Should you be running paid search for your contracting business? Ask ten agencies and you’ll get ten yes answers, because that’s what they sell. We’ve managed enough contractor accounts to say the honest answer is no about a third of the time. Google Ads for contractors works when four specific conditions line up, and it quietly drains money when they don’t. Here’s how to tell which side you’re on before you spend anything.
Your average job value decides everything else
Start here. Not with budget, not with keywords, not with whether your cousin’s landscaping company had a good experience.
Contractor keywords are expensive. Depending on the trade and the market, you’re looking at $8 to $25 per click, and the competitive remodeling and roofing terms sit at the top of that range. Say you land at $12 a click with a landing page converting at 7%. That’s roughly $170 per lead. Close half of those and you’ve paid $340 to book a job.
Now the question answers itself. If your average ticket is $12,000 for a roof replacement, $340 is a rounding error. If you’re a handyman averaging $450 a visit, you just lost money on every single job, and no amount of campaign optimization fixes that gap.
Our rough line is $1,500. Below that average job value, paid search is usually the wrong first channel, and you’re better off putting that money into Google Business Profile work and reviews. Above it, the math starts working in your favor fast.
One caveat worth naming. If your average job is small but your customers come back four times a year, run the math on lifetime value instead. A pool service company with a $180 monthly recurring ticket is a very different animal than a one-and-done repair business.
How big is your service area, really?
This one surprises people. Contractors tend to overestimate how much demand exists in their territory.
If you serve a 20-mile radius around a town of 45,000, there may only be 150 to 400 relevant searches a month across every keyword you’d want. That’s not a failure of your marketing. That’s just the size of the pond. And it caps what Google Ads can do for you no matter how much you’re willing to spend.
Here’s what goes wrong. You set a $3,000 monthly budget in a market that can only absorb $900 of genuine high-intent traffic. Google still spends the $3,000. It just spends the difference on loosely related searches, neighboring towns you don’t serve, and people researching how to do the job themselves.
Before you commit, pull your actual local search volume in Google Keyword Planner with your real geographic targeting applied. If the numbers come back thin, the answer isn’t a bigger budget. It’s a tighter budget plus a serious local SEO push.
Can you pick up the phone within five minutes?
More contractor ad money dies here than in the ad account itself.
We’ve watched a client pay $190 for a click that turned into a call at 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon that rang out to voicemail. The homeowner called the next contractor on the list. That $190 bought a competitor a job.
Speed to lead is not a soft metric in this industry. Homeowners with a leak or a dead AC unit are calling three companies in a row, and the first one to answer wins a wildly disproportionate share. If nobody is answering between 8 and 6, or if leads sit in an inbox until end of day, fix that before you spend a dollar on ads. An answering service costs less than a week of wasted clicks.
Same goes for form fills. A form submitted at 9 in the morning that gets a callback at 4 in the afternoon has gone cold. We generally push contractor clients toward call-focused campaigns for exactly this reason, since a phone call skips the follow-up gap entirely.
Do you actually know where your leads come from?
If your answer is “people usually mention it,” you don’t have tracking. You have anecdotes.
This is the piece most contractors skip and it’s the one that determines whether any of the rest is knowable. A plumbing company came to us spending $4,000 a month and reporting 200-plus form submissions. Sounded great on paper. Once we put real tracking in place with spam filtering and call tracking, only about 30 of those were legitimate leads. Their true cost per qualified lead was $133, not the $20 their previous reports implied.
We rebuilt the tracking, filtered the junk, and moved budget toward call-focused campaigns. Cost per qualified lead came down to $52 over the following quarter. Nothing about that was clever campaign work. It was just finally being able to see what was happening.
At minimum you want dynamic call tracking numbers (CallRail or similar), conversion actions firing correctly in Google Ads, GA4 configured properly, and form spam filtered before it ever counts as a conversion. Every dollar should trace back to a real job. That’s the whole point.
Search campaigns, Local Services Ads, or Performance Max?
Once the four conditions above check out, this is the next fork.
Local Services Ads are usually the best first move for licensed trades. You pay per lead instead of per click, you get the Google Guaranteed badge, and the placement sits above everything else on the page. For plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and roofing, LSAs frequently deliver a lower cost per lead than search. The tradeoff is control. You can’t write the ad, you can’t pick keywords, and disputing junk leads is a chore.
Search campaigns are where you get precision. Specific keywords, specific landing pages, specific service lines. If you make good margin on one service and terrible margin on another, search is the only channel that lets you bid accordingly.
Performance Max is where contractor budgets go to die, at least early on. PMax needs conversion data to optimize against, and a new account doesn’t have any. It’ll happily spend your money on display placements and YouTube while you wait. Get 90 days of clean conversion data through search or LSAs first. Then test PMax.
That’s an opinion, and plenty of people disagree with it. We’ve just seen too many new contractor accounts burn a quarter’s budget learning it the hard way.
What a realistic starting budget looks like
For most trades in most markets, $1,500 to $3,000 a month is the working range to start. Below roughly $1,000 you won’t gather enough conversion data for the bidding algorithms to learn anything, and you’ll spend three months in a permanent cold start.
Plan on 90 days before you judge results. The first 30 are noisy, the second 30 are where negative keywords and bid adjustments start doing real work, and the third 30 is your first honest read. Agencies that promise results in week two are selling you something.
Where contractor budgets leak fastest
Four patterns account for most of the waste we find in contractor accounts during audits.
Broad match with no negative keyword list. You will pay for “roofing jobs hiring,” “how to fix a water heater,” “roofer salary,” and “free HVAC estimate.” Build the negative list before launch, not after.
Every ad pointing at the homepage. Someone searching “emergency drain cleaning” should land on a page about emergency drain cleaning. Homepage traffic converts at a fraction of the rate.
No call-only campaigns on mobile. The majority of urgent contractor searches happen on a phone. Make the phone number the conversion.
Bidding on services you don’t want. Plenty of contractors run ads for low-margin work out of habit. Cut those keywords and put the budget behind the jobs you actually want on the calendar.
Our Google Ads manager spent years running campaigns for Angi and HomeAdvisor before joining the team, which means he’s seen the contractor lead economy from the other side. Most of what looks like a bidding problem turns out to be a targeting or tracking problem wearing a disguise.
The decision in one line
If your average job is worth more than about $1,500 and someone answers the phone during business hours, Google Ads for contractors will very likely pay for itself. The third requirement is patience, and 90 days is the floor before the numbers mean anything.
Miss one of those and don’t start yet. Fix the gap first, then come back to the ad account. It’ll be a much shorter and much cheaper conversation.
If you want a second set of eyes on an account you’re already running, we’re happy to take a look at it. No pitch attached.
