A homeowner searches your service and your city. Three franchises with budgets ten times yours are bidding on that search. You can still win it, because they're buying the whole country and you only need six zip codes. That's the entire advantage, and most local businesses never use it.
Book a call →You are paying for clicks. Do you know which ones turned into a job?
National brands run broad campaigns across hundreds of markets. Their targeting is wide, their ad copy is generic, and their landing pages don't mention your city. They're spending more than you and converting worse in your zip code.
You have the opposite setup. You know which neighborhoods generate the jobs you actually want. You know what the customer is really searching when they need you at 7am. You can put the city name in the headline and the phone number above the fold. Precision beats budget in a local auction, but only if someone's actually doing the precision work.
Conversions went from 7 to 17 between May 8 and Jun 4, 2026, measured against the prior 28 days, at $80.94 per conversion in the later window.
Growth like that comes from clean tracking, not luck. Most accounts I audit don't have it. Book a call and I'll tell you whether yours does.
Book a call →You're paying for "how to unclog a drain yourself" and "plumber salary." I've seen accounts burning a quarter of their budget on searches that could never have become a job.
Either it was never installed, or it's counting page views as conversions, which makes every report meaningless and every optimization decision a guess. If the number in your account doesn't match the number of calls you actually got, everything downstream is wrong.
Someone searched for emergency drain cleaning and landed on a page with a slideshow, an About Us link, and a contact form below the fold. The click cost you money. The bounce cost you the job.
Search is where I start for most local service businesses — it's the most controllable, the easiest to attribute, and the closest to intent. Performance Max can work well once there's conversion history to feed it, which is exactly how the Spartan campaign above got to +143%. Running PMax on an account with no clean conversion data is how budgets disappear.
If you're also eligible for Local Services Ads, that's usually the first thing to turn on. Here's how LSA compares →
Management is $1,500/mo plus a one-time $500 setup fee, the same price on every platform. Your ad budget is separate, goes directly to Google, and stays in your name. You keep the account: if we ever stop working together, the account, the history, and the conversion data go with you.
Every market has its own auction, its own click cost, and its own competition. Pick yours.
Emergency intent, high-ticket repipes, and the largest search volume in the region.
Seasonal demand spikes and a dense base of homeowners with aging systems.
Property turnover, cleanouts, and commercial work the franchises price too high for.
Older buildings, retrofit work, and job values that carry a higher cost per click.
Cheaper clicks and thinner competition than anywhere else I run campaigns.
Santa Cruz and every other trade and city combination I cover.
Enough to get meaningful data in your market — which depends on your trade and city, not on a number off a blog post. The right way to set it is backwards: what's a booked job worth to you, and what percentage of leads do you close?
I'd rather start you smaller and scale into what works than burn a big budget learning.
Yes. Management is $1,500/mo plus a one-time $500 setup fee. Your ad budget goes directly to Google on your own billing, and you control it. I never take a cut of ad spend, because that would give me a reason to recommend spending more than you should.
Conversion tracking, set up before launch. Calls from ads, click-to-call from mobile, and form fills are all tracked, so we can talk about cost per lead instead of guessing from clicks.
Without it you're reading impressions and hoping. With it you know which campaign paid for itself.
Yes. It's your account, in your name, with your billing. I work inside it. If we part ways you keep the account, the history, and every bit of conversion data we built. I don't hold accounts hostage.
Usually two to four weeks before there's enough data to start cutting waste and scaling what converts. The first couple weeks are about learning what searches actually turn into calls in your market.
Anyone promising profitable results in week one is guessing.
That's what the call is for. Bring me access and I'll tell you what's leaking — usually negatives, tracking, or where the traffic is landing. If your setup is already fine, I'll tell you that too.
Every week you wait, a competitor gets those calls. Book a call.
Spartan Junk Removal, Bay Area: 98.14% top impression rate, Jun 7 to Jul 6, 2026. See the case study →
Book a call →