Google Ads for solar installers: the build order

For solar installers the conversion that matters is a signed solar contract that reaches installation, with its contract value, and it lives in your solar sales platform or CRM (Enerflo, JobNimbus, OpenSolar) — 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 Solar installers · Target ZIP codes or counties by utility territory where your proposals work, with presence-only location options, and keep battery, solar and removal work in separate campaigns with their own budgets.

For a solar installer the utility matters as much as the distance. Rates, net metering or export credit rules, and the interconnection process differ from one utility to the next, so the same house can be a strong sale in one ZIP code and a weak one across the line. Installs take a crew a short stretch of days rather than months of visits, which means a longer drive is affordable where the utility economics are good. Draw the area by utility territory and permit jurisdiction first, and by drive time second.

Most residential solar leads arrive as forms, calculators and bill uploads, so calls are a smaller share than in service trades, but they are often the best leads: a homeowner who picks up the phone has usually decided to get a quote. The number on the site also rings for existing customers waiting on permits or utility approval, for sales recruits answering job ads and for lead sellers. Count only the calls that start a new sale, and import the outcome from the sales platform.

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 Solar installers · Broad match on 'solar' drifts into generators, outdoor lights, community solar, sales jobs and astronomy. Keep install and battery terms on exact and phrase until installed contracts are importing.

Every vertical has a set of searches that look commercial and are not. In solar installers 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 put solar installers in a block above the text ads under the Solar energy contractor category and charge per lead, so they catch the homeowner who has finished reading and wants to talk to an installer now. Search ads reach the earlier, larger group: people comparing solar with a battery, asking whether it pays in their state, or wanting a calculator before anyone calls them. The overlap to watch is your own name. Canvassing, yard signs and quote sites push homeowners to search for you, and when they call through the LSA listing you pay a lead fee for a sale something else already started.

Solar demand follows the electric bill more than the weather. Interest rises when summer cooling bills arrive in hot regions and winter bills in homes that heat with electricity, and it jumps when a utility announces a rate increase or a change to how it credits exported power. Changes to incentives move demand too: the federal tax credit for homeowner-owned systems ended for systems placed in service after 2025, so lease and power purchase offers and battery backup now carry more of many installers' search demand. Installation runs most of the year in most of the country, slowing in snow regions.

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 Solar installers · National installers, lead sellers and 'free solar' advertisers set the price on core terms. Win on a relevant page and a fast callback, and keep claims about savings and incentives to what you can show applies in [STATE].

Start on Maximize Conversions with appointments sat, not appointments set or forms, as the primary conversion, because a homeowner who sat through a consultation has confirmed they own the house and looked at their bill. Import signed contracts with system value from Enerflo, JobNimbus or OpenSolar, and retract or restate them when a deal cancels at financing, design or permitting, so bidding is not rewarded for signatures that never become installs. Move to value-based bidding once enough signed contracts import inside the click window, and keep battery-only and solar campaigns apart, since their values differ. 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 Solar installers · Bid on appointments sat until signed contracts import from Enerflo, JobNimbus or OpenSolar with system value, retract contracts that cancel before install, then move to value-based bidding.

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 Solar installers · Listen to calls and read disqualification reasons for every no-sit in the first month. If renters and small bills dominate, fix the form questions and negatives before judging keywords.

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 Solar installers · Compare appointments set, sat and signed by campaign in the sales platform. A campaign with many sets and few sits is buying form fillers, not homeowners.