Ballwin, Belleville and the Central West End should never share a bid
Geography is the biggest single control in a remodeling account here, because a short drive crosses a dozen governments and, in one direction, a state line.
A radius does not describe your territory. Drive west from Ballwin and you are still working the same suburbs. Drive east twenty minutes and you are in Illinois, in a different permitting world, on the far side of the Mississippi.
Build targeting from a list of places you actually serve. The City of St. Louis on its own, because it is an independent city and buyers treat it that way. The county municipalities you cover, named. St. Charles County if you cross it. Madison County and St. Clair County if you work the Metro East.
Then bid them apart. Job value, close rate and drive time all vary by area, and a flat bid pretends otherwise. A lead that costs you a full afternoon of windshield time is not worth what a lead ten minutes away is worth.
Set location targeting to people in or regularly in your area, not to people showing interest in it. Otherwise you buy clicks from somebody in another state reading about kitchens.
Half your wasted spend is a homeowner looking for a tuckpointer
In a brick market with freeze-thaw winters, a great many remodeling-shaped searches are repair searches, and they will drain a budget quietly.
Broad matching on kitchen and bathroom terms pulls in masonry repair, water in the basement, mold questions, grab bar installs, appliance hookups and cabinet refinishing. Some of that is good work for somebody. It is not your work.
Build the negative list before launch, then read the search terms report every week for the first couple of months. Nothing else you do in the account pays as well per hour spent.
Add the research family too: how to, DIY, cost calculator, cheapest, wholesale, salary. And add the job seekers, who search remodeling terms constantly and click without hesitating.
Review it seasonally. After a hard winter the repair-intent traffic climbs, and terms you never saw in September start eating budget in February.
When the design queue backs up in February, move the money instead of the target
Winter is real here, and a remodeler's budget should follow the sales calendar rather than a flat monthly line.
Indoor work does not stop for the cold, and homeowners shut inside a dated kitchen in January are shopping. Demand shifts here, it does not disappear.
The constraint is rarely the ad account. It is how many measures your estimator can run and how many jobs your crews can start. Once the design queue is full, more leads become slower replies and worse reviews rather than more revenue.
Pace against that. Pull spend when the queue fills, put it back when the calendar opens. Keep a small always-on budget on your own company name and your highest intent terms so you never vanish entirely.
Write the plan before the season starts. Otherwise the decision gets made in a panic in the middle of your busiest month, and it is always the wrong one.
A booked measure in Florissant and one in Ladue are not worth the same bid
Cost per lead flattens the differences that decide whether an account is profitable, so measure cost per booked measure and, once you have history, cost per signed job by area.
Tag every inquiry at intake with its municipality and its job type. Without that you cannot tell whether a campaign looks cheap because it is efficient or because it is bringing you jobs you do not want.
Send outcomes back into the ad platform. Importing offline conversions lets bidding work toward booked measures rather than form fills. Left alone, an automated strategy optimizes for whatever is easiest to collect, which is usually somebody browsing countertops at eleven at night.
Different values are not an insult to anybody. A whole kitchen and a vanity swap are different revenue, and bids should reflect what each area typically buys from you.
Give it time before judging. Remodeling has a long sales cycle, and one month of data on a considered purchase is mostly noise dressed up as a report.
Tub to shower conversions deserve their own campaign and their own page
Single-item and accessibility bathroom work is a different buyer on a different clock, and folding it into a general bath campaign shortchanges both.
Somebody searching for a walk in shower or a safer tub is often deciding fast, sometimes for a parent, and wants scope, price posture and a date. Design language slows them down.
The full bath renovation buyer moves slower and cares about drawings, tile and sequencing. Same trade, different sale, different ad.
Separate them: their own ad groups, their own landing pages, their own conversion targets. Both perform better once they stop competing for the same headline.
Watch the national one day bath operators in this category. You will probably not outbid them, so compete where you are actually better: custom tile, older brick houses, plumbing that has to move, and a crew that knows what tends to sit behind a plaster wall.
A metro this size cannot feed nine ad groups, so consolidate until the numbers mean something
St. Louis is a real market but not an unlimited one, and a fragmented account starves every campaign of the data it needs to learn.
Over-segmentation is the most common self-inflicted wound in a local remodeling account. Twelve campaigns, a handful of clicks each per week, none with enough conversions to steer anything.
Start with two or three campaigns: kitchen, bath, and a specialty line if you run one. Handle geography with location bid adjustments rather than parallel campaigns for every municipality.
Split further only when a segment earns it by producing steady conversions on its own. Structure should follow data, not the other way around.
The same restraint applies across platforms. Running search, social, Microsoft and a paid directory at once on one modest budget usually leaves you with four underfunded programs and no way to tell which one worked.
Questions we actually get
- How much should I budget for paid search?
- There is no correct figure to quote you, and any agency naming one before seeing your close rate and average job value is guessing. The workable approach is to start where the account can gather enough conversions to steer itself, measure cost per booked measure, and scale only while the crew calendar has room.
- Should I run Performance Max or automated campaigns?
- They can work, but fence them first. Exclude the geography you do not serve, feed them real conversion data rather than form fills, and add brand exclusions so they do not take credit for people already searching your name. Without those guardrails they tend to find the cheapest clicks available, which in this trade means the least useful ones.
- Google or Meta first?
- Search first, in most cases. Somebody typing a bathroom remodel query already decided they want the work done, and you are buying existing demand. Paid social has a role for a remodeler, mainly with strong finished photography aimed at a specific area, but it usually earns its budget after search is stable.
- Is it worth bidding on competitors' names?
- Sometimes, though it is expensive and the click quality varies. The more common problem is the reverse: lead resellers and franchises bidding on your name, so a homeowner looking specifically for you sees somebody else first. Defending your own brand terms is usually cheap and usually the better first move.
- How do I tell whether a lead came from Illinois?
- Capture the address, or at minimum the municipality, at intake, and record it against the campaign. Location reports in the ad platform tell you where a click came from, not where the house is, and in a metro with a state line running through it the two differ often enough to distort the whole account.
