This is the eighth in a series of articles I’m writing about Google Ads strategies for specific industries. This post will be about Google Ads for home services businesses.
Before jumping in I want to be clear about the scope and constraints of this series.
Scope & Constraints
The strategies and tactics outlined are broadly applicable to most advertisers that offer home services. However, every business is unique, and hence every Google Ads implementation needs to be as well. This article, alone, shouldn’t be the basis for building and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns. You should always work with an experienced Google Ads expert or take comprehensive training before making this type of investment.
Industry Description
Home services are a gargantuan market with an estimated $842 billion/year in the US alone.
For the purposes of this article I’m including a wide range of services such as renovations and remodelling, cleaning & maintenance, HVAC, plumbing, painting, lawn care & gardening, fencing and gates, home security, pools & spas, and so on. Most of these services can be treated similarly in Google Ads, noting a difference between one off services and recurring services.
For the most part, I’ll be discussing lead generation and branding. While some home services may be purchased directly online, it’s not the norm for acquiring new customers.
Google Ads Eccentricities
In this section, I’ll cover some specific things you need to be aware of when running Google Ads for home services.
Low Lead Quality & Click Fraud
More so than most other industries, home services tends to experience a lot more PPC click fraud or just low lead quality. There are a number of tactics to combat click fraud but one of the most beneficial things you can do to address both issues is to only track marketing qualified leads. In other words, don’t track every call or form submission as a conversions, qualify them first, then upload/sync them back to Google Ads.
This will help inform Google Ads what good quality clicks and leads look like… with this in place performance tends to improve pretty dramatically if you’ve experienced many “throwaway” leads.
Even if you don’t go the full lead qualification route, consider some basic things like not tracking clicks to call/email or short phone calls as conversions.
Local Service Ads
For any home services advertiser, Local Service Ads (LSAs) can make sense instead of or coupled with Google Ads. Unlike Google Ads LSAs are largely set it and forget it. Once you jump through some hoops to register and verify your business Google runs the show for you. The ads also run in search results but are call only. Our clients say the lead quality tends not to be quite on par with what we generate for them, and cost per leads is higher, but it represents another “channel” and they welcome the additional business.
Another, more global issue with LSAs, is that because they appear at the top of search results, they drive up the cost for Google Ads.
Search Campaigns
The bread and butter for any home services business, you should spend a large portion of your ad budget on search campaigns.
How many campaigns, how they are organized, and how much you spend will depend on many factors. Typically you would separate campaigns into 3 main types:
- Service type
- Branded (advertising your business by name)
- Competitor (conquesting searches for competing businesses)
With a large budget you might also split these up into different geographic regions, particularly if you have multiple locations and need to control lead flow to each.
For a small regional provider, say covering a city or part of a city, I recommend one campaign for each of your major services plus one branded campaign. Competitor conquesting is an advanced strategy with customer acquisition costs substantially higher than service-based or branded campaigns. Thus I don’t recommend introducing these until you start to see diminishing gains as you scale your other campaigns.
For service type campaigns you should sub-divide the campaign into ad groups by broad keyword themes. But don’t go nuts… these days with Responsive Search Ads you don’t need to be extremely precise.
You should always point your ads towards the most specific landing page possible. For some advertisers this may end up being your homepage. But for many, it’ll be a purpose-built page specifically for the service being advertised.
Most home services advertisers have 2 primary ways (calls to action) to generate new leads.
First, you can generate inbound calls either directly from ads or from the phone number on your website / landing pages. Second, you can present a general inquiry form such as “get a free assessment” or similar.
Some advertisers will allow prospects to book meetings through Calendly or a similar widget. While not common the benefit is that prospective clients that set an appointment are typically way more qualified leads because they are willing to immediately book a service or quote. On the other hand those completing an interest form are less likely to actually book a follow up appointment. By the same token, initial conversion rates tend to be much lower for appointment booking options.
One other option is to offer “sign-up” or purchase services directly online. This is mostly used by service providers with well defined recurring services such as home cleaning, lawn care, house sitting, or similar.
Further to the “Low Lead Quality & Click Fraud” section above, it can be a good idea to track both unqualified and qualified leads. You can set default or estimate the values using different techniques. By including both lead types with different values you can then use value-based bidding to drive better overall performance. This article explains a few different ways this can work.
As with any search campaign, ensure you fully utilize your RSA ad copy slots and add all applicable assets (formerly called ad extensions). People buying home services are often “local” minded. Thus it’s a good idea to consider using Google’s location insertion feature to automatically display the users’ city in your ads. This simplifies campaign design such that you don’t need to run tons of different ad groups for each relevant city.
In terms of keywords, start with exact match and ensure you use qualifiers to avoid running to adjacent markets or the wrong audience. Another big problem is showing your ads for unwanted job searchers. Starting with a basic negative keyword strategy blocking “job” “career” “opportunity” and similar can help avoid that from the get go.
Remarketing Campaigns
Once you’ve got your search campaign(s) dialed in you should build out remarketing. While display can still work okay we generally go with Google’s newer Demand Gen campaign type. This runs on Google’s own higher quality inventory (newsfeed, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube) rather than on 3rd party sites “GDN” (Google Display Network). As such the CPC is much higher on average but the click quality is substantially better, the network is mostly free of click fraud, and conversion tracking is much more robust. In addition, it’s always possible to turn on the GDN if you would like to expand to include 3rd party inventory.
