Google Ads for general contractors: the build order

For general contractors the conversion that matters is a signed construction contract, or an accepted proposal, with its contract value, and it lives in your construction CRM and project system (Buildertrend, JobTread, Houzz Pro) — 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 General contractors · Target the ZIP codes where you have signed contracts, with presence-only location options, and give additions and whole-home work their own campaign so their slower, larger sales are not judged next to bathroom volume.

A remodel is not a one-day visit. A project manager or superintendent drives to the house over and over for the length of the build, and every inspection, delivery and punch-list visit runs the same road. Distance therefore costs a general contractor more per project than it costs a roofer or a solar crew, even though the contract is bigger. Draw the area around where your supervisors can reach a job site easily, and around building departments whose permitting you already know.

General contractors get fewer calls than service trades and more of them are not homeowners. Superintendents, subcontractors, suppliers, inspectors and current clients all dial the number on the website, and none of them is a new project. A call conversion that counts all of them tells Smart Bidding your best keyword is whatever a drywall sub searched to find you. Count the calls that open a project conversation, and let the signed contract do the real teaching.

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 General contractors · Broad match on 'contractor' drifts into contractor jobs, licensing exams, insurance and bid lists. Keep addition and renovation terms on exact and phrase until accepted proposals are importing.

Every vertical has a set of searches that look commercial and are not. In general 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.

Local Services Ads show general contractors in their own block above the text ads and charge per lead, so they tend to take the homeowner who has made up their mind and wants a contractor on the phone now. Search ads reach everyone else: the homeowner comparing additions with moving, the buyer of an older house planning a renovation, the person who wants to see a portfolio before calling. The leak is your own name. Neighbors who saw your yard sign or your Houzz profile search your company and call through the LSA listing, and you pay a lead fee for a client who was already coming to you.

Remodel demand runs ahead of the building season. Homeowners plan in winter, after the holidays, for projects they want started in spring and summer, and design and permitting take long enough that a January lead is a summer build. Interior kitchens and baths sell year-round, with a late-summer wave of homeowners who want a finished kitchen before the holidays. Additions and exterior work depend on the weather in your region.

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 General contractors · Design-build firms, remodeling franchises and lead sellers bid on the same terms, and LSA sits above all of you. Win on relevance: a page with finished projects of the type searched, and a fast reply to every form.

Start on Maximize Conversions with site walks held as the primary conversion, not form fills, because a site walk means a homeowner gave up an evening and showed you the house. Import accepted proposals and signed contracts with their value from Buildertrend, JobTread or Houzz Pro as soon as they can be sent, and move the remodel and addition campaigns to value-based bidding once enough contracts have imported. If you sell a paid design agreement before the build contract, import it as its own stage: it arrives sooner than the contract and predicts it far better than a site walk. 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 General contractors · Bid on site walks held, not form fills, until accepted proposals import from Buildertrend, JobTread or Houzz Pro with value. Then move addition and renovation campaigns to value-based bidding and judge them over a full sales cycle.

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 General contractors · Read every form submission by hand in the first month. If many are subs, vendors or job seekers, fix the form and the negatives before judging any keyword.

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 General contractors · Compare site walks booked with site walks held and proposals sent, by campaign. A campaign that books walks that never become proposals is buying planners and bid collectors.