How customers search for a trade
Two patterns dominate. Emergency: “emergency plumber near me”, “electrician open now”, “AC not cooling repair”, searched on a phone, converting within minutes, with no comparison shopping. And planned: “bathroom renovation quote”, “house painting cost”, “deep cleaning service Kathmandu”, researched over days with two or three quotes. The first needs to be answered immediately; the second needs a page that explains the process and the price. Both are decided by proximity and by whether the business looks legitimate, which is why reviews, a real address and a phone number that gets answered matter more than clever copy. My Google Ads services for trades put the call first and measure the booked job.
What changes in Google Ads for home services
Service area targeting
Campaigns target the suburbs or wards you actually serve, not the whole city, using presence targeting and a radius around the base or the areas your vans cover. Travel time decides profitability on a small job, so the geography of the campaign is the geography of the business.
Call-only ads and schedules
Emergency keywords run as call-only ads during the hours a person answers, extended to nights and weekends only if you genuinely take those calls. Planned-work keywords run as standard ads to a service page. Nothing runs when nobody picks up; a missed call is a paid click given to a competitor.
Keywords and negatives
Exact and phrase match on trade plus problem plus location, with separate ad groups per service line. Negatives for “jobs”, “vacancy”, “salary”, “apprentice”, “course”, “DIY”, “how to fix”, “parts”, “spare”, “training”, “free” and brand names of manufacturers whose warranty work you do not do.
Assets and landing pages
Call assets, location assets, callouts for licensing, insurance and response time, price assets where you have call-out fees. A page per service with the problem, the process, the call-out charge or price range, service areas and a prominent phone number. Trust signals do the selling: licence numbers, insurance, real photos of the team and van, and reviews.
Local Services Ads where available
In the USA, the UK and Canada, Local Services Ads with the Google Guaranteed badge sit above the Search results and charge per lead. Trades in those markets should usually run both. They are not available in Nepal or Australia, where a well-built Search campaign with call tracking does the same job.
Tracking
Calls from ads through forwarding numbers, calls from the page through click-to-call, both counted above a minimum duration so wrong numbers do not register. Form and WhatsApp enquiries are tracked separately. Where the business records which calls became booked jobs and their value, those are imported so bidding follows revenue rather than ringing phones. The setup is under conversion tracking.
Typical account structure
| Campaign | Ad type | Primary conversion |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency and urgent repair | Call-only, scheduled to answered hours | Call above minimum duration |
| Service lines (installation, maintenance, renovation) | Responsive search ads to service pages | Call or quote request |
| Brand | Responsive search ads | Call |
| Area campaigns | Per suburb or ward where competition differs | Call |
| Local Services Ads (US, UK, CA) | Pay per lead, Google Guaranteed | Lead, rated and disputed |
The enquiry layer follows lead generation campaigns.
Mistakes I see in home services accounts
- Ads running twenty-four hours for a business that answers eight.
- City-wide targeting that produces calls from an hour’s drive away.
- Every service in one campaign, so cheap repair clicks spend the renovation budget.
- Counting every call, including the ten-second ones, as a job.
- Sending emergency searchers to a home page instead of calling.
Full stack for home services
Paid search wins the urgent call; the map listing and organic pages win the planned work. The same industry is covered under SEO for home services and Meta Ads for home services, with Google Business Profile optimization for the map pack that sits beside your ads. There are no separate marketing or automation industry pages for this sector yet.
Next step
Send read-only access for a free Google Ads audit; the summary will show when your ads are running versus when calls are answered, how far the clicks come from, and how many of the counted calls lasted long enough to be a job.