How to choose a Google Ads company for your contracting business (10 questions)

First, know what a Google Ads company should actually do for a contractor

The word "Google Ads" gets stretched to cover a stack of jobs, and vague vendors hide in the stretch. For a home-service contractor, a paid-search company owns a short, defined lane: Search Ads, Local Services Ads, the landing page those ads point at, the bidding and negative-keyword work, and the call tracking that tells you what booked. That is it. Everything else a sales rep piles on is either adjacent or padding.

Two things sit right next to paid but are not the same job, and a company that blurs them is a company you cannot hold accountable. Organic ranking, your website content, and the links pointing at you are SEO, a separate discipline. Your Google Business Profile, the map 3-pack, citations, and reviews are local SEO, another one. The one paid overlap is the Local Services Ads badge and the Google Guaranteed screening, because you pay per lead for those, so they live in the paid lane. A good Ads company names these lines cleanly instead of selling you "full-service marketing" as one fog.

Why this matters when you are hiring: the tasks do not overlap, so a vendor who lumps them can charge you for one and claim credit from another, and you will never be able to tell what your money bought. The point of paid is speed. A call from a Search Ad or an LSA is a call from a homeowner with a problem right now, standing in your service area, dialing instead of comparison shopping across ten sites. You are paying to jump the line. So the company you hire should be able to say, in plain English, "here is the paid work we run, here is what it costs to put a booked job on your board, and here is who owns the account." If they answer in adjectives instead of dispatch terms, you are talking to a click reseller, not a shop that runs paid for jobs.

The 10 questions to bring to every sales call

You size up a sub's bid before you cut a check. Do the same here. A fair Ads company survives blunt questions; a padded one gets vague. Bring this list to every call and watch how they answer, because how they answer tells you more than the pitch deck.

Read the answers as a set. A company that keeps your budget separate, puts the account in your name, quotes cost-per-job with real math, points clicks at a dedicated page, and turns on call tracking is running paid the way it should be run. A company that hides the budget in its fee, keeps the account in its own name, and quotes a click cost without asking your ticket size is selling clicks and calling them jobs. The rest of this guide is what a right answer to each question sounds like.

Money questions: budget separation, ownership, and cost-per-job

The first three questions are where padded quotes fall apart, so press hardest here.

Is my ad budget separate from your management fee (Q1). There are two different dollars in a paid engagement. One goes to Google as clicks or leads. One goes to the agency as a fee to run the account, usually a percentage of spend or a flat monthly. You must see both numbers plainly. When a company quotes one blended figure, you cannot tell whether your money is buying leads or overhead, and that is exactly why they blend it. A fair company shows you the split before you sign.

Who owns the account (Q2). You should own your Google Ads account and every scrap of its data, always. If an agency builds the account under its own name and you part ways, you can lose your entire conversion history, your negative lists, and your learning, and start from zero somewhere else. That history is worth real money because it is what makes a campaign cheap over time. Get ownership in writing, day one, non-negotiable.

What is my cost-per-booked-job (Q3). This is the number that decides whether paid is worth it, and most companies stay quiet on it because it is harder to promise. Walk the chain: a click is not a lead, and a lead is not a booked job. Say your cost-per-click is $20. If a good landing page turns 10 percent of clicks into calls, ten clicks make one lead, so that lead cost $200. If you close half your paid leads, two leads make one job, so a booked job cost about $400 in ad spend.

Now the number means something. If your average ticket is $600, a $400 cost-per-job is thin. If your ticket is $9,000 on a system install, that same $400 is a rounding error. A company that quotes you a click cost without asking your ticket size is selling clicks, not jobs. The right one asks what a job is worth before it quotes anything.

Setup questions: landing page, call tracking, and negatives

Questions four through six are where a company either does the unglamorous work that makes paid profitable, or skips it and burns your budget. Most contractors who tried Ads and got burned did not have a bad channel. They had a leaky account. These three plug the biggest leaks.

What am I sending clicks to (Q4). Your homepage is built to explain your whole company. A paid click needs one job: one offer, one phone number, one form, above the fold, fast. Sending paid traffic to a general page tanks your conversion rate and doubles your cost-per-lead, which means your $400 job becomes an $800 job for no reason. A dedicated landing page built for the campaign is part of the real cost of running Ads, not an upsell, and the good news is it is a one-time build, not a monthly bill. If a company plans to point ads at your homepage, the plan is broken before it starts.