In general, for home services you should run to all previous website visitors that didn’t convert. Testing different membership lengths from 10-days up to 180-days is a good place to start. If you have a fairly high volume of visitors you might also segment based on what service pages were visited.
You don’t need to get fancy here, just repeat your offer and try to bring them back with responsive display and/or video ads. Start running with Max conversions and consider setting a tCPA once you’re getting a good volume of conversions from the campaign, at least 10+ per month.
Also, don’t forget to exclude everybody that has already contacted you, (a) to eliminate unnecessary spend and (b) to avoid annoying prospects that have already probably booked or had a call with you.
Normally, budgets for remarketing are small compared to search, particularly when you pay a high average CPC. I would start at no more than 5% of your account budget but at least $10/day. Ramp up when you’re easily spending your budget and getting a reasonable CPA.
Lastly, if you offer emergency services such as to stop flooding water or to restore electricity you shouldn’t run remarketing there. People in this situation will hire somebody within 24-hours so there’s not point in wasting ad dollars on them.
P-Max Campaigns
For most advertisers, P-Max makes sense once you’re spending around $10K+ per month. As with any Google Ads account, you need to place enough budget on P-Max to generate at least 30 conversions a month. Any fewer than that and you run a high risk of poor targeting and low performance.
P-Max can help you reach untapped search inventory and work the upper part of the marketing funnel. This campaign type often drives incremental conversions at a similar CPA to search while also driving more performance through your existing search campaigns, particularly through branded.
On the downside, many advertisers find that the lead quality from P-Max isn’t quite up to par with those from search. For this reason it’s a good idea to track campaign source through your lead forms and calls and then analyze performance.
Here are some general guidelines for P-Max.
Always turn off URL expansion. This will ensure that Google only uses your ad copy and only advertises landing pages you explicitly include in the campaign.
In terms of audience “signal” targeting, you should include any relevant in-market audiences, remarketing lists, and your uploaded customer list. You might consider adjusting demographics, if for example, you offer pool maintenance services, you probably would do well to exclude income levels in the bottom 50%. Keep in mind that audience signals do not necessarily/rigorously follow the settings you choose. But P-Max now does have campaign level hard exclusions for age and gender.
Lastly, always include your top 50 performing keywords. This will dramatically improve performance and help dial in specific services with specific asset groups if your your service range is broad.
One last thing is whether or not to block your brand from running in P-Max search results. If you do have a dedicated brand search campaign or you don’t want to run ads for your brand at all you should generally block branded on P-Max. This can be accomplished by excluding your brand list (if you’ve created one) or by adding one more more negative keywords for your brand. That said, if you’re struggling to generate enough conversion volume on P-Max it can be worth letting it spend on branded to boost your numbers… it’ll help overall campaign performance.
Other Campaign Types
If you’re spending big, $25K+/month, you might want to rethink your overall account strategy. Serious advertisers may find more efficiency at this level by running search with AI-Max or DSA (dynamic search ads) and Demand Gen for upper funnel advertising, i.e. nix P-Max. This allows for much greater control over spending and targeting per channel. I wrote a separate article about this recently. There are absolutely benefits and drawbacks to this approach. While it may sound weird, many advertisers still can’t get their head around spending on brand awareness campaigns and seeing zero conversions… it’s a psychological barrier that’s tough to break.
Campaign Optimization Notes
Most Google Ads best practices (not necessarily the ones Google tells you) apply to home services campaigns. With the recent upgrades to provide full KPIs per creative asset you can now optimize creatives much faster/better than before.
Search terms review is absolutely crucial when starting new campaigns. It’s very easy to go off the rails showing your ads to job seekers, for example.
Add negatives as needed, pause low-relevance keywords, and add more qualifier keyword variations as needed.
As conversions ramp up past around 50/month you should start to migrate to broad match keywords. Just keep a close eye on search terms as you proceed. Importantly, broad match keywords use additional signals for optimizing bids and can run on AI Overviews and AI Mode auctions increasing your reach. Most advertisers find that once conversions get dialed in the irrelevant queries disappear just like magic.
Tools and other Tips
If you’re running any kind of lead generation I strongly recommend using CallRail or another 3rd party call tracking tool to capture those conversions in Google Ads and Analytics. Even if you only track another 25% of conversions, that can help tremendously with campaign optimization.
A tool like CallRail can also pull in form submission keywords and GCLIDS, allowing you to upload offline conversions such as deals that close up to 90 days after initial contact. Feeding these sales conversions and values back into Google Ads can have a significant effect on both lead quality and campaign performance over time.
Implementing landing page split tests can boost post-click conversion performance over time. This means you can increase the number of leads generated without spending more on direct ad costs. There are many options for this including:
- using two pages on your own site with a Google ad variation test
- using a service such as Optimizely to create and test variations of an existing website page
- using a full blown landing page management service such as Unbounce or Instapage
Summary
Home services companies have a few unique challenges with Google Ads, mainly revolving around a high incidence of click fraud and extra competition from Local Service Ads.
Outside of that, Google Ads should be run like most other service businesses.
It’s generally best to start with search campaigns and then add on remarketing and P-Max as you scale up. As you grow further you might want to consider migrating from P-Max to Demand Gen for greater control over targeting and what channels you spend your budget on.
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