Google Ads for contractors who sell projects, not visits.

Your estimator is your most expensive employee. Stop wasting his week.

Every lead that hits your inbox costs an estimator a site visit, a measure, and a proposal — call it 2–4 hours of skilled labor whether the job is worth $4,000 or $400,000. Most GC ad accounts we audit are optimized for cost-per-lead, which means the algorithm has quietly learned to bring in the cheapest, smallest, least-committed homeowners it can find. You end up with a full pipeline and an empty bank account.

Remodeling and addition projects also run on a long clock — homeowners research for months, get three bids, and often stall on financing before they sign. Your ad account has to be built to nurture that timeline, not just chase the click.

What each project type is actually worth your estimator's time.

Assumes a 20–25% close rate on qualified estimates. If your close rate is lower, the problem usually isn't the leads — it's the follow-up cadence during that 3-bid comparison window.

How we structure a GC ad account for a long sales cycle.

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  One campaign per project type, budgeted by margin

  Additions and whole-home renovations get first call on budget. Handyman and small repair keywords, if you run them at all, get capped hard so they can never crowd out the big-ticket campaigns.

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  A qualifying form before the phone rings

  Budget range, timeline, and project scope get asked on the landing page, before your team calls back. Homeowners who won't answer three questions in a form definitely aren't ready to sign a $50,000 contract.

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  Remarketing built for a 6-month decision

  Every past visitor who didn't convert gets followed with project galleries and financing content for months, not days. Most GCs turn remarketing off after two weeks — right when the homeowner is finally getting serious.

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  Negative keywords pulled from your CRM, not a template

  We cross-reference lost leads against search terms and permanently block the phrases that produce DIY questions, subcontractor job-seekers, and material-supply searches.

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  Weekly lead scoring, not monthly reporting

  Every lead gets tagged: qualified, quoted, won, lost, ghosted. 'Ghosted' is the category that kills GC pipelines — chase it as hard as you chase new clicks.

What a healthy GC ad account looks like.

Ads are one channel in a bigger system. See the full lead generation stack for remodelers for how it fits with referrals, directories, and organic.

General contractor ad questions

Why does Google Ads feel like a slot machine for contractors?

Because most GCs run one campaign for every service they offer, aimed at one landing page that says 'we do it all.' Google rewards specificity. A kitchen remodel searcher and a whole-home addition searcher have completely different budgets and timelines — mash them together and you get average results at best, wasted spend at worst.

How long until Google Ads pays off for a remodeler?

Expect 60–90 days before you can call it working. Remodel sales cycles run 8–20 weeks from first click to signed contract, so your first month of spend won't show revenue — it'll show pipeline. If your agency is grading week-two performance, they're grading the wrong thing.

Should I bid on cheap keywords to get volume?

No. A $600 bathroom refresh lead costs almost the same click price as a $90,000 addition lead, but eats the same sales-team hour to quote. Feed your estimator high-margin work first — see the ticket table above — and let the small stuff come organically through your local SEO instead of your paid budget.

What's a realistic starting budget?

$3,000–$6,000/mo in media for a single-market GC. Below that, you can't gather enough data across project types to know what's actually converting before the month resets. Above that without a full lead-gen system in place, you're just buying more unqualified leads faster.