Google Ads books jobs for contractors when it is set up around one idea: show up only when a homeowner in your area searches for a service you do, send them to a page about that service, and count booked jobs instead of clicks. In practice that means search campaigns, not display. Keywords built from your services and the towns you serve. A long negative keyword list. Call tracking tied to real jobs. A landing page per service. Ads that run when someone can answer the phone. Get those right and the account has a chance. Miss them and no budget fixes it.
Nathan Synoground has managed $20.5M in Google Ads across 150 client accounts since 2018, including $2.8M for home service and contractor businesses across 43 accounts. What follows is what that work keeps proving.
Run search, not display
Google Ads has several campaign types. For a contractor, the one that matters most is search: text ads that show when someone types a query.
Display ads, the banners on other websites, reach people who were not looking for you. They are cheap per click and rarely book a roof or a remodel. Many accounts we look at have display turned on by default inside a search campaign. That setting alone can burn budget on clicks that never call.
Performance Max can work once you have solid conversion data. Without it, the campaign has nothing good to learn from and spends where it is easiest, not where your buyers are. Start with search. Add other types when tracking proves they book jobs.
Build keywords from services and towns
Homeowners search the way they talk. “Roof leak repair” plus a town. “Stamped concrete patio contractor.” “Garage door spring replacement near me.” “Kitchen remodeler” plus a neighborhood.
Build ad groups around each service, with tight keyword themes. Use phrase and exact match for your core terms so you stay close to what people actually type. Broad match can find new searches, but only on top of good tracking and a strong negative list.
Keep each ad group to one service. When the keyword, the ad and the page all say the same thing, Google rewards you with better positions for the money, and homeowners click because the ad answers their search.
Add negatives every week
Negative keywords tell Google what not to show for. Contractors need a lot of them:
- Jobs: hiring, careers, salary, apprenticeship.
- DIY: how to, tutorial, video, materials, supply store names.
- Wrong services: if you install roofs but do not do gutters, say so.
- Wrong intent: free, cheap, used, rental, for sale.
- Wrong places: towns outside the area you want to work.
Read the search terms report every week. It shows the real searches your ads appeared for. Every irrelevant one is a new negative. This is boring work, and it is where a lot of wasted spend hides.
Track booked jobs, not form fills
This is the biggest single difference between accounts that grow and accounts that stall.
Most contractor leads call. If your account only counts form submissions, it is blind to most of what it produces. Set up call tracking: Google’s own call conversions for calls from ads, plus tracking numbers on your website so calls from the site are tied back to the click.
Then go a step further. A form fill or a call is not a job. Some calls are spam, wrong numbers or price shoppers. When you can, mark which leads became booked jobs and send that back to Google. Bidding that learns from booked jobs finds more people like your real customers. Bidding that learns from every call finds more callers.
One landing page per service
Sending every ad to your home page asks the homeowner to go find what they came for. Many will not.
Build a page for each main service. The page should repeat the promise in the ad, show photos of your own work on that service, name the towns you serve, show proof such as reviews and licence, and put the phone number and a short form at the top.
A homeowner who searched “deck builder” should land on a page about decks. Not a page that lists painting, gutters and remodeling first. This applies to every trade: concrete, landscaping, outdoor living, garage doors. Our guide on what a contractor website needs to turn visitors into calls goes through the page itself.
Run ads when someone answers the phone
An ad that rings a phone nobody answers is wasted twice. You paid for the click, and the homeowner calls the next company.
Set an ad schedule that matches when calls get picked up. If evenings and weekends are covered by an answering service or a call forward, run ads then. If not, pull back. Look at the hour of day and day of week reports after a few weeks and lean into the times that book.
Set geography carefully
Target the towns and zip codes you actually want to drive to. Then check one setting most accounts miss: by default, Google can show your ads to people “interested in” your area, not only people in it. For most contractors, choose presence, so you reach people who live or are in your service area.
Run Local Services Ads alongside
Local Services Ads sit above regular ads for many home service searches, with a Google badge. You pay per lead, not per click, and the lead goes to you alone.
They do not replace a search campaign. They sit beside it. Together they cover more of the top of the page. We cover setup and lead disputes in Google Local Services Ads for contractors.
Know what you are paying for
Ad spend goes to Google. Management goes to whoever runs the account. Keep the ad account in your own name, with your card on it. If you are weighing proposals, our guide to how much contractor marketing costs explains the common fee models and what each one rewards.
What a healthy account looks like
You should be able to answer these questions at any time:
- How many calls and forms came from ads last month?
- How many of those became booked jobs?
- Which services and which towns produced them?
- What did the search terms report show, and what was added as negatives?
- What changed in the account, and why?
If your current setup cannot answer them, that is where to start. See how we run campaigns on our contractor Google Ads page, or go back to the home page for the full picture.
Get a free review of your Google Ads
Nathan’s team at Fruitful Local will look through your current Google Ads account for free. We check tracking, keywords, search terms, negatives, landing pages and settings, then tell you what we would fix first. No obligation and no pressure. Use the form below.