The 30-second version
We audit contractor Google Ads accounts constantly, usually after an owner says some version of “I’m spending real money and I can’t tell what I’m getting.” The accounts come from different agencies, different trades, different budgets, and they almost always have the same five leaks: broad match keywords running wild, a negative keyword list that stopped growing months ago, conversion tracking that counts the wrong things, every device and hour treated the same, and ads landing on the homepage. Here’s each one, and how to check your own account in about twenty minutes.
Leak 1: broad match with no adult supervision
Open your search terms report (not your keyword list, the actual searches that triggered your ads) and read fifty rows. In most contractor accounts we audit, a meaningful share of spend went to searches that were never going to become jobs: DIY questions, other companies’ names, jobs you don’t do, cities you don’t serve.
Broad match isn’t evil, but it’s a firehose that needs a hand on the valve. If nobody has looked at your search terms report in months, the valve has been open the whole time. At trade-level click prices, that’s the single biggest leak in most accounts.
Leak 2: the negative keyword list that stopped growing
Negative keywords are how you teach Google what you don’t want. The tell in audited accounts is a negative list with a creation date and no modification dates: somebody added “free,” “DIY,” and “jobs” on day one and never came back. Real negative list management is a weekly habit, because searchers invent new irrelevant queries forever. We’ve written a full routine for this in the 20-minutes-a-week negative keyword habit, and it’s the fastest fix on this list: an hour of search-term review this week will pay for itself immediately.
Leak 3: conversion tracking that counts the wrong things
Ask what the account is optimizing toward. In audit after audit, the answer is something like “clicks,” “impressions,” or a conversion action that fires on every page view. Google’s bidding algorithms do exactly what the conversion signal tells them to. Feed them junk signals and they optimize for junk.
For a contractor, the conversions that matter are phone calls of meaningful length and real quote-request submissions. That means call tracking wired into the account, form tracking that fires only on actual submission, and junk conversions removed so the algorithm stops chasing them. Until tracking is honest, every other optimization is guesswork stacked on sand.
Leak 4: every hour, device, and town treated identically
Contractor demand has a shape. Emergency searches spike at specific hours. Certain suburbs produce jobs at twice the rate of others. Mobile behaves differently than desktop when the searcher is standing in a flooded basement. Most audited accounts have never applied a single bid adjustment: no dayparting, no geographic bid tiers within the service area, no device strategy.
You don’t need anything exotic. You need the account’s own history, segmented by hour, device, and location, and adjustments that push budget toward where the booked jobs came from. The data is already sitting in the account; it’s just never been read.
Leak 5: ads that land on the homepage
Click your own ad (once, forgive yourself) and watch where it goes. If a search for “deck builder” lands on a homepage about everything you do, the visitor does the work of finding the deck page, and most won’t. Ad-to-page match is one of the quietest killers of contractor campaigns: it drags Quality Score, which raises your cost per click, and it drags conversion rate, which raises your cost per job from both directions at once.
Every meaningful service and every meaningful town deserves a landing page that continues the exact conversation the ad started. That’s a website structure problem as much as an ads problem, and it’s why we build the two together.
Run the twenty-minute self-audit
Search terms report: read fifty rows, count the junk. Negative list: check the last modification date. Conversions column: ask what fires it. Segment performance by hour and device: look for adjustments that were never made. Click an ad: see where you land. If three or more of these fail, your budget has been subsidizing the leaks, and the fix usually costs less than one month of the waste. The broader picture of where ads fit in a contractor’s marketing lives in our contractor marketing guide, and if you’d rather have a professional read of your own account, that’s what we do.
Common questions
My agency says the account is fine. Should I still check? Twenty minutes to verify is cheap. A good agency will happily walk you through the search terms report; hesitation to show it is information.
Which leak should I fix first? Tracking. Every other decision depends on knowing which clicks became jobs.
Are these leaks the agency’s fault? Sometimes it’s neglect, sometimes it’s an account set up in a hurry that nobody revisited. Either way, the fix is the same and the account history makes it obvious.