Buy whole-home replacement and exclude the broken pane, the screen and the tint job
Most of the waste in a window account is not a bad keyword, it is a good keyword matched against the wrong job.
Build the negative list before launch, not after the first invoice. Repair, glass repair, screen, screen enclosure, tint, film, cleaning, blinds, curtains, shutters if you do not sell them, plus the DIY and how-to modifiers and the job-seeker terms.
Broad match paired with automated bidding will happily find window film pricing and window cleaning near me. Guardrails are the difference between a profitable account and an expensive audience-discovery exercise.
Add the manufacturer brands you actually carry. A homeowner searching a specific brand plus a city name is a long way down the funnel and usually cheaper than the generic head term.
Watch the search terms report weekly for the first two months. In this category the terms report is the campaign strategy, not a reporting afterthought.
One campaign per product line, because a slider buyer and an entry door buyer are not the same person
Impact windows, sliding glass doors and front entry doors carry different price points, different objections and different close rates, so they should not share a budget.
Whole-home window replacement takes the majority of the budget and the longest sales cycle. Give it its own landing page, its own copy and its own conversion target.
Door campaigns are a smaller ticket that closes faster, which makes them useful for filling gaps in the install schedule rather than as the main engine.
If you do not sell hurricane shutters or screen enclosures, keep those searches out entirely. If you do, they belong in their own campaign with their own economics, not blended into the window numbers.
Structure this way and the reporting answers a real question: which product line is actually paying for itself this quarter.
Bid by geography, because the design wind speed across Palm Beach County is not flat
Location adjustments matter more in this county than in most, because job requirements and job value both vary by parcel.
Palm Beach County publishes an Ultimate Design Wind Speed map at Figure 1609.3(1) for Risk Category II with several contours across the county, and separate GIS tools per Risk Category, so the rating a product needs is generally looked up by address rather than read off a single countywide figure.
In practice a coastal Riviera Beach parcel and a parcel out toward Loxahatchee can be different jobs with different products and different tickets. Bid, write and land those clicks differently instead of blanketing the metro at one price.
Exclude what you will not drive to. A radius drawn around the office rather than around the crews' actual routes is a reliable way to buy unservable leads at full price.
If you put any specific figure in an ad or a landing page, confirm it against the current Palm Beach County Amendments to the Florida Building Code first. Marketing copy is a bad place to be approximately right about a code number.
Ad copy that describes what the product approval really says beats "Miami-Dade approved"
Competitors here lean on a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance as though it were the local requirement, which leaves a clean angle open to an accurate advertiser.
Florida statute generally bars a local building department from demanding further testing on a product that already holds statewide Florida Product Approval. An official at the City of West Palm Beach or the Palm Beach County Building Division cannot, in most cases, require an NOA on top of a valid Florida approval; the route open to them is a written finding that the specific application is inconsistent with the approval.
None of which makes an NOA worthless. Many manufacturers carry one, Florida statute names the Miami-Dade product control office as an approved evaluation entity, and the product still has to be rated for the pressures at that address. Nothing in this argument means lighter windows.
So write copy that offers something concrete: products approved for the pressures at your address, with the approval documentation attached to the quote. It converts better than a borrowed credential and it is true.
Anything that edges toward a code or compliance claim is worth running past the building official or your own counsel before it goes live.
Paid social sells the decision to start; search only catches the people who already made it
For a purchase this size the constraint is usually procrastination rather than awareness, and procrastination is a feed problem.
Run homeowner-targeted campaigns built on real install footage. A crew cutting a forty year old aluminium slider out of a stucco opening and setting the new unit sells better than a carousel of finished living rooms.
Retarget the people who read your wind rating page or your permit page. They have already done the homework and they are worth more than a cold click.
One practical warning: promotional financing offers can push a campaign into a restricted advertising category on the major platforms, which limits the targeting available to you. Check the category rules before you build a whole campaign around a monthly payment figure.
Measured on last click, paid social will look like a failure every time. Judge it on booked appointments and on movement in branded search volume instead.
Pace the budget against the install calendar, not against the month
A dealer who outsells the crews burns the pipeline, and one who goes dark in a slow week loses jobs that were there to be booked.
Tie pacing to the measure calendar. If appointments are booked out two weeks, ease off rather than buying leads that go cold before anyone gets to them.
Demand in this category moves with weather news and with insurance renewal timing rather than in a smooth curve. Keep the ability to spend fast when attention spikes, and the discipline to stop when it does not.
Report cost per booked in-home measure weekly and cost per signed contract monthly. Cost per lead flatters whichever campaign is generating the most repair calls.
Call tracking on every campaign, with recordings reviewed occasionally. A large share of responses to a window ad arrive as phone calls, and an account optimised only on form fills is optimising on the minority.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget to start?
- Work backwards instead of picking a round number. Take your average signed job value, your close rate from in-home measures, and your measure rate from leads, and the budget that can buy a meaningful sample in one product line falls out of that. Starting with one product line and one geography beats spreading a small budget across everything.
- Google Ads or Local Services Ads?
- They do different work. Local Services Ads sit above search results and are worth testing where your category is eligible, but eligibility and screening rules vary and change, so confirm before planning around them. Neither replaces a search campaign for a considered purchase where the homeowner reads before calling.
- Do we need separate landing pages, or can ads point at the website?
- Separate pages, matched to the campaign. A sliding glass door ad landing on a general homepage asks the visitor to do navigation work they will not do. The page should repeat the promise in the ad, show the product, and offer one action.
- Is paid social worth it for a job this size?
- Yes, but only if you measure it correctly. It creates demand rather than capturing it, so a last-click report will always undervalue it. Judge it on booked appointments, on retargeting performance, and on whether branded search rises while it runs.
- Competitors keep clicking our ads. What can be done?
- Some of it is real and most of it is over-attributed. The platforms filter a portion of invalid activity automatically. Beyond that, the practical defences are tight geography, IP exclusions where they help, and paying attention to cost per booked measure rather than to click counts, since click-level noise rarely survives to the appointment stage.
