- 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 inquiry-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 inquiries 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 optimizing 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.