No results are promised here, and none should be promised to you by anyone selling ads. What you can control is whether you know what your ads are doing. That comes first.
Why tracking comes before spend
Most contractor leads are phone calls. If your account counts only form fills, or counts every click on your phone number as a conversion, Google's bidding learns from the wrong signal and your reports can't tell a good campaign from a bad one. Fix what is counted before you change what is spent.
What to track
- Calls from the ad itself. Call assets (call extensions) put your number on the ad. With a Google forwarding number, Google can count those calls and how long they lasted.
- Calls from your website. Website call tracking shows a forwarding number to people who arrived from an ad, so calls made after they clicked through are counted too.
- Forms and booking requests. Count the submitted form or booked appointment, not the visit to the contact page.
- Calls long enough to matter. Set a minimum call length so a wrong number doesn't count as a lead.
- Booked and won jobs. Mark which calls became jobs in your CRM, and import those back into Google Ads as offline conversions. This is what lets you compare campaigns by jobs, not by clicks.
What a fair Google Ads audit checks
- Conversion tracking. What is counted, whether anything is counted twice, and whether calls are counted at all.
- Search terms. The searches you actually paid for. Look for jobs you don't do, places you don't serve and people looking for work, not a contractor.
- Negative keywords. Words like “jobs”, “salary”, “DIY” or “course”, if they don't bring you work.
- Location settings. Whether ads reach people in or regularly in your service area, rather than people merely interested in it.
- Ad schedule. Whether ads run at hours when nobody answers the phone.
- Landing pages. Whether an ad for water heater repair lands on a page about water heater repair, with your number at the top.
- Calls answered. How many calls from ads were missed. Ads can't book a job if the phone rings out.
A fair audit gives you a written list of what to fix, in order, and tells you plainly if the account is fine.
The part ads can't fix: answering the phone
Every ad you pay for ends in a phone call. If you're on a job, the call goes to voicemail, and the caller may try the next company. Before you raise a budget, decide what happens to the calls you can't take: missed call text back, after-hours answering or an AI receptionist.
When Google Ads isn't the right move yet
- You can't answer or call back the leads you already get.
- You have no way to tell which calls came from ads.
- Your calendar is already full for weeks ahead.
- Your website has no page for the service you'd advertise.
Fix those first; they cost less than clicks. If Google Ads isn't the right move right now, we'll tell you.