering. For example, a construction equipment rental company based in Fresno might want to bid on “backhoe rental in Fresno.” 

When setting up a Google Ads campaign, you will be asked to select which keywords you want to target. You will need to set a bid on each keyword as well. 

When users search for a keyword you’re targeting, Google’s algorithm will analyze all of the bids for that phrase, and display the three or four winning bids.  

Google Ads works on a pay-per-click (PPC) billing model. This setup means that you won’t be charged for your ad unless someone clicks on it, even if your ad was one of the three that were displayed. 

You can customize your per-click bid, as well as your weekly and monthly budgets. Once you have hit your spending limit, your ad will no longer be displayed. 

Choosing the Right Types of Ads for Your Rental Business

When creating Google Ads campaigns, you will have the ability to select from several different types of ads, including: 

Search Ads

Search ads are the most well-known type of Google Ads content. These search ads appear at the top of SERPs, directly above organic results. Usually, only three search ads are displayed on a SERP page. 

Paid search ads are a great tool for targeting customers who are Googling phrases related to your business. 

For instance, if you operate a party supply rental company, you could use search ads to target customers searching for phrases like “table and chair rentals” or “party rentals.” 

Google Ads Keyword Planner provides some great information on search volumes. This insight will help you decide which keywords to target and how high to set your bids. 

However, paid services like SEMRush and Ahrefs provide more detailed search volume data. Therefore, you may want to invest in one of these services once you get a good grasp on the basics of PPC marketing. 

Display Ads

Display ads incorporate images into the content and are not as focused as search ads. Whereas search ads are displayed on SERPs, display ads are shown on websites that have enabled Google AdSense. 

This system is a monetization tool that provides websites with a small cut of the revenue generated from display ads. On a side note, you can use Google AdSense once your website begins generating a healthy amount of organic traffic. 

Display ads can cultivate brand awareness and showcase your products or services. You can use display ads to target prospects based on past search history, location, and demographic attributes. 

While display ads are more general than search ads, they are typically displayed on sites that have some nexus to your business. For instance, an ad for a kayak rental company may be displayed on a blog about outdoor activities. 

Remarketing Ads

Remarketing ads specifically target customers who have previously visited your site. When setting up your Google Ads account, you will have the ability to install a cookie-based tracker on your website. 

Once this cookie is embedded on your site, you will gain the ability to track users and target them with remarketing ads. The purpose of these ads is to nurture leads who have visited your site but were not quite ready to book a rental.

Establishing Your Budget

Before your Google Ads campaign goes live, you will need to establish a budget. When setting up your budget, you will be asked to choose per-word bids, and also select a monthly spending limit. 

Keep in mind that the price of keywords can vary radically. Several factors impact the price of keywords, including the amount of search volume they are generating, how many companies are bidding for those phrases, and your geographic location. 

Naturally, keywords like “kayak rentals” are going to be more costly in areas near beaches or popular waterways. Fortunately, there are ways to stretch your Google Ads budget. One great approach involves targeting long-tail keywords, which are usually far cheaper. 

Long tail keywords are phrases that usually include four to seven words. For example, instead of bidding for “kayak rentals,” you could target the phrase “kayak rentals in Tampa Bay, FL.” 

While you are going to get fewer clicks overall, the interactions that you do earn are going to be much more relevant. You will also be paying less for each click, which can translate into huge savings over the course of a campaign.

Monitoring Performance

Although Google Ads makes it easy to manage campaigns, you cannot “set it and forget it.” If you want to get the most bang for your advertising buck, you will need to carefully track your ad campaigns to measure their efficacy. 

We suggest monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like:

• Click-through rate
• Cost per click
• Total number of clicks
• Conversion rate — how many people rented equipment after clicking on your ad?
• Cost per conversion — total cost of clicks divided by the number of conversions
• View-through conversions — how many returned to your site and booked?

When your campaign is not producing the desired results, re-evaluate your tactics. You may have missed the mark with your ad content or might be targeting the wrong keywords. 

Alternatively, you may have a high friction rental process that is dragging down conversion rates.

Grow Your Rental Business with Google Ads

Google Ads is a powerful marketing tool that can help you bring in leads and make more sales, often very quickly. 

Looking for additional marketing ideas for equipment rental? Or help with planning campaigns and tracking performance metrics? Quipli can help with our cutting-edge equipment rental software and marketing offerings. 

