The causeway and the twin spans are line items, not just bridges
Geographic targeting in this market is a drive time decision that shows up directly in your cost per job.
A single radius drawn around your yard will buy clicks in three parishes with wildly different economics. A West Bank inquiry, an Uptown inquiry and a Covington inquiry all cost roughly the same to acquire and cost you very different amounts to serve.
Build the account by parish. Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany each get their own campaign, their own budget and their own bid posture. If you rarely cross the lake, do not bid as though you do. If Northshore work is your best margin, bid up there and let the close rate justify it.
Location targeting should be set to presence rather than interest, or you will pay for someone in another state reading about pools in New Orleans. Check that setting first on any account you inherit.
Then read the geographic report every month instead of the campaign averages. Averages hide the fact that one parish is carrying the account and another is quietly eating it.
French Quarter hotel pools and parade season searches do not belong in your account
The exclusion list is not housekeeping, it is the difference between a build budget and a donation.
Pool cleaning, pool service, weekly maintenance, pool table, water park, hotel with a pool, apartments with a pool, lifeguard jobs, pool supply. Every one of those matches your keywords under broad match and every one of them will spend real money.
Our metro adds its own noise. Tourist searches for hotels and short stays with a pool, event and festival queries, and property listing language all collide with construction terms. Someone searching for a courtyard pool in the French Quarter is far more likely to be booking a room than digging a hole.
Read the search terms report weekly at first, not monthly. Early in an account's life that report is the highest value half hour in the week, and it stays worth doing forever at a lower frequency.
Keep exact and phrase match doing the heavy lifting on your core terms, and give broad match a small fenced budget where you can watch it. Broad match is a research tool here, not a growth strategy.
Separate the money for gunite work from the money for deck and coping replacement
Renovation clicks are cheaper and convert faster, which is exactly why they will swallow a new construction budget if you let them.
A new build and a resurface are different products with different sales cycles, different margins and different close rates. Put them in one campaign and the algorithm will optimize toward whichever converts more often, which is almost always the smaller job.
Give each its own campaign and its own daily budget. Then you are choosing your mix deliberately instead of discovering it in a monthly report.
Renovation terms are worth real money. Cracked coping, failing plaster, deck replacement, liner swap, equipment upgrade. In Metairie, Kenner and Gentilly there are neighborhoods full of pools old enough to need all of it.
Landing pages have to match. Sending a resurface searcher to a new construction page with a rendering of a Northshore backyard is how a well built account still fails.
The call has to be answered while the homeowner is still standing in the yard
Paid search buys attention that expires in minutes, and most of it is lost inside your own office.
Ad schedules should reflect when your phone is genuinely answered by a person who can book a site walk. Bidding hard into hours when calls go to voicemail is paying for the privilege of losing.
Call extensions and call only campaigns are worth testing on mobile, because a homeowner in a side yard with a phone in one hand is far more likely to press call than to fill in nine fields.
Route calls properly. If everyone who can qualify a job is underground on a dig in Mid-City by nine in the morning, the account needs an answering plan before it needs a bid strategy.
Track calls with dynamic number insertion so you can tie a booked walk back to the campaign and the parish that produced it. Without that link, every optimization decision after month one is a guess.
Pacing against one excavator, a dewatering plan and a permit queue
Spend should follow the crew calendar, because leads you cannot start are just deposits on future frustration.
Most pool builders have hard capacity. One or two crews, one machine, a subcontractor list that is only so deep. An account that outruns that capacity generates unhappy customers and refund conversations.
Pace deliberately. Pull back when the schedule is full and push when it opens, and keep a renovation campaign running underneath as filler work that can slot between builds.
Site conditions here add lead time that a national playbook does not account for. Dewatering, drainage plans and the review process on a visible exterior in a protected block all sit between a signature and a shovel. Confirm current requirements with the parish or the relevant commission rather than assuming.
Budget in quarters, not months. A signature in February that becomes a dig in May belongs to February's spend, and any monthly report that ignores that will tell you the wrong story twice a year.
Dollars spent per dig on the schedule, split by parish
Cost per lead is a vanity number in this trade, because leads and jobs are separated by a site walk, a design and a deposit.
Import your closed jobs back into the ad platform, or at minimum reconcile spend against signed agreements in a spreadsheet every month. Offline data is what turns an account from click buying into job buying.
Report four numbers per parish. Spend, booked site walks, signed design agreements and digs scheduled. The gaps between them tell you whether the problem is the account, the intake or the proposal.
Averages lie in a three parish metro. A blended cost per job can look healthy while one campaign runs at twice the acceptable cost and another subsidizes it.
We do not promise a lead volume or a cost per job, because both depend on your close rate, your capacity and the auction. What we do is make the number visible and then work it down.
Questions we actually get
- What should I budget to start?
- Enough to gather real data in one parish rather than a thin spread across three. A budget stretched over a whole metro produces numbers too small to act on, so nothing improves. We would rather concentrate spend where your close rate is already strongest, prove the cost per signed job, and expand from there. Any agency naming a figure before seeing your close rate and capacity is guessing.
- Is Google Ads better than Meta for pool construction?
- They do different work. Search captures people already looking, which is why it usually comes first. Meta and YouTube are useful for renovation demand, where the owner has not started searching yet but has been staring at cracked coping for two summers. Start with search, prove the cost per booked walk, then test social against the renovation side.
- How do I stop paying for people who want pool cleaning?
- A long exclusion list applied at the account level, tight match types on core terms, and a weekly read of the search terms report in the first months. Service, maintenance, repair and supply language should be excluded unless you sell those services. Expect the list to keep growing, since new phrasings surface constantly.
- Should I bid on competitor names?
- Sometimes, carefully. It can be efficient, and it can also be expensive and irritating, and the ad copy has to stay accurate about who you are. Any claims about licensing or credentials in ads should be ones you can document. It is worth confirming the current advertising rules that apply to your license with your own counsel before running that kind of copy.
- How quickly will I see results?
- Traffic arrives immediately. Useful decisions take longer, because a pool sale runs from click to call to site walk to design agreement, and that path is measured in weeks. Expect the first month to be about exclusions and structure, and the following months to be about cost per signed job. We will not promise a volume or a timeline.
