The Metro East is a second auction with its own rules, not an extra zip code
The Illinois side of the river runs under a different state, which means different competitors, different costs and different licensing questions.
Give it its own campaign and its own budget. Mixing Belleville and Edwardsville clicks into a Missouri campaign hides what they cost and lets one side quietly fund the other.
Send that traffic to a page that names the Illinois municipalities you actually work in. A landing page that only talks about St. Louis County tells an Edwardsville homeowner they are in the wrong place.
If you do not cross the Mississippi, exclude Illinois outright rather than relying on bid adjustments. Then check that your location settings target people present in your area, not people merely interested in it, because the default setting has funded a lot of out of state clicks.
Licensing and registration differ by state and by jurisdiction. Worth confirming with the relevant authority or your own counsel before you advertise work on either side.
Negatives first: pool tables, swim lessons and the aquatic center in Kirkwood
A meaningful share of the money in an untended pool account goes to searches that have nothing to do with construction.
Build the list before the campaign goes live: pool table, billiards, pool hall, swim lessons, lifeguard, hiring, jobs, above ground kit, public pool hours, aquatic center, water park, hotel pool, pool party rental.
Add service terms if you do not sell service. Opening, closing, weekly cleaning and chemical searches look adjacent and convert into work you cannot staff. Add them as negatives and stop paying for the education.
Read the search terms report weekly for the first two months, then monthly. The report is where the account actually tells you what it is buying, and it is the single highest return half hour in a paid program.
Phrase and exact match discipline matters more than usual in a trade with this much consumer ambiguity. Broad match with a thin negative list is how a construction budget disappears in a fortnight.
Repair and leak searches are the cheapest way into a full renovation
Someone searching for a leak has a deadline; someone browsing pool shapes does not.
Bid on liner replacement, leak detection, cracked deck, lifted coping, pump replacement and heater repair. The clicks generally cost less than construction terms and the caller is closer to a decision.
A meaningful number of those calls turn into larger jobs once someone competent is standing in the yard. The leak is the reason for the call, not the size of the opportunity.
Fence the money. Repair keywords will eat a shared budget because they get more volume, so give construction its own campaign with its own daily cap.
Route those calls to a person who can quote, not to a voicemail. A repair caller with a wet yard will phone the next builder inside ten minutes.
A budget that stops at first frost and starts again at the February thaw
Spend should follow the dig calendar and crew capacity, not the platform's monthly cycle.
Research happens through the winter. People decide on a backyard in January and call in March, so pulling the account to zero in December means arriving late to the season you are trying to fill.
Volume climbs hard at the thaw and stays high until the schedule fills. Once you are booked out, the honest move is to reduce spend rather than to buy inquiries you will disappoint. Never promise a timeline in ad copy you cannot hold.
Keep a smaller always-on line for renovation and repair, which sells across more of the year than new construction does.
Set pacing rules in writing before the season so the decision to pull back is not made in the middle of a busy week by whoever happens to be looking at the account.
Local Services ads and search ads do not belong on the same report card
They buy different things, fail in different ways, and averaging them together tells you nothing.
Local Services charges per lead and leans toward smaller, faster jobs. It depends on reviews and on screening, and it gives you very little control over which job type comes through.
Search gives you keyword level control, which is what a builder needs when the difference between a liner swap and a new gunite build is most of the year's revenue.
Run both if the economics work, but report them on separate lines with separate cost per booked job. One channel subsidizing the other inside a blended number is how builders end up defending a program they cannot explain.
Eligibility and verification requirements for these programs change. Worth confirming the current rules and any license documentation directly with the platform before budgeting around it.
What a booked dig actually costs you in Ballwin versus Belleville
A metro-wide cost per lead hides the two or three places where you should stop bidding entirely.
Import offline conversions from your CRM so the account can see which clicks became booked site visits and which became signed agreements. Without that, you are optimizing toward form fills, and form fills are not the product.
Tag every inquiry with a municipality, not a metro. Drive time across a county full of small jurisdictions varies more than a map suggests, and administrative variation adds days that a radius does not show.
Once the data exists, bid adjustments become an argument rather than a guess. Some municipalities will justify a premium. Some will not justify any bid at all.
Do not expect this in the first month. It takes a season of matched records before the numbers mean anything, and the honest version of a first quarterly review says which questions the data can now answer.
Questions we actually get
- How much should we put into January when nobody is digging?
- Enough to be present for the research, not enough to fund a full season's pace. The buying decision often happens months before the call, so going dark through winter means competing from behind in March. Set a floor for winter, a higher rate through the thaw, and a written rule for pulling back once the schedule is full.
- Should we advertise on the Illinois side if we are not set up there?
- No. Exclude it in the location settings rather than hoping bid adjustments handle it. The Metro East is under different state rules and licensing differs by state, so confirm what is required with the relevant authority or your own counsel before spending anything across the river.
- Are Local Services ads worth it for a builder rather than a service company?
- Sometimes, and only if you report it separately. It leans toward smaller and faster jobs and gives limited control over job type, which suits service work better than construction. Judge it on cost per booked site visit for the jobs you actually want, not on cost per lead.
- How do we keep pool cleaning searches out of a construction budget?
- Build the negative list before launch, not after the first invoice. Cleaning, opening, closing, chemicals and weekly service belong on the list if you do not sell them, along with pool tables, swim lessons and public aquatic centers. Then read the search terms report weekly for the first couple of months.
- Should we bid on competitor names?
- It is legal in most cases to bid on them, though using a competitor's name in ad text is a different question and worth confirming with your own counsel. Practically, competitor traffic in this trade is small and defensive. The renovation and repair terms usually return more for the same money.
