Google Ads for commercial-contractors: the build order

For commercial-contractors the conversion that matters is an awarded project or signed construction contract, with its contract value, and it lives in your preconstruction CRM (Followup CRM, HubSpot, ConstructionOnline) and the contract set up in Procore — not in the ad platform. Google can only optimize toward what you send it, so whatever you pick here decides what the algorithm spends the next ninety days chasing. Pick the wrong one and every later step in this playbook is executed perfectly in the wrong direction.

This is the step we get called about most. If you do not have a developer for it, that is the normal situation rather than the exception — it is most of what we do, and it is worth fixing before the spend rather than after.

Google enables these on every new Search campaign, and none of them are keyword decisions — they are switches on the settings screen that decide where the money goes before a single keyword applies. Everything else in this playbook operates on whatever is left after they have taken their cut, so a reader who skips this step spends the rest of it optimizing a remainder.

For Commercial Construction · Target the counties you can staff and are licensed in, with presence-only location settings and a separate campaign per state if you work across state lines. Keep metal buildings in their own campaign with a wider area.

Commercial projects justify far more distance than residential work, but each one needs a superintendent on site for weeks, permits in that jurisdiction and a license valid in that state. Draw the area from where you can staff and supervise a job, where you hold the right license, and where you have built before, then let project size set the edge: a small retail refresh deserves a tighter area than a pre-engineered metal building.

A commercial builder gets far fewer calls than a residential trade, and each real one can be a project that runs for months. Calls are also where noise enters most easily: subcontractors, suppliers, staffing agencies and job seekers call the number on a contractor's ad as readily as a tenant does. Count a call only when it is a project enquiry, and let site walks and awarded projects from the CRM teach the bidding.

One flat keyword list is why most accounts in this vertical cannot tell which half of the budget works. Sorting terms by the intent behind them means you can bid, write and judge each group on its own terms — a problem-aware search and a competitor search convert at rates that have nothing to do with each other, and averaging them hides both.

Exact match includes close variants — misspellings, plurals, reordered words, dropped function words. Phrase match now behaves roughly like the old broad-match-modified. Broad match reaches as far as Google judges useful, which with a good conversion signal is genuinely valuable and without one is an open tap. Start narrow, prove the signal, then widen — in that order, because widening is reversible and a mistrained bidding algorithm is not.

For Commercial Construction · Broad match on 'contractor' and 'construction' drifts into jobs, licensing, residential remodeling and bid boards. Stay on exact and phrase until site walks are importing and the search terms report is clean.

Every vertical has a set of searches that look commercial and are not. In commercial-contractors those are job seekers, students, people looking for free help, and DIY researchers. Broad and phrase match will find all of them for you. Add this list at the account level on day zero — the first week of an unfiltered account is the most expensive week it will ever have.

Ad groups exist so the ad can match the search. The moment a group holds two intents, the ad has to be vague enough to cover both, and vague ads lose the auction on relevance before budget ever enters the picture. Build these groups, each with its own ads and its own landing page.

Google rewards assets that match the search and the page behind it. It penalizes — and increasingly disapproves — copy that promises something the page does not deliver. Every line below is written to be provable on arrival. Character counts are shown because assets over the limit are rejected at upload, which is where most copied-from-a-blog ad copy dies.

General contractor is a Local Services Ads category, but it is shared with residential remodelers, so expect many callers who want work on a house. For a commercial-only builder that makes LSA a narrow tool. Search lets you bid on tenant improvement, restaurant build-out and metal building searches and send each one to a page of that project type. If you test LSA, switch off the job types you would never take, answer on weekdays, and judge it on site walks and awarded projects, the same as Search.

Commercial build-out demand follows leases and budgets more than the weather. A tenant searches for a contractor once a lease is signed, often with an opening date already set, and owners with capital budgets plan projects around their fiscal year. Ground-up and metal building work in colder states still feels the weather, because site work and steel erection depend on it.

Position is not bought, it is earned and then paid for. Google ranks you on your bid multiplied by how good it expects your ad and landing page to be, plus your assets — so a relevant advertiser at half the bid outranks a vague one, and then pays less per click at the same position. This is the mechanism underneath everything above: tight ad groups and honest ad copy are not tidiness, they are the discount.

For Commercial Construction · Residential remodelers, lead sellers and franchise construction firms crowd the broad terms. Specific project-type keywords and a portfolio page of that type are where a commercial builder wins on relevance.

Start with tight exact and phrase keywords and Maximize Conversions on a qualified enquiry: one the business development lead marks as a real project with a location, a use and a timeline. Awarded projects are too few, and land too late, to bid on alone. Import a mid-stage step such as site walk held or proposal requested, with an expected value by project type, inside the 90-day click window, and send the awarded contract with its value whenever it lands in time. Keep the click ID and the contact's email on the CRM opportunity, so a project that awards after the window can still be reported against its campaign in your own numbers. Smart bidding is a data problem before it is a strategy problem: with thin or wrong conversion data it will confidently optimize toward noise, and it does that faster than a manual account can lose money.

For Commercial Construction · Bid on qualified enquiries first, then on site walks imported from Followup CRM or HubSpot with an expected value, and report awarded contracts against the campaign even when they land outside the import window.

Most accounts are killed or rescued on evidence that could not have meant anything yet. The bidding algorithm is fitting a model, and a model fitted on two weeks of data is fitted on noise. This is the shortest honest schedule: what to look at each stretch, and — more usefully — what to ignore.

For Commercial Construction · Expect no awarded projects in the first quarter even when the campaigns are right. Judge the first month on enquiry quality and the quarter on site walks and proposals.

An account left alone drifts toward the cheapest clicks it can find, because that is what the system is built to do when nobody corrects it. This is the shortest routine that keeps it honest. It takes about an hour and it is the difference between an account that compounds and one that plateaus at month three.

For Commercial Construction · Read every enquiry with the person who returned it: real project, sub, vendor, job seeker or residential. The share of real projects by campaign tells you more than cost per lead.