Google ads are one of the most reliable and consistent methods of generating leads for Contractors in the USA.
Let's be honest - Most contractors would much prefer to focus on their business operations and projects, rather than worrying about how to get Google ads running efficiently.
This guide will show contractors exactly how you can get your Google ads set up, along with advanced tips on making your Google ads incredibly profitable in driving you new business on autopilot.
How Does Google Ads Work For Contractors?
Ultimately, Google ads is simply a platform that lets you pay to have your business advertised at the top of Google search results whenever someone is looking for a contractor.
👉 Here's an example of a Google ad from a contractor in NYC:
It’s a pay per click (PPC) system, which means that you’ll pay a fee to Google every time somebody clicks on your advert and gets pushed through to your website or landing page.
For example - you might pay on $10 every time someone clicks on your advert.
If every 1 in 10 of those people clicking on your advert become a paying customer, that means you’ll end up paying $100 to acquire each new customer.
The Benefits of Google Ads For Contractors
As we’ve discussed, Google ads lets your company feature in the decision-making process for any local customer who is looking for contractor services on Google.
✅ There’s a few other strategic benefits as well:
- You can receive leads very fast. Your adverts will start showing up within hours of launching them.
- Google ads are a great way for contractors to help scale their business, providing a very consistent source of leads.
- If you’re launching in a new City or location, Google ads are perfect since you can geo-target your ads to only serve people in that location.
- Google ads are flexible - If you’re experiencing too much demand you can easily pause adverts until you have the capacity to take on new contractor projects again.
Setting Up Google Ads
Here's some simple tips for contractors on getting your Google ads up and running.
Choosing the Right Objective
The very first thing you’ll do when setting up your first Google ads campaign is select your campaign type and objective.
Contractors Want Leads
We’ve worked with hundreds of contractors to build successful Google ad campaigns, and we always strongly recommend selecting ‘Leads’ as their primary objective.
Contractors want leads because they need to assess each individual project enquiry to make sure it’s the right fit and job scope for their company to take on.
Keyword Research
Google ads are primarily keyword based.
This means you need to identify and select the keywords that you want your advert to show up for whenever a user inputs them.
For example “Contract near me” or “Contractor New York City” would be examples of keywords that you may wish to bid on.
Moving more towards complete PPC automation, Google is slowly moving away from ‘do it yourself’ keyword selection, and gives advertisers the opportunity to select a broad match campaign, which means Google ads will automatically select the keywords for advertisers.
The upside of this is that it means less work for you and often, Google can uncover profitable long-tail keywords that you didn’t know existed.
The downside is that if you choose an automated approach, you have far less control over the keywords that Google shows your advert to.
Crafting Ad Copy
In order to get people to actually click on your advert, you’ll need to write attention-grabbing ad copy that calls out to the customer’s needs.
Here are a few examples of compelling advertising headlines for contractors:
- #1 Contractor in Los Angeles - We Make Renovation Easy
- Top Contractor In Your City - Get a Free Estimate Today
- Free Contractor Estimate This Week - No Up Front Fee
- #1 Contractor in NYC - 100s of Happy Customers
In addition to ad copy, you should also include additional information and ad extensions to make your ads more attractive.
These are called 'assets' and make your advert more likely to be interacted with.
Here are some assets you can ad to your Google ads:
- Images of your headquarters
- Images of your friendly, professional team
- Phone number to make contact easy
- Quick links to examples of the work you’ve done with professional images
Design Effective Landing Pages
Landing pages are the pages that visitors will arrive on after they click on your advert and are taken to your website.
If you don’t have strong landing pages, you will fail miserably with Google ads.
We help contractors design their landing page to get the most leads and phone calls possible. Typically with contractors, we want to offer potential customers a free estimate or project consultation in order.
The Biggest Mistake We See
The number 1 biggest mistake we see by far is contractors who have incredibly poor landing pages.
If your landing page is slow and difficult to navigate on a mobile device, then users are just going to click back and find another contractor.
But guess what - You’re still going to get charged for the click!
Here’s an example of a strong landing page for a contractor...
What makes this a strong landing page:
- Strong clear imagery of a beautiful home ✅
- Very clear button to make a phone call or receive a quote ✅
- Links to other webpages such as their work and various services ✅
- Although we would prefer to see some customer testmimonials on the homepage ❌
Now let's take a look at a BAD landing page for a contractor...
There's a few things that need improved with the page below.
Here's why this is a weak landing page:
- No obvious signs to get in touch, just a small contact button at the top of page ❌ (This is true even if you scroll down the page!)
- Poorly designed website with too much spacing ❌
- No customer testimonials or social proof ❌
We wouldn't expect this landing page to convert particularly well, and there's clearly a lot of improvements to be made here.
Key Components of a Strong Landing Page
- Clear and consistent message between your ads and landing pages.
- Dedicated landing page for each location or type of service.
- Social proof, reviews & testimonials.
- Nice imagery showcasing your work.
- High performing website that looks good on mobile.
- Make it incredibly easy for people to get in touch with you.
That’s really all you need to succeed!
Managing Google Ad Campaigns
We always structure contractor Google ad accounts in a very simple way.
- If they’re a local contractor - we keep things incredibly simple and create different ad groups based on different service types e.g. roofing, kitchens, bathrooms, painting, extensions etc.
- If they’re a national contractor perhaps State-wide - then we’ll structure their google ads account based on location so that we know exactly how things are performing in different localities and cities.
Allocating Budget
One of the most important things you’ll do is setting your Google ads budget.
First off, we advise all contractors to set their budget based on their desired outcomes.
So for example, if you’re looking to acquire 10 new customers per month, you should first estimate what range you are willing to pay to acquire 1 new customer on average. This will help you set a reasonable initial budget.
