Why your Google Ads spend disappears (contractor edition)
Contractor ad budgets usually leak in two places: clicks from searches that were never going to be jobs, and real leads that nobody answered. Both are fixable inside an afternoon, and neither one is solved by raising the daily budget, which is the first thing most agencies suggest.
The clicks that were never jobs
Open your account and pull the search terms report. Not the keyword list you wrote, the report showing what people actually typed before they clicked. That is where the money shows itself. A painting company that thought it was buying "interior painting" ends up paying for painting jobs hiring, painting classes near me, how to paint kitchen cabinets, and the name of a competitor two counties away. Every one of those was a click you paid for and a person who was never going to hire you.
The cause is usually match type. Broad match lets Google decide what counts as close enough to your keyword, and Google is paid when you get clicks. Tighter match types plus a real negative keyword list is the whole fix. Add negatives for jobs, hiring, salary, careers, DIY, how to, cheap, free, school, and the trades adjacent to yours that you do not perform.
Geography leaks the same way. Location settings default to including people who show interest in your area, not just people in it. For a contractor who drives to the work, that setting is pure spend. Set targeting to presence only, then check the location report and cut the zip codes you would never dispatch a crew to.
The leads you already paid for and then lost
The second leak is bigger and quieter. You paid to make the phone ring, and then the phone rang at 4:40 on a Thursday while everybody was loading the truck. The click cost the same whether or not anyone answered. A lead you paid for and ignored is more expensive than a click you never bought.
Ads run all day and most contractors do not. If your ads serve at eight at night, something has to catch that call, or the schedule should reflect the hours you can actually respond. We wrote about the size of that window in the after-hours call is the one that pays. Whichever way you go, decide it on purpose instead of letting it happen.
Google is optimizing toward whatever you measure
Most contractor accounts count a click, or at best a form submission, as the goal. Google then dutifully buys more of whatever produces clicks and form fills, including the tire kickers. If you feed the account better signal, it buys better traffic.
That means conversion tracking on calls of a meaningful length, not every call. It means marking booked estimates and won jobs as the real conversion when your CRM can send that back. It also means separating campaigns by service, because a two hundred dollar service call and a full repaint should not share a budget and a bid strategy.
What to check this week
- Search terms report for the last 90 days, sorted by cost. Add negatives for anything that was never a job.
- Location targeting set to presence only, and the location report scanned for out of area spend.
- Ad schedule compared against the hours somebody actually answers.
- Call conversion set to a minimum call length, so an accidental hang up is not counted as a lead.
- Landing page match. An ad for cabinet refinishing should land on a cabinet refinishing page, not the homepage.
- Local Services Ads eligibility. The pay per lead format sits above search ads and charges by lead, and it is worth checking whether your trade and state qualify.
What we do in our own companies
We run painting and flooring companies in Bellingham, so we spend our own money on this. The rule we work by is that we do not turn ads on for a service until the response side is ready to catch them. That means the phone gets covered, web forms trigger an instant reply, and quotes have a follow up sequence behind them, which we laid out in the five touch follow up post. Ads into a leaky pipeline just make the leak more expensive.
The honest part: paid search is the fastest lever we have, and also the easiest to waste. We treat it as the thing you turn on after the free channels are working, not instead of them. The system we run is built so an ad click, a map pack call, and a referral all land in the same place and get the same response.
Where is your ad money actually going?
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