Sign up for a free trial and experience the capabilities of our dynamic solution.    

Learn About Quipli’s rental Software

If someone wants something, they are probably going to use Google to find it. With an estimated 40K Google Searches per every second, looking into the data behind Google Search can provide insight into almost any niche.

Quipli, an equipment rental software solution, conducted a study to evaluate which U.S. cities have the highest demand for equipment rentals by analyzing how many searches occur within each city for the most popular types of equipment rentals.

By analyzing this data, Quipli has been able to pinpoint the U.S. cities that have the most people searching for equipment rentals.

“Understanding the importance of how local search behavior ties into equipment rentals is essential for rental companies aiming to succeed in their market, especially as the rental industry continues to move online. We hope this study shines light on how important it is for equipment rental companies to focus on their online visibility, as well as reveal overlooked markets for small business owners looking to branch out.”

How Cities with Populations over 1 Million Compared

Rank	Searches per City	City	Population
1	3710	Houston, TX	2320268
2	2080	San Antonio, TX	1547253
3	1480	Dallas, TX	1343573
4	1390	San Diego, CA	1423851
5	1370	Phoenix, AZ	1680992

How Cities with Populations Between 500K & 999K Compared

Rank	Searches per City	City	Population
1	2810	Miami, FL	467963
2	1020	Cincinnati, OH	303940
3	930	Colorado Springs, CO	478221
4	870	Wichita, KS	389938
5	737	Omaha, NE	478192

How Cities with Populations Between 100K & 499K Compared

Rank	Searches per City	City	Population
1	2130	Austin, TX	978908
2	1690	Las Vegas, NV	651319
3	1250	Denver, CO	727211
4	1180	Portland, OR	654741
5	1010	Sacramento, CA	513624

How Cities with Populations Between 50K & 99K Compared

Rank	Searches per City	City	Population
1	527	Yuma, AZ	98285
2	440	Lawrence, KS	98193
3	390	Auburn, AL	66259
4	370	Fort Myers, FL	87103
5	354	Duluth, MN	85618

Get Your City’s Google Keyword Data

Did you city place in the top 100? Submit your email and your city and we’ll send you the keyword data for your city, so you can dial in on what keywords your business should be targeting. 

Methodology:

About The Data in this Study: 

The data in this study is based on Google’s estimations of keyword search volume. Based on the sample size of this study and Google’s tendency to underestimate search volume, true search volume for each city is likely higher. Google does not provide exact amounts, but does provide monthly estimations.

The Process:

We created a list of 35 thousand keywords and ran them through a tool called Keywords Everywhere. This tool collects keyword usage estimation data from Google at a monthly level.

With this keyword data, we grouped keywords by city to understand the total rental product demand.

How do people search for equipment rentals? 

There are a series of variations that are common amongst Googlers looking for rental equipment products that are geographically based.

There common iterations were:

1. [keyword] rental [city] [state] 

For example: equipment rental denver co,  forklift rental denver co

2. [city] [keyword] rental

For example: Denver equipment rental, denver forklift equipment rental

3. rent [keyword] city

For example: ie: rent equipment denver, rent forklift denver 

We took the 22 of the most common equipment rental products that are searched and applied these common iterations to see which had estimated search volume in each city. 

The types of equipment rentals we evaluated were:

Auger Rentals, Backhoe Rentals, Boom Lift Rentals, Chainsaw Rentals, Crane Rentals, Equipment Rentals, Excavator Rentals, Floor Sander Rentals, Forklift Rentals, Heavy Equipment Rentals, Ladder Rentals, Lawn Mower Rentals, Lift Rentals, Log Splitter Rentals, Mini Excavator Rentals, Paint Sprayer Rentals, Scaffolding Rentals, Scissor Lift Rentals, Sod Cutter Rentals, Tool Rentals, Tractor Rentals, Trailer Rentals, and Trencher Rentals.

We applied these 66 keyword variations to all cities with populations over 50,000 which resulted in 535 cities.

 

Businesses rely on their websites much more today than they did a decade ago. They’re more than just digital business cards now, with so much going into building an effective website. To do so correctly, you’re going to need to find the right website builder for your business.

