Home services are constantly searched for online, making them both in high demand and high supply, driving CPC to higher numbers than ever before.
While PPC ads remain a powerful lead generation tool for home services, the landscape has become more expensive and complex.
Whether you work for an agency specializing in home services or handle marketing in-house, finding cost-effective strategies is crucial.
This article explores the most effective PPC ad strategies tailored for home services, ensuring you can maximize any budget and succeed in this competitive niche.
From campaign setup to targeting and optimization, you’ll find strategies to suit both short and long sales cycles, helping you generate quality leads and boost conversions.
Campaign strategy
The campaign strategy will depend on the length of the sales cycle.
For home services, there are:
Short sales cycles with immediate services needed, such as plumbing repairs.
Long sales cycles, such as remodeling services.
For short sales cycles
Most home services with short sales cycles will use search campaigns only, with rare exceptions.
In the case of repairs, there is usually an immediate need, so the sales cycle may be one day or less.
For example, someone may search “plumber near me” or “emergency AC repair service.”
The person is trying to quickly find a company for their immediate need, so a search campaign is the best option.
Search campaigns will account for most, if not all, of the budget for home services because people search online for the specific service they need at the time they need it, whether on Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo or other search engines.
For long sales cycles
Some home services, such as remodeling or pool builders, have a longer sales cycle than one day.
This allows you to test multiple campaign types at the same time to target different stages of the funnel, including:
Ongoing services like pest control, carpet cleaning or maid services may have either short or long sales cycles, as customers aren’t always in immediate need.
People often search for long-term providers without urgency. These services can benefit from both Search and other types of campaigns for targeting.
Display campaigns with longer sales cycles can target in-market, affinity, demographic, custom audiences and remarketing audiences.
For example, the display campaign could target:
In-market (Pools and Spas or Affinity > Home Décor Enthusiasts or Demographics > Homeowner).
Or a custom audience targeting users that recently visited a remodeling services website or recently searched for remodeling services.
Another option for display campaigns would be targeting ads on websites based on their content, such as topics, keywords and handpicked placements on relevant websites to home services.
Video campaigns have very similar targeting options to display campaigns.
You would test the same options but for views or conversions as the campaign goal rather than clicks or conversions chosen as the goal of display campaigns.
Google Ads also has a basic video maker built into the platform, or you can hire video creators for a range of budgets.
Getting started with video ads is much easier than it used to be.
Dig deeper: How to overcome the top 3 objections to YouTube video ads
Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns cast a very wide net and use more automation signals, but don’t give nearly as much data and don’t have as much control.
If you have a large budget, it can be useful to experiment with one or two campaigns targeting all stages of the sales funnel or running them alongside other campaigns.
This approach is best for long sales cycles with high-cost services, like remodeling or custom home building, but not recommended for short sales cycles.
Bid strategy
For smaller budgets or new ad accounts with no conversion history, it may be best to test manual CPC bidding until the account builds up some conversion history.
This way you can turn your bids up and down slowly to monitor the effects on leads. Automated bidding works well when it has more conversion data.
For short sales cycles
The bidding will be for Max Conversions, possibly with a target CPA also in place.
The campaign goals will be the ones you set for phone calls and form fills – such as booked appointments.
This ensures the bidding strategy focuses on maximizing calls or online appointments, rather than just visits to the contact page or getting directions.
There are a lot of options for leads for home services, but PPC allows for another layer of quality control.
To remove bad leads, set a minimum call length inside Google Ads before they are counted as a conversion.
This will help the automation not count hangups or people calling for employment, for example. More information can be found here on Google’s official support page.
PPC call tracking software, such as Call Tracking Metrics or CallRail, has a similar feature, allowing minimum call lengths to be counted as conversions.
Connect your CRM to Google Analytics for second-level quality control for your leads for home services.
Then, set up another goal for calls that turn into booked appointments and import this goal into Google Ads, Microsoft Ads or even Facebook Ads as an offline conversion.
For example, suppose a call turns into an appointment. In that case, you can mark the call inside a home services CRM such as Workiz, ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro and then export that back to Google Analytics or even back to Call Tracking Metrics.
Most systems can mark a lead as a sale/appointment with a value attached to it.
You want to make sure that sale/appointment makes its way all the way back to Google Analytics, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads and other ad platforms to see which leads are turning into appointments.
This example from Call Tracking Metrics shows how you can mark a phone call as converted and even add a Converted/Sales amount.
For smaller companies, this can be done manually to review phone call quality or listen to call recordings if you don’t have the budget for the large CRMs.
Monitoring lead quality is critical for automated bidding, especially for home services.
Otherwise, PPC ad campaigns may continue to optimize for three-second phone calls as more and more come in from the ads.
For long sales cycles
The same approach would be taken, but you can also have campaigns with automated bidding with the goal of micro-conversions.
At the top of the funnel, people may not be ready to request a quote or book an appointment for a bathroom remodel, custom home builder or outdoor kitchen builder.
You should still track both conversions, but having more than one option can help bring in more leads.