Home services
Google Ads for plumbers, HVAC, cleaners and contractors in Ottawa
Emergency calls, service areas and seasonality for home service companies that win work by answering the phone.
Home service work is decided on the phone. A furnace stops on a January night, a basement takes on water, or a cleaning schedule needs rearranging this week, and the person searching calls two or three companies. The business that answers first and sounds ready usually gets the job.
That shapes how a campaign should be built: emergency searches treated differently from quoted work, service areas drawn around where you want to drive, and call tracking that shows not just how many calls came in but how many were answered.
Where home service campaigns lose money
Sending a truck further than the job is worth
A radius drawn around the shop includes river crossings and highways that turn a twenty-minute job into an hour. Service areas should follow the communities you serve and the work you want, with the rest excluded.
Running emergency and quoted work together
No heat at 11pm and a quote for a new install are different searches, different clicks and different margins. One campaign for both flattens the numbers and hides which one is paying.
Missed calls nobody looks at
In this industry the phone is the booking system. Calls missed at lunch or between jobs are work that went elsewhere, and the weekly report should say how many happened.
Judging the campaign on call volume
A call is not a job. Quoted work can take weeks to turn into scheduled work, so the number to watch is cost per booked job, by service and by area.
What your customers search for
What homeowners in Ottawa type when something needs doing:
- furnace repair near me
- no heat emergency Ottawa
- plumber open now
- AC repair Kanata
- blocked drain Orleans
- duct cleaning Barrhaven
- roof repair Ottawa
- house cleaning near me
How we track the leads that come in
In home services, tracking is mostly about the phone. Tracked numbers show which search produced each call, and the report separates answered from missed. That second number is often the most uncomfortable line in the report and the most valuable, because a missed call is a job somebody else did.
Where the volume justifies it, we look at when calls get missed: the lunch hour, a busy Monday, the first hour after closing. Sometimes the fix is changing the hours your ads run, sometimes it is a second number, and sometimes it is simply knowing that the phone, not the budget, is the constraint.
- Calls credited to the search that produced them, by service and by area.
- Answered and missed calls counted separately.
- Quotes logged as leads, with the outcome fed back when the job is booked.
- Cost per booked job, not cost per call.
Seasonality, capacity and what to do when you are full
Home service demand in Ottawa runs on the calendar: heating through the cold months, air conditioning in the first hot week, roofing, gutters and exteriors in the shoulder seasons, cleaning fairly steady all year. Budget should follow, heavier when the work is there and lighter when it is not.
Capacity matters just as much. When the schedule is full, spending on emergency searches only adds calls you cannot serve, so we cap the spend, lower the bids or pause the campaigns, then switch them back on when you need work. That is one advantage of no contract: the campaign answers to your calendar, not to ours.
What we build for a home services account
Every account is different, but the shape is consistent:
- Separate campaigns for emergency work and for quoted work, because the two behave nothing alike.
- Ad copy that states your response time, the area you serve, and that you are licensed and insured.
- Call and location extensions, so the phone number and the map pin sit inside the ad itself.
- A landing page per major service, rather than one homepage doing every job.
- Negative keywords for do it yourself, jobs, training and how to searches, added from day one.
- A weekly report with spend, calls, missed calls and cost per booked job.
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