HOME SERVICES

Paid media for home-services businesses.

Home services is the vertical where paid media behaves least like the textbook. Demand arrives in spikes you did not schedule, the conversion is a phone call rather than a form, and the difference between a good month and a bad one is often whether anyone answered.

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HOW BUYERS BEHAVE

What search looks like in this vertical.

Intent is usually urgent and local: a failed system, a leak, or storm damage. The searcher will call two or three businesses and book whoever answers first, which makes ad position and call handling matter more than persuasion. Demand is also seasonal and weather-driven, so a bid strategy tuned on last month’s data is frequently tuned on the wrong month.

CAMPAIGN STRUCTURE

How we build the account.

Emergency vs planned separation: Emergency intent and planned-replacement intent want different bids, different ad copy and different hours. Merging them hides both.
Service-line campaigns: Structured around the jobs worth the most money, not around the alphabet of services on the website.
Radius and drive-time control: Targeting built on how far a truck will actually go, including suburbs where the competitive picture is different from the city centre.
Dayparting against capacity: Spend paced to when calls get answered. Paying for after-hours clicks that reach voicemail is the most common avoidable waste in this vertical.
Local Services Ads alongside Search: LSAs and Search compete for the same budget. The split depends on service area, licensing and booking capacity, and it is a decision rather than a default.

WASTE PATTERNS

Where the money goes in accounts we audit.

Generic repair terms with no service or brand qualifier, collecting DIY traffic that never converts.
Job-seeker and training queries absorbing budget on broad match.
Parts, manual and price-only searches that want information rather than a technician.
After-hours spend on campaigns whose landing page only offers a form.
Every call counted as a conversion, including thirty-second wrong numbers, which teaches bidding to buy more of them.

WHAT WE REPORT

The numbers that decide whether this worked.

Cost per booked job: Ad spend divided by jobs actually scheduled in the CRM, for a stated platform and date range.
Call answer rate: Share of tracked calls answered by a person, measured because it caps everything downstream.
Qualified call rate: Share of tracked calls over the qualifying duration that were in-area and in-service.
Cost per qualified lead by service line: Reported per service line, because a roof replacement and a filter change cannot share a target.

WHAT WE HEAR

The objections, answered.

“We already get plenty of calls.”

The question is what they cost and how many turn into booked jobs. Most accounts we audit cannot answer the second part, which means the platform cannot either.

“Our busy season pays for the slow season, so we leave budget flat.”

Flat budget through a demand spike means capping revenue at the moment it is cheapest to earn. Budgets should move with the demand curve, and that requires watching it.

FAQ

Questions from home services businesses.

Should we run Local Services Ads or Google Ads?

Usually both, in a deliberate split. LSAs sit above search results and charge per lead, which suits high-volume common jobs. Search gives control over which service lines you buy and lets you compete on higher-value work. The right balance depends on your service area and how much booking capacity you have.

How do you handle storm-season spikes?

By treating them as a bidding and budget problem rather than a surprise. Demand rises faster than the platform’s learning, so budget caps and conservative bid strategies quietly throttle exactly the week you wanted to win.

We do not have a CRM. Can you still track booked jobs?

Partly. Call tracking gets us to qualified calls. Getting to booked jobs and revenue needs somewhere those outcomes are recorded - which is the point at which reporting stops being about leads.

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