Google Ads for carpenters who can only take so many calls

You decide how many calls

Most Google Ads advice assumes a business that wants as many enquiries as possible. A carpenter working alone wants as many good ones as the week can hold. Past that point, another call is a call you cannot return.

So we set up the account backwards. First you tell us how many quotes you can give in a week, the towns you will drive to and the jobs worth the fuel. The budget and the targeting follow from that. If the diary fills, we turn the ads down instead of leaving them running.

Big jobs and small jobs, kept apart

A person typing deck builder is planning a spend of thousands. They will look at photos, read a few pages and ask two or three carpenters to quote. A person typing door repair near me wants a visit this week.

We run these as separate campaigns. The deck campaign sends clicks to a deck page with your finished work and a quote form. The repair campaign sends clicks to a repair page with your phone number at the top. Each has its own budget, so you can see what a deck enquiry costs against what a repair enquiry costs.

Keeping out the wrong clicks

Carpentry phrases collect strange traffic. Deck builder also matches people searching for card game decks. Pergola searches pull in people shopping for kits to put up themselves. Some people want a carpenter's job, and some want timber from a supplier.

We read the search terms report each week and add negative keywords for game terms, kits, jobs, apprenticeships and supplier searches. Each one is checked against the work you do before it goes in. If you do supply and fit, supply stays in.

Hours that match the phone

On a job site you cannot always answer. A carpenter on a roof frame or a router does not hear the phone. An ad that rings out is money spent on a missed customer, and the customer rings the next name.

We schedule ads for the hours you pick up, and the phone number on the page is a tap to call. Outside those hours the ad can send people to a short form, with a clear line about when you will ring back. The form asks for a name, a phone number or email, and a comment.

Knowing where the call came from

Every enquiry from the ads should say so. On the site we built for Ovas Build, each enquiry email carries a line saying whether it came from Google Ads or from a page found in search, and phone taps and form sends are reported back to Google Ads. The account is then judged on enquiries, not only clicks.

We set up the same for carpenters. We count calls from the ad, taps on the number and forms sent. We keep out the actions Google counts by itself, such as clicks on a map inside the ad, because they make the total look bigger than the number of real people.

Spring and the wait

Deck and pergola work tends to build into spring. Ads for those jobs can start early, because the people planning in winter are often the ones who book first. Repair searches are steadier all year and need a smaller, even budget.

We plan the budget with you month by month and show you the spend as it goes.

Your account, your spend

You create the Google Ads account and add your own card. You pay Google directly for clicks, and we never hold your payment details. We are added as a manager, and you can remove us whenever you like.

Each month you get a short report on spend, clicks, enquiries and cost per enquiry, with the changes we made and why. We do not promise a number of enquiries. Our fee covers managing the account, month to month, and cancels on 30 days notice.