Search ads work when someone has already decided
The difference between Google Ads and most other advertising is the timing. Nobody searches “emergency pest control Round Rock” for entertainment. They search it because something happened and they want it dealt with today.
That is the whole appeal — and it is also why search advertising punishes sloppy setup. You are bidding against other businesses for the same handful of high-intent searches, and the auction does not care whether your account is organised. If your campaign is pointed at the wrong keywords, the wrong radius or a page that does not load, you will still spend the money. You just will not get the work.
What usually goes wrong
Most of the underperforming accounts we are asked to look at have the same handful of problems.
Everything is in one campaign. Kitchen remodels, drywall repair and flooring all share a budget and a set of ads, so the cheapest-to-click service quietly consumes the budget while the profitable one gets nothing.
No negative keywords. The account is paying for “how to pressure wash a driveway”, “pest control salary”, and every variation of someone looking for a job rather than a service. On a tight local budget this is where a surprising share of the money goes.
Conversions are not tracked, or they are tracked wrong. A lot of accounts count a click on the phone number as a conversion, which is not the same as a call that was answered and booked. Some count page views. If what you are optimising towards is not a real business outcome, Google will cheerfully get you more of the wrong thing.
The radius is set to the whole metro. Austin, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, Kyle and Jarrell are not one market. Driving from one end to the other is an hour in traffic. Paying for clicks across all of it, when you will only take jobs in part of it, is a straightforward waste.
How we set it up
We start from the work rather than the keywords. Which service lines are actually profitable, which ones you want more of, what a job is worth, and how far you will genuinely drive for it. That shapes the account structure before a single keyword goes in.
From there, campaigns are separated by service line so each one has its own budget and its own ads, and you can see which service is producing. Keywords are grouped by intent — someone searching “pressure washing company near me” is in a different frame of mind to someone searching “pressure washing prices”, and they should not see the same ad.
Negative keyword lists go in before launch, not as a cleanup job three months later. Location targeting is set to where you work, with the “presence” setting rather than “presence or interest”, so you are reaching people in the area rather than people reading about it.
Then conversion tracking. Calls that last long enough to be real conversations, form submissions, and booking actions — each one defined as a conversion before the campaign goes live, so the first month of data is usable instead of needing to be thrown away.
Where it connects to the rest
Search ads are the sharpest tool for immediate demand, but they are the most expensive way to get a customer if the rest of the path is broken. A good campaign pointed at a slow page with no clear next step will produce clicks and very little else.
For the home-service trades there is also the question of Local Services Ads versus standard search — a different auction, charged per lead, sitting above the ads everyone else is bidding in. Which one deserves the budget depends on the trade and the job value, not on which one Google pushes hardest.
So the page the click lands on matters, the speed with which you follow up matters, and whether the lead is captured anywhere you will see it matters. That is why Google Ads usually runs alongside local SEO for the searches you should not have to pay for, a conversion-focused page for the click to land on, and follow-up automation so an inquiry at 7pm is not sitting unread until Monday.
What you get each month
A report that tells you what you spent, what came back, which services produced, and what we changed and why. Not a dashboard screenshot with impression counts on it. If a campaign is not working, the report says so, and says what we are doing about it.
You keep access to the account throughout. If the arrangement ends, the account, the conversion history and the audiences stay with you.