Google Ads for Contractors

Why most contractor ad accounts underperform

Three causes account for most of it. Keywords too broad, so you pay for people researching rather than hiring. Every click landing on the homepage instead of a page about the thing they searched for. And no conversion tracking, so the account gets optimised on clicks — a number that says nothing about booked jobs.

Fixing those three usually matters more than any bid strategy.

Intent over volume

The highest-volume keyword in your trade is rarely the one that converts. "Kitchen remodel ideas" is a browser; "kitchen remodel contractor near me" is a buyer. We build around the second kind, and maintain negative keywords continuously so the first kind stops costing you money.

For trades it applies to, Local Services Ads are usually the better starting point — above everything else, Google Guaranteed badge, charged per lead rather than per click.

Land the click on the right page

A homeowner who clicked an ad about bathroom remodeling should arrive on a bathroom remodeling page, with the matching form and number. Sending everyone to the homepage and expecting them to navigate is the most common and most expensive habit in contractor advertising.

If the matching page does not exist, that is usually the first thing to fix — before increasing the budget.

Measure booked jobs, not clicks

Conversion tracking has to be live before spend starts. Calls and form fills counted as conversions, attributed to the campaign and the page that produced them.

With that in place the only question worth asking becomes answerable: what does a booked job cost through this channel, and is that less than the job is worth to you.

Scaling what works, and cutting what does not

Once conversion tracking is in place the account stops being a guess. You can see which campaigns, keywords and pages produce booked jobs and at what cost, which turns budget decisions into arithmetic rather than argument.

In practice that usually means a small number of keywords carry most of the value and a long tail quietly drains budget. Pruning the tail and moving the spend into what converts is the single most reliable improvement we make to inherited accounts — more reliable than new creative or a different bid strategy.

It also means knowing when to stop. If a campaign cannot produce a booked job below what the job is worth, the honest answer is to turn it off rather than optimise it indefinitely, and to put the money into a channel that can.

Seasonality, and not disappearing in the slow months

Most contractor trades have a season, and the instinct in the quiet months is to switch ads off entirely. The problem is that campaigns lose their learning and competitors consolidate position while you are away, so restarting in spring costs more than maintaining a reduced presence would have.

A smaller always-on budget that holds position, with spend released into the months that convert, generally outperforms the on-off pattern — and it means the account is warm when demand arrives rather than learning from scratch.

Call tracking, and what it changes

Most contractor leads arrive by phone, and a form conversion is the easy half of the measurement. Without call tracking the account can only see the enquiries that happened to come through a form, which for most trades is the minority.

Tracking calls as conversions, attributed to the campaign and keyword that produced them, usually reorders which campaigns look like they are working. We have taken over accounts where the campaign about to be switched off was quietly producing the most phone calls, because nobody had ever measured them.

It also surfaces the other half of the problem: calls that rang out. If the data shows paid leads reaching voicemail at six in the evening, no amount of campaign work fixes that, and the right next step is lead response rather than more budget.