If you’re the owner of a local service business and you are either thinking about running Google Ads or you are currently running Google Ads for your business, today I’m going to go over five things that you want to keep in mind when you are running Google Ads.
These things will most likely save you time, save you money, save you headache, and could potentially bring you a lot more leads and a lot more jobs as a result.
I’ve done tons of audits for home service businesses over the years, and I see the same mistakes over and over again. The good news is that most of these mistakes are easy to fix once you know what to look for.
If you’d prefer to watch a video on all of this, you can check out the video above. Or, you can read on to see the five Google Ads tips that will help you get better results in 2026.
1) Run Search Campaigns (Not Performance Max)
The first thing we have to talk about is campaign type.
A lot of times when I’m doing audits, I see people running a bunch of different types of campaigns. But if you want to generate leads from Google Search for your home service business, search campaigns are the types of campaigns that you want to go with.
Why Search Campaigns Work Best
Search campaigns are where your ads show up directly on the Google Search results page when someone types in a search query related to your services.
This is the highest quality traffic you can get because people are actively searching for what you offer right now. They’re not browsing around, they’re not watching videos, they’re searching for a solution to a problem they have.
When someone searches for “plumber near me” or “HVAC repair [city name]”, they need help now. Your ad shows up, they click on it, they call you or fill out a form, and you’ve got a lead.
This intent-driven traffic is why search campaigns work so well for home service businesses.
Don’t Use Performance Max For Local Lead Generation
Google loves to push Performance Max campaigns, and you’ll probably see recommendations in your account telling you to switch to Performance Max or create a new Performance Max campaign.
Don’t do it.
As of right now, Performance Max just honestly doesn’t really generate super high quality leads for local service businesses. The traffic is all over the place, and you have very little control over where your ads show or who sees them.
Performance Max campaigns show your ads across Google’s entire network – YouTube, Display Network, Gmail, Google Maps, and more. While this sounds good in theory, in practice it means you’re getting a lot of low quality traffic that doesn’t convert into leads.
It’s best to just keep your ads in Google Search and get traffic from Google Search. That’s going to be the highest quality traffic, and it’s going to lead to the highest quality leads for your home service business.
Stick with search campaigns and ignore Google’s recommendations to switch to Performance Max.
2) Set Up Conversion Tracking
The next thing you need to have in place on your Google Ads campaign is conversion tracking.
I have done a lot of audits where I’ve looked at campaigns that have no conversion tracking set up, and this is really, really important for a couple of reasons.
Why Conversion Tracking Is Critical
Conversion tracking allows you to track the actions that matter to your business – phone calls and form submissions.
When you have conversion tracking set up properly, you can see what is working and what isn’t working on your campaign.
You’ll be able to see which keywords are generating phone calls, which ads are generating leads, and where your money is actually being spent effectively.
If you are not tracking conversions on your Google Ads campaign, you have no idea what’s working. You’re going to have no idea where to optimize your campaign, how to optimize your campaign, and how to get it performing better.
You’re essentially flying blind.
Google Learns From Your Conversion Data
On top of helping you understand your campaign performance, conversion tracking is also critical because Google nowadays learns based on the conversion data that you feed it.
If you’re not feeding conversion data into Google – meaning you’re not telling Google what is a good lead for you – Google’s not really going to know how to optimize on their end.
There’s so many AI algorithms and machine learning systems working behind the scenes in Home Service Google Ads. We need to tell Google what is actually important to the business.
If you’re not telling Google “hey, we want to get more phone calls and more form fills”, then Google’s not really going to know what to do.
Google can’t optimize for conversions if it doesn’t know what a conversion is.
What To Track
For most home service businesses, you want to track two main conversion actions:
Phone Calls – Track calls from your ads, calls from your landing pages, and calls from any call extensions you have running.
Form Submissions – Track when someone fills out a contact form on your landing page or website.
These are the two primary ways people become leads for home service businesses, so these are what you need to track.
Set It Up Before You Launch
You need to make sure that you have conversion tracking set up on your campaign. If you’re not, in a lot of ways your campaign is pretty much going to be flying blind and you’re going to have no idea if it’s actually making you money or if it’s lighting money on fire.
Get conversion tracking set up ASAP, and if you haven’t set up a campaign yet, do that before you even turn it on.