If you’re paying $10 per click and converting 1 in 10 clicks to new customers, then it’s going to cost you $100 to acquire a new customer.
This means you should set your Google ads budget at around $1,000 per month.
Of course, that’s a massive oversimplification, and chances are you won’t get leads quite that cheap! But this is the type of logic you should be following to set your budget.
Read more about PPC budgeting here.
Choosing Your Bid Strategy
The next key part is choosing the right bidding strategy.
Google ads has this part largely automated, and it’s actually very intuitive and easy to use.
Rule of Thumb For Beginners
As a general rule of thumb, we recommend that entirely new Google ad accounts use manual bidding, where you set the maximum bid that you’re willing to pay for a single click. This is because automated bid strategies only work best once you have significant conversion data on your account, typically more than 30 conversions per month.
However, once you’ve established some data on your Google ads account, you’ll definitely want to switch over to a smart bidding strategy, which uses automation to get you the best results possible.
Smart bidding strategies for contractors include:
- Target CPA - where you tell Google how much you want to pay for a conversion. This is incredibly useful because you're telling Google what margins you need to work within, and what price you can afford to pay to acquire a new customer.
- Maximize Conversions - where you tell Google to get as many conversions as possible within your budget. This should only be used if you're super confident that you're attracting great leads through your ads.
Geo Targeting
Imagine for example you’re a contractor in Manhattan, New York City.
You can display different ads to people in different locations within the city, each with different messages.
For example, someone searching from Tribeca will see an advert that specifically says “Tribeca” in the headline, and someone searching from the Upper East Side would see something specific to them.
This is incredibly powerful for contractors running Google ads, as customers want a reliable contractor that’s local to them.
Google ads is incredibly powerful for geo-targeting.
They allow you to geo-target your customers down to a 1 mile radius!
Imagine for example you’re a contractor in Manhattan, New York City.
You can display different ads to people in different locations within the city, each with different messages.
For example, someone searching from Tribeca will see an advert that specifically says “Tribeca” in the headline, and someone searching from the Upper East Side would see something specific to them.
This is incredibly powerful for contractors running Google ads, as customers want a reliable contractor that’s local to them.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking gives you the simple capability to see which leads are converted from Google ad campaigns vs. other source.
Without it you’ll be completely blind, and you’ll be pouring money into Google ads without knowing if they’re working or not!
This is probably the most difficult part of Google ads that we regularly see our customers get totally wrong.
The simple goal here is so that you, the business owner, can easily look at your client list and determine which customer came from a Google ad, and which customer came from another source.
Technically speaking this can be a little tricky to get set up, because you have to use a bit of coding knowledge to get everything working correctly.
In addition, most contractors will want to set up call tracking on their Google ads, so that they can account for customers who don’t send any enquiry email or form, but simply pick up the phone and talk to them.
The good news however is that once you’ve got this all set up and working correctly, you don’t need to worry about it too much.
If you’d like help with conversion tracking, get in touch with our agency.
Monitoring and Optimization
In order to maximize your success with Google PPC adverts, you need to regularly check your results and adjust accordingly.
Track Key Metrics
It’s important to regularly track your key metrics. Google ads are very transparent because they’ll let you know how you’re doing in comparison to many of your competitors in terms of impression share, and how often your adverts are showing vs. your competitors.
You can also check important metrics like CTR (click through rate) and most importantly conversion rates, which will tell you exactly how many people are clicking on your ad and then subsequently getting in touch with you for a quote or to discuss a new project.
Identify Top Performing Search Queries
Most top PPC agencies will test a variety of keywords in order to find out which ones perform best. You can very easily look at your search terms within Google ads to see which ones are performing well and conversely, which ones are not performing well or leading to any conversions.
The typical adjustment to make is to pause keywords that are underperforming, and if you find any specific high-volume keywords that are performing extremely well, you might want to consider moving them into a separate high-focus campaign.
To learn more about keyword selection, check out this blog post.
Test Your Ads Regularly
The very best Google ads experts in the World test more than anyone else.
Here are some ideas of things that contractors should test specifically:
- Test different advertising copy
- Test broad match vs exact match keywords
- Test making phone calls much more visible on your ads to see if that improves your conversion rates
You can easily set up tests within Google ads (they make it incredibly easy) and you always want to change just 1 variable at a time, so that you can clearly identify the winner.
See our guide on PPC testing for more ideas on tests you can run 💡
Common Pitfalls To Avoid
We’ve put together a list of the top pitfalls that we’ve seen contractors make when they’re just getting started with Google ads:
- Check Lead Quality Carefully - This is by far the biggest mistake we see. Clients come to us and show that they’re getting conversions on their Google ads, but when we drill down we discover that many of these are very low-quality leads that aren’t fit for purpose. You only want to be attracting high-quality leads that have enough budget to pay for your services.
- Set Negative Keywords - You need to keep on top of your negative keywords list within Google ads in order to avoid irrelevant searches clicking on your ads.
- Mobile Optimization - Many contractors have basic websites, and sometimes they don’t function properly on mobile devices. If this is the case with your website, then you’re flushing money away by not having your website properly optimized for mobile.
- Set up Remarketing - You can quite cheaply leverage PPC retargeting in order to convert customers who have already visited your website or clicked your initial advert, but didn’t yet convert. This method is called PPC remarketing. Those customers will already be familiar with your brand, and significantly easier to convert by showing them other ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram as well.
Wrapping Up
The great thing about Google ads for contractors, is that most of your competition don’t have the technical expertise to get them up and running successfully.
This represents an incredible opportunity for ambitious contractors and construction companies to achieve huge growth from Google ads.
We strongly encourage you to be patient, because whilst you can get Google ads up and running fast, it will take time for them to become super profitable.
If you’d like some help getting your Google ads up and running, get in touch with us!