Easy-to-Use Website Content Management Systems

When evaluating different equipment rental website builders, ease of use is going to be near the top of the list for anyone who doesn’t have extensive website experience. There are many options out there with templates, drag-and-drop functionality, and other features that make the once-difficult task of website building accessible to anyone.

Key Ease of Use Features

There are some features you really shouldn’t be without. Ideally, you’ll find a website builder that has an available customer service team to help with the builder. Here are some of the other key features that you should be looking for to make your website building experience go smoothly:

One-Click Page Composer

You should be able to make a new page with just one click or something close to that. Good website builders have pre-made templates to suit just about any potential need. These website templates should make it easy for you to create modern and user-friendly web pages in no time.

eCommerce Capabilities

Different website builders allow for varying levels of integration with your business. Since your website is for your rental company, you need a website builder that makes eCommerce integration easy with specific templates for that function.

SEO Features

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves catering your website content to what search engines recommend to their users. This design approach involves putting keywords in the right places, including content that is only viewable by search engines. A good builder makes this task incredibly straightforward.  Find out how Quipli’s digital growth products can work for you!

Fully Responsive Sites with Mobile Optimization

Most users make the decision to stay on or leave a certain website within 15 seconds. If your website isn’t fully loaded and completely functional within that time, then your customer is gone. A good website builder has the fully responsive layout needed to make things easier for your customers.

You also need to make sure that your website builder optimizes for mobile users. Search engines like Google place a high value on mobile optimization, and over 60% of search traffic comes from mobile devices.

Ability to Add Product Listings, Category Pages, and Subcategory Pages

Most rental businesses start small and grow over time. Your business is sure to add more equipment as time goes on, likely branching out into other categories. Updating your website to reflect these new product listings shouldn’t be a challenge. Instead, your website builder should handle this practically automatically.

It should be just as straightforward to save your rental equipment in different categories as it is with any other eCommerce venture. Quipli makes it even easier with the ability to import product information and categories from an Excel spreadsheet. Our software updates your product listings without any difficulty at all.

Straightforward Payment Integration

Of course, a big part of running any business is getting paid. You need a website builder that lets you accept bookings and payments from a wide variety of sources. It isn’t enough to only accept a credit card for online payments. Many customers will simply move on to a competitor with more versatility.

Today, there are countless options like Stripe, PayPal, and more for online payments. You need an integrated payment system that can let customers pay how they want. Quipli does just that while also making a seamless connection between online reservations and in-person pickups.

Equipment Inventory and Reservation Management

Inventory management is a vital part of any rental company’s day-to-day operations. Given how many customers prefer to book online today, the only way to meet those needs is to have your website builder include an integrated inventory and reservation management system.

Syncing your inventory and reservations is something that needs to be done automatically to avoid mix-ups. You can’t have two separate systems running online and in-person reservations — you need your website to be fully integrated with your inventory.

Rental Software with CRM Integration

Customer relationship management (CRM) is essential for any business to succeed. This need is particularly pronounced in many types of rental companies where repeat customers are among the top sources of business. Many tools can improve your CRM, and you should choose a website builder that integrates those tools.

Among the most important aspects of CRM is to capture valuable data from customer interactions. This capture includes getting email addresses from customers and visitors to provide a direct link for email marketing. If you aren’t using these resources, you’re missing out on one of the most valuable marketing tools available today.

Blog Features

Blogs might seem like they have gone out of style, but they are a very important part of how businesses market themselves online today. You need a website builder that makes it easy to create, manage, and optimize blog posts for your rental business.

All of the content on your website plays a role in search engine rankings. Blog posts are a great way to target specific keywords to cast a wider net and funnel more potential customers through your website.

Customer Support for the Rental Website Builder

Many website builders online today have little to no customer support available. That’s a position that you don’t want to be in as a business that relies on its website for reservations. If your website develops issues, you need to know that there’s someone you can consult with to resolve those issues.

Get Started with Quipli’s Rental Website Builder

Quipli provides all-in-one rental business software for equipment rental businesses. Our software features a built-in website builder that works seamlessly with our inventory and reservation management solution. 

The Quipli website builder is easy to use and has all of the features you need to run your business, including our integrated point of sale (POS) system. Contact Quipli today to set up a demo and find out more.

CREATE YOUR OWN STOREFRONT WITH QUIPLI’S POWERFUL WEBSITE BUILDER