Google Ads can be one of the fastest ways to get in front of people actively searching for what you offer — or one of the fastest ways to burn through a budget with nothing to show for it. The difference almost always comes down to what's in place before the campaign starts, not the campaign itself.
Have a landing page that matches the ad
If someone clicks an ad for "emergency plumbing repair" and lands on your general homepage, you've already lost a chunk of them. The page they land on should speak directly to what they searched for and make the next step obvious — call now, get a quote, book online.
Know what you're actually tracking
A campaign that generates clicks but no way to tell which clicks turned into actual phone calls or booked jobs is a campaign you can't improve. Conversion tracking — on form submissions, on phone calls, on booking confirmations — needs to be set up before you spend the first dollar, not reviewed after the fact when the budget's already gone.
Negative keywords save you real money
Without them, your ad for "HVAC repair" can end up showing for searches like "HVAC repair courses" or "how to fix HVAC myself" — clicks you pay for from people who were never going to hire you. A short list of negative keywords, reviewed periodically, quietly protects your budget.
Local Service Ads are often a better starting point than search ads
For a lot of home service businesses specifically, Google's Local Service Ads (the ones with the green checkmark and "Google Guaranteed" badge) tend to convert better than standard search ads, and you generally only pay for actual leads rather than clicks. They're worth understanding before defaulting to a traditional search campaign.
Start smaller than you think you should
A tight, well-targeted test budget that tells you what's working within a few weeks beats a large budget spread thin across too many keywords and locations. Once something is clearly working, that's the time to scale it up — not before.