PPC for Contractors

Agencies with a verified published price

How to compare PPC agencies for contracting businesses

1. Fix tracking before you fix bidding. Calls, form fills and booked jobs must be counted once each and attributed to the campaign that produced them. Ask how call tracking is implemented, how duplicate leads are handled, and whether job value is fed back. Without this, every later optimisation is guesswork dressed up as a report.
2. Draw the service area you actually serve. Bidding on a whole metro spends a large share of budget on people you would decline or drive an hour to reach. Ask a candidate to show you the geographic targeting it would set, down to the towns and postcodes, and how it would adjust bids where jobs are most profitable.
3. Demand a search terms review every month. The report of what people actually typed is where waste hides: job-seeker queries, do-it-yourself searches, competitor names and adjacent trades you do not offer. Ask to see a redacted example of a monthly negative keyword list from another account, and make that review a standing agenda item.
4. Test the intake path yourself before launch. Call your own number after hours, submit your own form, and time the callback. Contractors who believe their advertising failed are usually losing calls rather than missing them, and no agency can fix a phone that rings out. Agree a target answer rate and review call recordings monthly.

What contractors actually pay

Management is charged in one of three ways: a flat monthly retainer, a share of media spend, or a hybrid with a floor. Small single-truck operations commonly pay a fee in the high hundreds per month; established multi-crew businesses running several trades or locations pay into the low thousands. Media spend is always separate, and in competitive trades a serious account needs enough monthly budget to gather data rather than a token amount spread thinly across every service you offer.

Percentage-of-spend pricing deserves a hard look in this trade, because it pays the agency more for spending more while your constraint is usually crew capacity rather than demand. If you use it, put a target cost per booked job in the contract alongside the percentage. Whatever the shape, ask whether landing pages, ad creative and call tracking software sit inside the fee or are billed on top, since those three line items are where a cheap-looking quote becomes an average one.

What moves cost per booked job

Four levers do most of the work. Geography, as above. Query quality, which is the search terms review done properly. Ad and landing page relevance, which affects what you pay per click as well as whether the click converts: Google's documentation on Quality Score describes expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience as its components, so a page that matches the ad is a cost lever and not just a conversion lever. And scheduling, because paying full price for clicks at times nobody answers the phone is the purest waste available.

Seasonality sits underneath all four. Most trades swing hard with weather, and a fixed monthly budget wastes money in slow weeks and runs out exactly when the phone would have rung. Ask a candidate how it handles a heat wave or a freeze, and whether budgets move within the month. A team that has run home services accounts answers with a specific mechanism. A team that has not will say the campaigns are always on.

Advertising claims and reviews

Contractor advertising carries claims about licensing, guarantees, financing and pricing, and the Federal Trade Commission's guidance on online advertising and marketing applies to all of them. The practical rule is that qualifications belong next to the claim rather than behind a link: if a price is a starting price, or a guarantee has conditions, the ad and the landing page have to say so where the reader sees the offer. Ask who reviews creative before it runs.

Reviews are the other exposure. The Federal Trade Commission's guide on soliciting and paying for online reviews is direct about incentivised reviews that are not disclosed and about suppressing negative feedback. Plenty of agencies in this space offer review generation as a bolt-on, and the good ones will tell you exactly what they will not do. Ask that question early, because a reputation problem created by a vendor is still your reputation problem.

Questions people actually ask

How much should a contractor spend on paid search?

Start from capacity rather than from a benchmark: how many extra jobs a week can your crews take, what is the average job value, and what closing rate do you achieve on inbound calls. That gives you a defensible cost per booked job, and the budget follows. Spending a token amount across every service you offer produces data too thin to optimise and is the most common early mistake.

Should I run paid search all year?

Most trades benefit from running continuously at a base level and increasing sharply in season, because pausing loses the account's learning and the historical data that informs bidding. What should change through the year is budget, geography and which services are promoted. Agree the seasonal plan in writing rather than discovering it in a busy month.

Who should own the ad account?

You should. Create it under your own billing, grant the agency administrative access, and revoke it if you part ways. Conversion history has real value for future bidding, and starting from zero because a previous supplier kept the account is a cost most contractors only discover when they are already unhappy.

Is paid search better than buying leads from a marketplace?

Marketplace leads are usually sold to several contractors at once, so you pay to race for a first call and build nothing you own. Paid search costs more per click and gives you an exclusive enquiry, an account with history, and pages that keep working. Many businesses run both while their own account matures, then taper the marketplace spend.

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