Target people standing in the valley, not people interested in it
Location settings default to including anyone showing interest in a place, and few cities on earth attract more idle interest than this one.
Set every campaign to presence only. Then draw the geography around the valley itself, naming the areas you serve rather than a mileage radius from your office. Include Henderson and North Las Vegas deliberately, because they are separate cities and a sloppy setup can drop them or double count them.
Decide about Boulder City and the far edges on purpose. The valley is compact enough that most of it is a reasonable drive, but the outer runs cost you a half day, and a campaign should not quietly commit your estimator to one.
Watch the location report weekly for the first month. If clicks are arriving from states you do not work in, the setting is wrong, not the keyword.
Your negative list starts with hotel suites, apartment turns and RV bathrooms
The wasted half of a remodeling account here is commercial and hospitality intent wearing the same words as your customers.
Build the exclusion list before the campaign goes live. Hotel, resort, casino, suite, timeshare and hospitality terms belong there. So do apartment turn, unit turnover, mobile home, RV and trailer. So do the shoppers who will never hire anyone: how to, DIY, cheap, free, wholesale, liquidation, and every job seeker term such as hiring, salary and apprentice.
Read the search terms report weekly for the first month, then monthly. In a trade where one click can carry meaningful cost, an hour of reading terms is the highest paid hour in the account.
Separate the buying stages too. Somebody pricing a countertop slab on a Sunday afternoon and somebody looking for a contractor to gut a primary bath deserve different ads and different pages, and lumping them together makes both perform badly.
The graveyard shift searches at four in the morning, so decide who answers
A round the clock hospitality economy means real buyers here are awake at hours when your competitors' phones are not.
Standard business hours call handling misses a genuine share of this market. Before changing anything, pull your own call data and sort by hour. If inquiries are landing at six in the morning and eleven at night, that is not noise, it is a shift population.
You then have two honest options. Run ads around the clock and put a booking path behind them that actually works at that hour, whether that is a scheduling tool or a service that takes a full message. Or restrict the hours to when someone answers. Paying for a click that rings out is the most expensive thing in the account.
If after hours availability is real for you, say it in the ad and prove it on the landing page. Never claim it if the phone is not staffed, because the first broken promise ends the sale.
Bid on the plumbing move, not on the word remodeler
The searches with money behind them describe a change to the house, not a category.
Tub to shower conversion, moving a shower drain, opening a wall between the kitchen and the great room, running a gas line to a range, adding a bathroom: those queries carry intent and usually less franchise competition than the category head terms.
Write the ad to the constraint the searcher is worried about. An ad that says a firm scope comes after a site visit, and that the number accounts for what is under the slab, speaks to a homeowner who has already heard a story about a job that changed price.
Send each of those queries to a page about that job. A general services page kills a high intent click. If you only have budget to build three landing pages, build them for your three highest value job types.
An architectural review can sit between the click and the contract
Homeowners associations are unusually prevalent here, and anything touching an exterior wall, window or roof vent generally adds an approval step before work starts.
The practical effect is lag. A click today can become a signed job much later, and an account judged on thirty days of data will look worse than it is. Set the conversion window to match how your sales cycle actually behaves, and look at cohorts rather than calendar months.
Import your offline outcomes. Feed back the booked consultation, then the signed contract, so the platform is optimizing toward work that pays rather than toward form fills. An account fed only form fills will reliably find you more forms and fewer jobs.
Track two numbers side by side: cost per booked consultation, which you can read early, and cost per signed job, which you can only read later. Association rules vary by community, so confirm specifics with the association itself rather than assuming a pattern across the valley.
Summer is not your slow season, and the bidding should say so
Interior remodeling does not care what the thermometer says, even while outdoor trades in the Mojave heat slow to a crawl.
Check your own account before acting on that. Look at impression share and cost by month across a full year. If competitors are pulling back in the hottest stretch while homeowners are inside browsing, holding your budget through it is worth testing.
Pace against capacity, not against the month. Cabinet and fixture lead times, plus one crew's install calendar, set a real ceiling on how much demand you can absorb. Spending past that ceiling produces angry customers and reviews you will spend a year repairing.
When the schedule fills, throttle the campaigns that produce the jobs you like least, not the ones producing the best work. Most accounts cut in exactly the wrong order.
Questions we actually get
- How much should we budget to start?
- We will not quote you a cost per click, because inventing one would be dishonest and this category moves. Build the floor from your own math instead: your average signed job value, your consultation to close rate, and what you can afford to pay for a signed job. Then run a short discovery period to measure the real click costs in your service area.
- Google or Meta first?
- Google first, because search captures people already looking. Meta earns a place later with finished project photography for retargeting and for reaching homeowners in specific communities, though it generally produces a colder inquiry that needs a longer follow up. Running both badly at the same time is the common mistake.
- Are Local Services Ads worth it for remodeling?
- Sometimes, and eligibility and categories vary, so it is worth confirming what is currently available for your license type before planning around it. Treat it as a separate channel with its own economics rather than a replacement for search, and track its jobs separately.
- How do we stop paying for tire kickers?
- Three things do most of the work: a negative keyword list that removes commercial, hospitality and DIY intent, ad copy that states a price posture so browsers self select out, and a landing page form that asks about the room and whether anything has to move. Expect fewer inquiries and better ones.
- Do Henderson and North Las Vegas need their own campaigns?
- Own ad groups and own landing pages, usually yes, because they are separate cities and homeowners there want proof you cross the valley. Separate campaigns only make sense once each has enough volume to be managed on its own numbers, otherwise you are splitting thin data.