Don’t run a single dollar of ad spend without conversion tracking in place.
3) Turn Off Auto-Apply Recommendations
Another thing that I strongly recommend is turning off all of your auto-apply recommendations.
When you go into your Google Ads account, click on “Recommendations” in the left sidebar, and then click on “Auto-apply” at the top.
You’re going to see a list of different settings that allow Google to automatically make changes to your campaigns without your approval.
Why You Should Turn These Off
Make sure all of these are unselected. Make sure it says “zero out of eight” or “zero out of fourteen” or whatever the total number is.
The reason you want to turn these off is because a lot of these options will essentially allow Google to just randomly make changes to your campaigns.
Google might add new keywords, raise your bids, add new ad variations, or make other changes that increase your costs without improving your results.
When you let Google auto-apply recommendations, you lose control over your campaign, and you’ll often end up spending more money without getting better results.
Ignore Most Recommendations
On top of turning off auto-apply, you should also be very skeptical of the recommendations that Google shows you in your account.
If you get emails or notifications from Google, or you see recommendations showing up in the recommendations tab telling you to implement new campaign types, switch to broad match keywords, or make other changes to your campaigns – just don’t do it.
Google is going to tell you all the time that your campaign is not optimized. They’re going to show that your optimization score has dropped and all this kind of stuff.
All it is doing is really just Google trying to get you to implement different features and spend more money, or switch to things that will get them more clicks.
At the end of the day, more clicks just makes Google more money.
These types of things – some of them can be useful, but for the most part they honestly just sort of trick people that don’t really know specifically what they’re doing with Google Ads.
If you’re just auto-applying these things or implementing recommendations without understanding them, Google is just going to take the reins and not really deliver what you want out of your campaign, which is more leads.
Make sure all of these things are turned off, make sure you’re not applying random recommendations just because Google says so, and that is going to save you a ton of money and a ton of headaches over the long term.
4) Get The Right Traffic (Keywords, Match Types, and Negative Keywords)
The next tip is kind of broadly about getting the right traffic. This is actually a three-for-one tip because there are three components to getting the right traffic.
You need to get high-quality traffic into your campaign because upfront, if you’re not getting the right types of searches and the right people seeing your ads and clicking on your ads, you’re not going to get high quality leads. In some cases, you just might not get leads at all.
Use High Intent Keywords
First things first, you need to make sure you’re choosing high quality, high intent keywords.
You don’t want to be just bidding on something generic like “pools” or “HVAC” or “plumbing”. Your keywords need to be things that are high intent searches that actually indicate that somebody wants to make a buying decision.
High intent keywords for home service businesses include things like:
- “[your service] near me”
- “[your service] [city name]”
- “[your service] company”
- “emergency [your service]”
- “[your service] repair”
For example, if you’re a pool service company, you want to be bidding on keywords like:
- “pool service near me”
- “pool cleaning service near me”
- “pool service Gilbert”
- “pool service Scottsdale Arizona”
Obviously you need to tweak that for your particular business and location, but the keywords you select need to be high intent searches.
Avoid low intent keywords like:
- “pool service cost”
- “how to clean a pool”
- “pool cleaning tips”
- “pool service jobs”
These are people looking for information, trying to DIY, or looking for jobs. They’re not looking to hire you.
Use Exact Match and Phrase Match Keywords
On top of choosing high intent keywords, you need to make sure that you are using the right match types.
You want to make sure with your keywords that they’re set to either exact match or phrase match. You don’t want to see “broad match” on your keywords.
Exact match keywords (shown with [brackets] around them) are going to give you traffic that is as closely related to that keyword as possible.
Phrase match keywords (shown with “quotes” around them) are a little bit more loose, but they’re still going to be within the theme of what you’re targeting.
If you use broad match keywords, Google will show your ads for such a wide range of stuff that you probably don’t want to be showing up for.
For example, if you had “pool service near me” as a broad match keyword, your ads could show up for:
- Pool service products
- Pool service stores
- DIY pool service guides
- Pool service equipment for sale
- Pool service jobs
All of these clicks would waste your money because none of these people are looking to hire a pool service company.
If somebody clicks on your ad after searching one of those things, you’re still going to get charged, and that is not going to result in a lead. It might just result in an irrelevant phone call at best.
