What should I actually be paying for ads, and what should it return?
Your ad budget should be set by what a customer is worth to you, not by a percentage somebody quoted. A local service business should know its cost per qualified call and its cost per booked job, and should be able to trace both back to a specific search term. If your current account cannot answer those two questions, the budget is not the problem. The measurement is.
- Every call tracked so you can see which search term produced which job
- Wasted spend mined out of the account weekly, not quarterly
- Google, Meta, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Local Services Ads under one plan
The part most people get wrong
Most wasted spend is not a bidding problem
It is a matching problem. Google will happily show your ad for searches that share a word with your service and nothing else: people looking for jobs, people looking for parts, people three states away, people who wanted the thing you do not sell. Left alone, that traffic quietly eats a real share of the budget every month while the account still reports a healthy click-through rate.
A lead you cannot trace is a lead you cannot price
If the phone rings and nobody knows which campaign caused it, every decision after that is guesswork. Tracking every call back to its source is what makes it possible to cut the half of the budget that is not working instead of cutting the whole thing when the quarter gets tight.
Local Services Ads sit above everything else
For the trades, Local Services Ads appear above the regular search results and charge per lead rather than per click. They are also the channel most likely to send you junk if nobody is disputing the bad leads. Running them without a dispute process is how businesses conclude the channel does not work.
What the work actually is
1. Set the baseline and the math before spending anything
What is a job worth, what share of leads close, and what can you afford to pay for a booked job. That gives us a target cost per lead to run against instead of a vague goal to "lower the cost per click."
2. Get tracking right first
Every call and form tracked back to the campaign and search term that caused it, wired into your CRM. We do this before we scale spend, because scaling an untracked account just buys more of what you cannot measure.
3. Start on the channel closest to the money
For most local service businesses that is Google search plus Local Services Ads, because those people are already looking for you. Meta, Microsoft, and LinkedIn come in once the first channel has a stable cost per booked job.
4. Mine the waste weekly
Search-term review and negative keywords every week, not once a quarter. This is unglamorous and it is where most of the return comes from in the first ninety days.
5. Report on booked jobs, not impressions
You get cost per qualified call and cost per booked job, tracked to your CRM. Impressions and click-through rate are diagnostics, not results.
For a Kauai restoration company we traced $1.17M in revenue back to the work. Counting only what we could attribute conservatively, $434,642, that is still 17x what they paid us. A separate 7-location auto brand runs at $17 to $22 per qualified call. Both are real accounts and we will walk you through the tracking on the call.
What we see go wrong
- Judging the account on cost per click instead of cost per booked job.
- Running Local Services Ads without disputing the bad leads, then concluding the channel is broken.
- Letting broad match run unattended, which turns the budget into a donation to loosely related searches.
- Sending every ad to the homepage instead of a page that answers the exact search.
- Pausing everything the moment a slow month arrives, which throws away the learning the account has accumulated.
Who this is for
This works best when you have capacity to fill now and a job worth enough to pay for a click: restoration, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, legal, dental, and similar. High-ticket work absorbs the cost of paid traffic in a way low-ticket work usually cannot.
When this is the wrong thing to buy
- Your average job is small. If a customer is worth $80, paid search math rarely closes, and we will point you at local search and reviews instead.
- You cannot answer the phone. Speed to lead decides paid media outcomes more than bidding does. If calls go to voicemail during the day, fix that first.
- You want to spend under a few hundred dollars a month. Below a real budget there is not enough data to optimise on, and you will pay management fees on noise.
What people ask before they call
How much should I spend on Google Ads each month?
Work backwards from a booked job. If a job is worth $6,000 in profit, one in four leads closes, and you are willing to pay 10% of that profit to win it, you can afford roughly $150 per lead and about $600 per booked job. Budget is then whatever number of jobs you want multiplied by that figure. Anyone quoting a budget before asking what a job is worth is guessing.
What does Advocate 1917 charge to manage paid media?
Paid media management starts at $1,499 per month, which covers one platform, negative-keyword mining, conversion tracking, and the search work underneath it. Two platforms and workflow automation start at $2,500. You keep ownership of your ad accounts and your card pays the platforms directly, so the spend is never routed through us.
How long before ads produce leads?
Usually days, which is the entire point of paid media. Stable cost per booked job takes longer, normally 60 to 90 days, because that is how long it takes to mine out the wasted spend and accumulate enough conversions to optimise against.
Do you require a long contract?
Six months minimum on paid media. Not to trap you, but because the first 60 to 90 days are spent building the tracking and cutting the waste, and leaving before that means paying for the setup and none of the payoff.
Should I run ads or do SEO first?
If the schedule is soft right now, ads. They buy attention immediately. Search visibility compounds and lowers your cost per lead over time but will not fill next week. Most clients run both, with ads carrying the near term while search work builds underneath it.
Who owns the ad account and the data?
You do. We manage accounts you own, on a card you control. If the engagement ends, the account, the history, and the conversion data stay with you.
Get a straight read on your ad spend
If you are already spending on ads, the fastest thing I can do is look at where the money is going. Answer four questions and grab a time, and I will review the account before we talk and show you what is working and what is not.
Let’s find your business
So I look at the right business in the right town.
Advocate 1917
1669 Lasea Rd, Spring Hill, TN 37174
Hours
Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Saturday and Sunday closed.
Service area
Middle Tennessee and nationwide across the US, Canada, and the UK.