Rush hour on I-285 decides which suburbs are worth bidding on at four in the afternoon
Geographic targeting for a remodeler here is a schedule problem wearing the costume of a map problem.
The Perimeter and the radial interstates mean the same address is a reasonable job at ten in the morning and an expensive mistake at four. If your team works out of a location inside the Perimeter, an Alpharetta consultation is a very different afternoon than a Decatur one.
Build the target list from zip codes or drawn polygons that match a real drive time window, not a circle around your office. Then apply bid adjustments by hour and by day. If your designer books north of the Perimeter on Tuesdays and Thursdays, spend harder there on the days you can serve it.
Set location targeting to people in your targeted locations rather than the looser option that includes anyone showing interest. Otherwise you buy clicks from people researching Atlanta remodeling from another state.
Say the boundary out loud on the landing page. Naming the counties and suburbs you serve costs you a handful of clicks and saves your intake person a stack of calls that end in an apology.
Kitchen money and bath money belong in two different campaigns
They are different budgets, different decision timelines and different buyers, so blending them hides everything useful.
A full kitchen and a hall bath rarely come from the same headspace. The kitchen buyer has been thinking about it for a year and is comparing designers. The bath buyer often has a specific problem and a shorter fuse. Ad copy that tries to serve both serves neither.
Separate the campaigns so you can control budget independently. When the kitchen calendar fills, you want to shift money to bath without touching the kitchen structure, and blended campaigns will not let you do that cleanly.
Inside each, keep intent tight. Full renovation searches, single room searches and material shopping searches are three different levels of readiness. Countertop and cabinet shopping queries are worth buying only if you have something to sell that person today.
Match the landing page to the split. A kitchen ad should land on kitchen work, kitchen photos and a kitchen inquiry form. Sending both to a general services page is the most common and most expensive shortcut in this trade.
Fence the automated campaigns before they buy you a job you cannot drive to
Automated campaign types will happily find demand in places your dispatcher will refuse.
Performance Max and broad match with automated bidding expand where the algorithm sees conversions. If your conversion is a form fill rather than a booked job, it will find you cheap form fills from the edge of the map and from people shopping a scope you do not run.
Fence them properly. Tight location targeting, exclusions for the areas you will not serve, and a conversion definition that means something. Feeding back only qualified inquiries or booked consultations changes what the system chases.
Local Services Ads are worth testing separately. They generally require license and insurance verification and a background check before you can run, and the details are worth confirming directly with Google since program requirements change. When they work, they work close to home, which suits the proximity reality here.
Give any automated campaign a probation period and a clear kill criterion before you launch it, written down. Otherwise it quietly consumes budget that a well built search campaign would have converted.
Lead resellers bid on your company name and that click is cheap to win back
Somebody is running ads on searches for your business, and it is usually not a competitor.
Search your own company name from a phone. If a directory, a lead marketplace or a franchise brand is sitting above you, a share of the people your reputation earned are being sold to three of your competitors before they reach you.
Brand clicks are typically the cheapest in the account because you are the most relevant result for your own name. Defending them is not glamorous and it is usually the fastest win available in month one.
Keep brand reporting separate from everything else. Blending brand into the account total makes your cost per lead look great and tells you nothing about whether the non brand work is paying.
While you are in there, run the search terms report weekly for the first two months. Remodeling accounts attract rental repair queries, appliance and cabinet part searches, DIY questions, big box installation brands and job seekers. Every one of those belongs on the exclusion list before it becomes a habit.
When the schedule fills with Gwinnett jobs, cut the Gwinnett budget first
Pacing in a metro this spread out is a geographic decision, not just a monthly one.
Most remodelers pace spend against the month. The better lever here is where the calendar is already full. If the next three weeks are booked with work out past the Perimeter, more spend in Gwinnett buys you a queue, a longer wait and a worse close rate.
Review geographic performance and calendar load together, at least every two weeks. Shift budget toward the areas with open capacity and pull it back where the crew is already committed.
Capacity is the real ceiling in this business. A remodeler who cannot start for four months converts far worse than the same company with a six week window, no matter how good the ads are. Spending through a full calendar is money spent teaching people to call somebody else.
Build the seasonal rhythm in as well. Two real seasons here means two planning peaks rather than one long stretch, so pace against your own booked history rather than against a national benchmark.
One full kitchen pays for a quarter of powder room clicks, so weight the goals
Counting every inquiry as one conversion trains the account to buy your least valuable work.
A lead is not a job and jobs are not equal. If the system treats a powder room inquiry and a full kitchen inquiry as identical, it will optimize toward whatever is cheapest to generate, which is almost never the work you want.
Import conversions back from your CRM with values attached. Qualified inquiry, booked consultation, signed design agreement, and eventually contract value. Bidding against real values changes the shape of the account within a couple of months.
Cost per booked job is the number that pays your crew. Cost per lead can drop while cost per booked job climbs, and plenty of agencies will show you the first chart and never mention the second.
Accept the lag. Remodeling decisions take weeks, so the money you spend this month is judged on jobs that sign later. Report on both the current spend and the cohort of inquiries from prior months, or you will keep making decisions on incomplete data.
Questions we actually get
- What should we expect to spend to get useful data?
- Enough to generate a meaningful number of inquiries per month in each campaign you run, which depends on your local click costs and your average job size. We would rather run one tight kitchen campaign properly than four underfunded campaigns that never gather enough data to make a decision from. We size it against your close rate and job value before launch.
- Is Local Services Ads worth it for a remodeler?
- Worth testing, and best treated as a separate line item. Eligibility generally requires license and insurance verification plus a background check, and the details change, so confirm current requirements with Google directly. It tends to perform closest to your actual location, which suits the proximity reality of this metro.
- Should we run Meta ads too?
- Sometimes, and for a different job. Search buys people already looking. Paid social with strong finished project photography builds recognition in specific neighborhoods and works well for retargeting the people who read your cost page and left. It rarely produces the same immediate booked consultations that search does.
- How do we stop paying for tire kickers?
- Three things: a hard exclusion list built from your own search terms report, a stated price posture on the landing page, and qualifying questions in the form. You will get fewer inquiries and more of them will be worth a truck. Judge the change on booked consultations, never on lead count.
- How quickly can paid search produce booked consultations?
- Clicks start immediately and inquiries usually follow within days, but the first month is largely about learning which terms and which areas are real. We will not promise a lead volume or a date. What we will do is show you cost per booked consultation from the first month rather than hiding behind impressions.
