The state line is the first campaign boundary, not the drive time ring
Kentucky clicks and Indiana clicks should live in separate campaigns with separate money, because they are separate businesses in every way that matters.
A radius has no idea that Clarksville is in another state. Set geography by county instead: Jefferson, Oldham and Bullitt on the Kentucky side, Clark and Floyd on the Indiana side, each with its own campaign, its own budget and its own landing page.
Registration, tax and insurance requirements generally differ by state. If you are set up for one side only, exclude the other outright and stop paying for inquiries you have to turn down. Worth confirming your position with your own counsel or insurer before you widen the map.
Say it in the ad copy as well as in the targeting. A line naming Southern Indiana, or naming the Kentucky counties you serve, costs you nothing and filters the click before it costs you a dollar.
Use location of presence rather than interest where the platform allows it. Somebody in another state researching a Louisville pool is usually a relocation, and a relocation deserves its own message rather than being mixed into your local auction.
Two seasons of buying: sell the dig in winter, sell repairs after the thaw
This market has two distinct buying moments in a year, and running one flat budget through both wastes most of the account.
Real winters make new construction a planning purchase. People shop while the yard is frozen so they can swim in summer, which means the money that fills a spring and summer schedule has to be in market during the cold months, when most builders quietly go dark.
After the thaw the mix flips. Owners open pools, find cracked coping, a torn liner, a cover that did not survive, and start searching with urgency. Renovation and repair campaigns should be scaled up then and should not share a budget with new construction, because the cheaper clicks will otherwise eat the expensive campaign alive.
Set the calendar deliberately. Decide months in advance which campaign gets the weight in January, which gets it in April, and what happens when your crews are booked out.
Turning everything off when you are busy is a trap. The pipeline you kill in July is the schedule you are missing next spring.
Municipal, apartment and hotel searches sit in your keywords and pay differently
Commercial and institutional aquatic work shares vocabulary with residential construction, and it is a different sale entirely.
Queries for public pools, apartment complex decks, school and club facilities and hotel work will land in a residential builder's search terms report. Some builders want that work. Most do not, and the ones who do should be bidding for it deliberately with different copy and a different page.
The everyday drains are familiar: pool cleaning, chemicals, opening and closing service, above ground kits, parts, jobs and careers, and anyone researching how to do it themselves. Read the search terms report weekly at first, then monthly, and keep pruning.
Guard the words that look like yours and are not. Hot tub, swim spa and stock tank shoppers convert on a different scale entirely, and a pool builder's budget disappears into them fast.
Negatives are maintenance, not a setup task. A list built once and never touched is a list that stopped working months ago.
Cap the Jefferson County campaign or Oldham and Floyd never get served
Left alone, the densest part of the metro will absorb the entire budget and the outlying counties will never see an impression.
Jefferson County carries the volume. Pooled with everything else, it will spend the day's budget before lunch and the smaller campaigns will run at a trickle, which makes it impossible to tell whether Oldham County or Floyd County could produce work.
Give each geography a floor. Even a small daily cap on Bullitt County or Clark County generates enough data over a season to decide whether to keep buying there.
Drive time matters to margin. A job an hour out past the Gene Snyder costs you crew hours that a job inside the Watterson does not, so the geography that looks equal in cost per click rarely stays equal in cost per completed job.
Review budget splits by season too. The counties that produce new construction inquiries in winter are not always the ones producing renovation calls in spring.
Third shift and a 5am inquiry are normal, so schedule ads that way
A large logistics and air freight base means a meaningful share of this metro is awake and shopping at hours most contractors treat as dead.
Look at when inquiries actually arrive before you set an ad schedule. Early mornings and late nights are ordinary here, and cutting them because a template says business hours removes demand rather than waste.
Bidding into those hours only works if something happens on the other end. An after hours answering service that can book a site visit, or a form that sets expectations honestly about when someone will call back, changes what those hours are worth.
After hours availability is a genuine differentiator in this market rather than a throwaway line. If you can take a call at 6am, say it in the ad and mean it.
Watch call reports by hour and day rather than guessing. The pattern for a pool builder here rarely looks like the pattern the platform recommends.
Your sales cycle outruns the attribution window, so keep your own ledger
A click in January that becomes a signed contract in April will not be reported to you as one, which is why builders keep judging pool accounts on the wrong number.
Cost per lead is the number that flatters an account and hides the money. The pair that matters is cost per booked site visit and cost per signed contract, tracked separately for the Kentucky side and the Indiana side.
Get calls tracked and recorded, with a field for the address, so every inquiry can be tied to a campaign and a county. Most pool inquiries are phone calls, and an account measured only on form fills is measuring a minority of its own results.
Keep a simple ledger in the CRM: source, county, date of inquiry, date of site visit, date of agreement. Feed signed jobs back into the platform where you can, but keep the record yourself, because platform windows close long before your sale does.
Give the account a season before you draw conclusions. Judging a pool campaign on thirty days of data will have you shutting off the exact campaign that fills your summer.
Questions we actually get
- How should we split budget between the Kentucky side and the Indiana side?
- Start with where you are actually set up to work and where you will genuinely drive. If you are registered on both sides, run separate campaigns and give each a floor so the denser Jefferson County side cannot starve the Indiana campaigns. After a season you will have cost per booked visit and cost per signed job for each and can shift money on evidence rather than on instinct.
- Should we really be running ads in January?
- For new construction, that is often when the work gets sold, because a homeowner planning a summer pool is shopping while the ground is frozen. Renovation and repair usually scale up after the thaw. Running both flat all year is the version that wastes money. Decide the seasonal weighting in advance and hold to it.
- Google Ads or Meta first?
- For a builder with a limited budget, search usually comes first, because someone typing a pool query has already decided they want something. Paid social is better suited to reaching owners who have not started searching yet, which is a slower and less measurable job. Get search structured and measured properly before adding a channel that is harder to attribute.
- Is it worth bidding on competitor names?
- Sometimes, and it depends on discipline. Competitor terms tend to be cheaper per click and much worse per signed job, so they need their own campaign, a tight budget and their own success number. Keep ad copy factual, never imply a certification or a relationship you do not have, and check anything involving license claims with your own counsel.
- What single change usually improves a pool account the fastest?
- Tracking phone calls properly, including the address, and matching them back to campaigns. Most inquiries in this trade arrive by phone. Until you can see which county and which campaign produced each booked site visit, every optimization is a guess and the outlying geographies get judged on nothing.