Stick with exact match and phrase match keywords only.
Build A Comprehensive Negative Keyword List
You want to make sure you have your keywords set up properly, you want to make sure you have your match types in place properly, and then on top of that you want to layer in negative keywords.
I’ve seen campaigns with over 3,000 negative keywords. You don’t always need to go that wild with it, but I would rather have as many negative keywords as possible.
Negative keywords tell Google what you don’t want your ads to show up for, and that is so important nowadays because keyword matching has become a lot more loose and a lot more broad in a lot of ways.
We need to layer in big negative keyword lists to tell Google what we do not want to show up for.
Some common negative keywords for home service businesses include:
- Different states (if you only service one state)
- Competitor names
- Words like “free”, “cheap”, “DIY”, “how to”
- “jobs”, “careers”, “hiring”
- “supplies”, “equipment”, “products”
- Retail store names like “Home Depot”, “Lowe’s”
Anything you don’t want to show up for, you need to build into your negative keyword list.
If you layer those three things together – high intent keywords, proper match types, and comprehensive negative keywords – it’s going to help you clean up your traffic and help you get higher quality traffic from Google.
At the front of a campaign is the traffic, and if you don’t have the right traffic coming in, you’re just not going to get leads. And if you are getting phone calls, they’re not going to be high quality leads.
5) Send Traffic To Landing Pages (Not Your Website)
The last thing you want to make sure you have in place is landing pages.
Now, you can technically send your traffic to your website, but I would strongly recommend going with landing pages instead.
Why Landing Pages Convert Better
Landing pages are one of the biggest ways that you can improve the cost per lead on your campaign, generate more leads, and improve the number of clicks that convert into leads.
Landing pages typically convert around 20% of clicks into leads. Websites usually convert around 10%.
That difference can make or break a campaign in terms of profitability.
Here’s how that looks in real numbers:
Sending Traffic To Your Website:
- 100 clicks at $10 per click = $1,000 spent
- 10% conversion rate = 10 leads
- Cost per lead = $100
Sending Traffic To Landing Pages:
- 100 clicks at $10 per click = $1,000 spent
- 20% conversion rate = 20 leads
- Cost per lead = $50
Just by using landing pages, you can cut your cost per lead in half and double your lead volume with the same budget.
What Makes A Good Landing Page
The biggest thing you want to make sure you have on your landing page is no navigation.
Your landing page needs to be very simple, very straight to the point. It should include:
- Clear headline about your service
- Reviews and testimonials
- Information about your services
- Information about your business
- Trust badges (BBB, licenses, insurance, etc.)
- Photos of your work or your team
But bigger than all of that, you want to make sure it works well on mobile devices.
Most of your traffic is going to come from mobile phones, so your landing page needs to be optimized for mobile.
You should have a click-to-call button stuck to the top of the page (or bottom) so that people can just tap the button and call whenever they need the service.
This is going to help you boost up your conversion rate and ultimately help you get more leads out of your campaign, which is obviously going to make it more profitable.
Implement These Five Tips Today
If you implement those five things on your Google Ads campaign for your home service business, you are definitely going to see more leads, lower cost per lead, and ultimately a more profitable campaign in the long run.
To recap:
- Run search campaigns – Don’t use Performance Max, stick with search campaigns for the highest quality traffic
- Set up conversion tracking – Track phone calls and form submissions so you know what’s working
- Turn off auto-apply recommendations – Don’t let Google make changes to your campaign without your approval
- Get the right traffic – Use high intent keywords, proper match types, and comprehensive negative keywords
- Send traffic to landing pages – Convert more clicks into leads with dedicated landing pages instead of your website
These aren’t complicated strategies that require advanced marketing knowledge. These are fundamental best practices that every home service business should be following with their Google Ads campaigns.
The difference between a profitable campaign and one that wastes money often comes down to getting these basics right.
Need Help With Your Google Ads Campaign?
If you are the owner of a home service business and you want somebody to actually build these campaigns, manage them, optimize them, and handle them so you don’t even have to worry about it, I can help.
Click the button below to apply for a free consultation. Fill out the form and it’ll get sent over to me. I can see if I can help you out.
Thanks for reading!
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