Are you setting up call tracking (Q5). Contractors book on the phone, so if you cannot see which clicks turned into calls, you are flying blind and paying for the privilege. Call tracking ties a phone call back to the exact ad and keyword that earned it. Without it, a company reports clicks and impressions because that is all it can see, and you can never cut what does not book. This is table stakes. A fuzzy answer here is a hard no.

How do you build negatives (Q6). Negative keywords tell Google what searches to never pay for. Without a negative list, you pay full price for "plumber salary," "plumbing jobs," "how to unclog a drain," and "DIY," none of which will ever call you.

• Negatives are the single biggest waste in an untuned account, and building them out often cuts spend 20 to 40 percent with no drop in leads.
• Broad match with no negative leash is a faucet left running: Google spends your money on searches you never chose.
• Service-area and hours matter too. Paying for clicks outside your radius, or 2am clicks when nobody answers the phone, burns budget on jobs you will never run.

A company that leads with call tracking, a real landing page, and a negative-keyword plan understands that the win is more booked jobs per dollar, not lower clicks. That is where real management earns its fee.

LSA and Google Guaranteed: the pay-per-lead question most companies skip

Question seven separates a company that knows contractors from one that only knows Search Ads. Local Services Ads (LSA) are the listings that show above the regular results with the green Google Guaranteed checkmark, and they price completely differently. You do not pay per click. You pay per lead, roughly $25 to $90 a lead in most home-service trades, higher in restoration. Google decides a call or message is a valid lead for your trade and service area, and bills you for it.

That flips the risk in your favor. With Search Ads you pay for the click and hope it calls. With LSA you only pay when someone actually reaches out, which is why for a lot of contractors LSA is the smarter first dollar. A company that does not bring up LSA when it clearly fits your trade is either not paying attention or only sells what it is comfortable running. Ask, and listen for whether they know the catches, because the catches are where amateurs get you billed for nothing.

• You dispute the junk. Google bills you for spam calls, wrong numbers, and out-of-area calls too, and you have to flag them to get credited. A good company works your dispute queue every week. A lazy one lets it pile up on your dime.
• Ranking is not just money. LSA position leans on your review count, how fast you answer the phone, your proximity to the searcher, and your Google Guaranteed screening. You cannot simply outbid your way to the top the way you can on Search.
• You pay to get screened. Google Guaranteed requires a background and license check to earn the badge. That gate is real work, and a company that runs LSA should handle it for you, not hand you a login and wish you luck.

For many shops the right answer is not Search or LSA, it is LSA first for the pay-per-lead safety, then Search underneath to catch searches LSA misses and to run remarketing. Which one leads depends on your trade, your review count, and how fast your team answers the phone. A company that can explain that trade-off in plain terms, and one that handles your Guaranteed screening, is one that has actually run paid for contractors, not just for storefronts.

Trade fit, contracts, and how to run the relationship

The last three questions are about whether this company can run paid for a contractor specifically, and whether the contract protects you when the honeymoon ends.

Have you run paid for service-area trades like mine (Q10). A contractor is usually a service-area business: you go to the customer, you do not run a storefront they visit. That changes everything about how paid is built. Your ads need a service radius set to the towns you actually work, dayparting so you are not paying for 2am clicks when the truck is parked, and call-only campaigns for the searches where a homeowner just wants to dial. A company that ranks dentists in one zip code will run the same template on you and never notice it is leaking. Ask whether they speak dispatch, ticket size, and service area, and whether they know a seasonal trade sees demand and CPC swing through the year. A roofer chasing storm calls across a county has a different paid problem than a plumber working a tight radius, and the right company describes yours.

Is a long contract required (Q8). Google Ads needs a quarter to prove out. Month one is the most expensive per job because the campaign is learning who to show your ad to, and cost-per-lead usually settles by month two or three as negatives get tuned and wasted clicks get cut. So a 90-day look is fair. A 12-month lock on day one, with a penalty to leave and no interim proof, is the contract doing the work the results should be doing. Fair terms let you see progress and walk if you do not.

What does your monthly report show (Q9). A useful contractor report is short and honest.

Run the whole thing like you run a subcontractor. Set the scope, hold them to the proof, own the account, and judge paid on a quarter by cost-per-booked-job, not by clicks. A company that hands you the account keys and talks in booked jobs is running paid the right way: as a line on your P&L, not a mystery retainer.