Most of the accounts we audit are spending real money on searches that were never going to turn into a customer.
Someone researching a career in HVAC. Someone in Charlotte. Someone looking for the free version of what you sell. The account looks fine on the dashboard because the dashboard reports clicks, and clicks are exactly what you’re paying for.
What matters is cost per booked job. To know that number you need conversion tracking that works, call tracking that ties a phone call back to a keyword, and someone reading the search term report every month. That’s most of what this service is.
Account audit and cleanup. Before we change anything, you get a written list of what’s wasting money: the search terms that shouldn’t have matched, the campaigns competing with each other, the conversions being counted twice.
Conversion and call tracking, installed first. Dynamic number insertion so a phone call ties back to the keyword that produced it. Form fills separated by type, because a contact form and a quote request are not the same lead. We won’t run an account without this, and we test it with a real call and a real submission before launch.
Campaign builds across the formats that fit. Search first, always. Then Shopping if you sell products, YouTube and Display for retargeting, and Performance Max only when it earns its place.
Negative keyword maintenance, monthly. Not a one-time list at setup. An account left alone accumulates junk queries continuously, and this is the single most reliable way to lower your cost per lead.
Landing page review. We’ll tell you when the ads are fine and the page is the problem. Sometimes that’s a fifteen-minute fix and sometimes it’s a new site.
Bid strategy and budget management, including the conversation where we tell you to spend less.
Reporting you can read in four minutes. Leads, cost per lead, cost per booked job, what changed, what’s next.
Read-only access is all we need. You get a written document back either way.
Across 13,000-plus search campaigns measured between April 2025 and March 2026, the all-industry averages were $5.42 per click, an 8.18% conversion rate, and $66.69 per lead.
| Industry | Avg. CPC | Conversion rate | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| All industries | $5.42 | 8.18% | $66.69 |
| Home & home improvement | $8.33 | 8.05% | $90.92 |
| Dentists & dental services | $8.00 | 10.67% | $72.97 |
| Physicians & surgeons | $4.76 | 12.43% | $40.04 |
| Attorneys & legal services | $9.87 | 5.55% | $131.63 |
Source: WordStream 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks.
Two things to take from that table. If you’re in home services, a $90 lead is normal, not a failure, and anyone promising you $25 leads is either counting things that aren’t leads or hasn’t run a campaign in your category. And if your dental practice is converting at 6% when the category median is 10.67%, the problem is almost certainly the landing page, not the bidding.
Google has spent three years pushing everyone into Performance Max, and the pitch is that the machine allocates your budget better than you can. Sometimes that’s true. The problem is that it decides across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover at once, and the reporting doesn’t tell you cleanly where the money went.
How we handle it: a standard Search campaign running in parallel so your highest-intent exact-match terms get priority, account-level negatives and brand exclusions so PMax doesn’t just harvest people already searching your name, asset groups split by service line, and API pulls to get query-level data the interface won’t show you.
Some accounts we run at 30% Performance Max. Some at zero. It depends on whether it’s actually finding you customers you weren’t already reaching.
Read-only access, written findings back. Yours to keep either way.
Nothing launches until a test call and a test form submission both land where they should.
Structure, keywords, negatives, ad copy, extensions, landing page recommendations.
Heavy pruning. Expect the cost per lead to drop through this window rather than start low.
Monthly search term review, negative maintenance, creative testing, and a report you can read.
Work backward from what a customer is worth. If a booked job is worth $800 to you and your close rate on leads is one in four, you can afford roughly $200 per lead and still be well ahead. At the home services benchmark of about $91 per lead, that’s healthy. Most Triangle service businesses land somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, but the number that matters is yours, not the range.
Nothing. Same service, different vocabulary. PPC (pay per click) is the older industry term and some people still search for it that way. Search engine marketing is a third name for roughly the same thing.
You’ll get clicks on day one and meaningful data in about 30 days. Real optimization takes 60 to 90, because that’s how long it takes to accumulate enough conversions to make decisions that aren’t noise.
Yes, and some people do it well. The two things that catch most people out are conversion tracking (easy to set up wrong, and then every decision after that is based on bad data) and the search term report (tedious, unglamorous, and the highest-return hour in the whole account). If you’re going to do it yourself, do those two things properly and you’ll beat a lot of agencies.
Established businesses with something to sell today and the capacity to handle more calls. It works best when you know what a customer is worth to you.
If you need leads this week and haven’t run ads before, if nobody can answer the phone during business hours, or if your budget is small enough that the management fee eats most of it. We’ll say so on the first call.
Related: website design and local SEO, which is where the traffic lands and what keeps working when the ads are off.
