Why Did a Contractor Spend Three Months on Google Ads for Contractors and Get Calls From the Wrong Towns?
The situations described here are composites drawn from the types of jobs and decisions we encounter regularly. Names and specific figures are illustrative.
The owner opened the dashboard on a Friday afternoon and read the numbers out loud, the way people do when they are trying to convince themselves. Four hundred clicks. Sixty-one calls. Twelve booked estimates. Three jobs. For a company that handles roofing, siding and gutters, three jobs from $9,000 in ad spend was not a result he could take to his accountant. He had hired someone to run Google Ads for contractors, been told it takes time, and given it three months. What he wanted now was a clear answer to why the phone rang so much without producing work.
Where the calls were coming from
The first thing the audit looked at was geography, because for a company that serves a defined set of towns the map is where most waste begins. Google Ads lets an advertiser target by country, region, city, postal code or a radius around a point. It also has a setting that governs whether the ads show only to people physically in the targeted area or to anyone showing interest in it. Google’s own help documentation explains the difference, and advertisers who leave the broader default on can end up showing ads to people who are only searching about the area.
In this account the targeting was set to a county, with the broader option on. Roughly a third of the clicks came from a neighboring metro area an hour away, where the company did not send crews. Those callers asked for estimates and were told no. They also called back, which inflated the call count. That is the kind of detail that makes a dashboard look healthier than it is.
Search ads and Local Services Ads are different tools
The second thing the audit noticed was that the company was running one kind of ad and ignoring another. Standard Google search ads charge for clicks. Local Services Ads, which appear at the top of results for many home service categories with a Google Guaranteed or Google Screened badge, charge per lead, meaning a phone call or message from a customer. Google vets those businesses, including license and insurance checks and background checks, and the process takes a few weeks to complete.
Industry benchmark reports, such as the home services figures LocalIQ publishes, consistently show that cost per click for home-services keywords is high and that cost per lead varies widely by trade and market. They also show that Local Services Ads often produce leads at a lower price than search ads, though the leads tend to be shorter, more price-focused calls. Neither is better in every case. Search ads let an advertiser control the message and send the click to a page built for the offer. Local Services Ads put a company in front of customers who are ready to call. The right mix depends on the trade and the market, and many contractors use both.
The owner in this story had never applied for Local Services Ads because he assumed they were the same thing. Our page on Google and Meta ads management explains how we usually compare the two before recommending a budget split.
What the keyword report showed
The third problem was in the search terms report, which lists the actual phrases that triggered the ads. The campaign was bidding on broad terms like roofing and siding, and a meaningful share of the budget was going to searches for jobs, supplies and DIY instructions. People searching for how to patch a roof leak were clicking, reading and leaving. The fix is not complicated, but it takes regular attention: add negative keywords for phrases that signal the wrong intent, split campaigns by service so budgets follow demand, and send each ad to the page that matches it.
A homeowner searching for storm damage repair needs to land on a page about storm damage repair, with a clear phone number and a form, not on a homepage that covers everything. That connection between ad and page is part of why pairing paid ads with SEO tends to work better than running either alone, because the page earns its place in both.
Measuring what happened after the click
The most important change was the simplest. The account had no call tracking. Calls were counted by a Google forwarding number, but nobody listened to them or recorded which became jobs. Once recording and a simple outcome field were added, the picture changed. Of sixty-one calls, nineteen were from outside the service area, fourteen were vendors or job seekers, eleven were existing customers calling a number they found through an ad, and seventeen were genuine new inquiries. Twelve of those had booked estimates and three had become jobs.
That is a very different story from sixty-one calls. It also changed the question from how to get more clicks to how to turn the seventeen real inquiries into more jobs. Part of the answer was speed, since many homeowners call two or three companies and hire whoever answers first, and part was making sure the ad promised only what the company did. A company that is not sure where its leads are going wrong can start with a free ads audit before changing anything.
What changed in month four
The changes were not dramatic. The targeting moved to the towns the company served, with only people physically in the area. The campaign was split into three, one for each service. Negative keywords removed the DIY traffic. The company applied for Local Services Ads and ran them alongside search. Calls were recorded, tagged and reviewed weekly. In month four the click count dropped by about half. The number of real inquiries stayed about the same, the cost per booked estimate fell, and two more jobs closed. A lower click count was the result of the work doing what it was supposed to do.
We described a related pattern of stale profiles and quiet competitors in a story about local SEO in a fast-growing county, which is the organic side of the same problem.
What the story leaves behind
Ad dashboards report what is easy to count. A contractor looking at Google Ads for contractors is better served by asking harder questions. Where are the clicks coming from? What did people search? How many calls were real, and how many became estimates and jobs? A campaign that answers those questions gives the owner something to act on, and one that does not is a bill with a chart attached.
If you’re looking for Google Ads management for a local service business, you can reach out here.
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