Separate gut-renovation searches from countertop-shopper searches before you bid
Campaign structure should follow the size of the job a searcher has in mind, because that is the variable that decides whether a click is worth paying for.
Structure by intent rather than by product. One campaign for full renovation and design-build intent, one for single-room scopes, one branded. Separate budgets so cheap clicks cannot eat the expensive ones.
Match types matter more here than in most trades. Broad match on bathroom remodel will collect people wanting a caulking service. Keep phrase and exact on the money terms and use broad only where you read search terms weekly.
Bid kitchen and bath separately. Same household, different budgets, different urgency, often a different close rate. Blending them hides which one is paying for the other.
Put the filter in the ad copy too. Stating the level of work you take, in plain language, does more qualifying than any bid adjustment.
The negative keyword list is where a remodeling account is actually won
In this trade the money saved by excluding the wrong searches usually exceeds the money made by improving the right ones.
Build the exclusion list before launch, not after the first invoice. Jobs, salary, apprentice, DIY, how to, cheap, free, wholesale, refacing kits, and every appliance or big-box brand you do not install.
Exclude the adjacent trades you do not want. Handyman, tile repair only, drain cleaning, countertop resurfacing. Those searches convert well and they convert into work you would rather not have.
Read the search terms report weekly for the first quarter, then fortnightly. In a metro this size the report is short enough to read line by line, so read it.
Add rental and property manager language to the exclusions if you sell to owner-occupiers. A management company pricing a bulk bathroom refit is a different business from a homeowner in Grandview Heights.
A radius around your office is the wrong shape for a remodeler's territory
Circles include water, farmland and streets you would never drive to, and they exclude the specific blocks that actually feed a design-build pipeline.
Target by municipality and by neighbourhood polygon instead. The city first, then the districts and corridors where the housing stock matches what you build.
Set bid adjustments by area rather than treating all of Palm Beach County as one market. A click from a street of 1920s houses in El Cid is not worth the same as a click from a 2005 subdivision.
Use presence rather than interest, unless you deliberately want to pay for someone out of state researching a Florida second home.
If second home owners are a real segment for you, run them as their own small campaign with copy about remote project management and video updates, rather than letting them contaminate the main account.
Cost per booked in-home consultation is the only number that pays the crew
Cost per lead flatters a campaign that produces form fills from people who will never sign, and remodeling produces plenty of those.
Instrument the whole chain. Click, form fill or call, qualified conversation, booked consultation, signed design agreement. Import the later stages back into the ad platform as conversions.
Once the platform optimises toward booked consultations rather than raw form fills, its behaviour changes character. It starts paying more for fewer, better clicks, which is what you want when one job carries real margin.
Review call recordings weekly rather than counting calls. Within a month you will know which keywords produce people who were never going to buy.
Set a target cost per booked consultation from your own close rate and job margin. Without that number, every conversation about budget is a matter of opinion.
Meta earns its place with finished-kitchen photography, not instant lead forms
Paid social does not capture existing demand for a remodeler; it builds familiarity so the later search click is cheaper and warmer.
Run real photography and short walkthrough video to homeowners in your target neighbourhoods. The creative is the targeting. A finished kitchen in a recognisably local house style filters the audience by itself.
Retarget everyone who viewed a project page. This sales cycle is long enough that retargeting has time to work and cheap enough that it usually should run continuously.
Treat instant lead forms with suspicion. They generate volume and, on a considered purchase, poor quality. If you use them, add qualifying questions and accept far lower numbers.
Upload your past customer list for a lookalike audience once it is large enough. Previous kitchen clients are the best available description of a future kitchen client.
Pace spend against the consultation calendar, not against the month
Your constraint is not budget; it is how many consultations a designer can hold and how many jobs the crew can start.
Work backwards. Decide how many starts you need in a quarter, calculate how many consultations that requires at your close rate, and set spend to produce that many. Then stop.
If the calendar fills, pull spend rather than banking leads. An enquiry that waits three weeks for a call is worse than no enquiry, because it becomes a review.
Do not push a flat monthly budget through a business with seasonal planning patterns. Shift weight toward the weeks your own booking history shows homeowners actually plan work.
Keep a small always-on branded campaign running. It costs little and it stops aggregators from buying your name in front of a homeowner who had already chosen you.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget to start?
- There is no honest generic answer, and any agency quoting one before seeing your close rate is guessing. The method is fixed though: decide how many job starts you need in a quarter, work back through your consultation-to-contract and enquiry-to-consultation rates, and fund the number of booked consultations that implies. Start with enough to gather a month of clean search term data on your core terms, then set the real number from your own figures.
- Should we bid on competitors' names?
- Sometimes, and carefully. It is cheap, it is legal to bid on the term itself, and it can catch a homeowner comparing two firms. Do not use a competitor's name in the ad text, keep the landing page a genuine comparison rather than a hit piece, and drop it if the click quality is poor. It is a small tactic, never a strategy.
- Search or Meta first?
- Search first, almost always. Someone typing a remodel query has already decided they want the work; you are buying an existing intention. Meta comes second, as photography and retargeting that make the eventual search cheaper. Running Meta first, with lead forms, is the fastest route to a pile of enquiries your estimator resents.
- Our leads are terrible. Is that the campaign or the market?
- Usually the campaign, and usually in one of three places: broad match with a thin negative list, geography set as a radius, or the account optimising toward form fills instead of booked consultations. Pull the search terms report for the last ninety days before blaming the market. The answer is normally sitting in it.
- Should we advertise a discount to get started?
- For high-ticket renovation, discounting mostly recruits price shoppers who will keep shopping. A stronger offer is something that costs the homeowner nothing and demonstrates competence: a structured in-home design consultation, a measured feasibility review, a clear explanation of what happens with permits. Sell the process, not the markdown.
