We read the websites of 12 electrical contractors that advertise on Google in our example market, Columbus, Ohio, and wrote down what each one says about its hours.
Six make no promise of round-the-clock service. One schedules jobs online 24/7 but doesn't promise a truck at night. Others post office hours like "Mon-Fri 7am-5pm" or "Office Hours Mon - Fri, 7:30am - 4:00pm" and ask after-hours callers to contact them about availability. Of the six that do promise 24-hour emergency service, two post weekday office hours that end by 5 p.m., and a third says its 24/7 on-call service "is based on technician availability."
Now open a brand-new Google Ads campaign. Its ad schedule is set to "All day." Every one of those 12 shops would be buying clicks at 2 a.m. on a Sunday unless someone changed it.
That's one of the defaults Google switches on for you. Here are the six we change before an electrical account spends its first dollar, plus the few settings that should stay on.
Google's Default Schedule Runs Electrical Ads Around the Clock. The Hours Someone Answers Are the Hours to Buy.
The schedule question isn't "when are we open?" It's "when does a human being pick up the phone?" Those are often different hours. A shop with a 7-to-5 office and an owner who grabs the late calls on their own cell is open until whenever they're willing to answer. A shop with a 24/7 line that rolls to voicemail after 6 isn't open at night, whatever the website says.
Set the ad schedule to the hours a person answers. That includes an answering service, as long as it can book the job or dispatch someone. A service that takes a name and promises a callback tomorrow is a voicemail with better manners. For the shop answering 7 to 5 on weekdays, that's ten hours a day, five days a week. The rest of the week, the ad stays dark and the budget waits for morning.
The schedule can also do more than switch the ad on and off. Google lets you raise or lower bids for particular days and hours, which pairs naturally with Chapter 7's hand-set bids. If the first weeks show that Monday mornings bring the calls that turn into panel jobs, while Friday afternoons bring price checks, nudge the bid up for the first and down for the second. Don't start there, though. Launch with the plain on-and-off schedule, then let a month of calls tell you which hours deserve more money. A schedule based on a hunch about when homeowners search is just the "All day" default with extra steps.
Two details catch people out. The schedule runs on the account's time zone, so an account opened by someone in another state can quietly run on the wrong clock. And this is the schedule for the main campaign. Whether to chase after-hours emergency calls is a separate decision with its own rules, including Google's requirement to show the after-hours fee. Chapter 14 builds that campaign on its own, with its own hours.
Presence or Interest Shows Your Ad to People Who Only Read About Your Town. Presence Keeps It to Homes Your Trucks Reach.
Pick Columbus as a target and Google, left alone, sets the location option to "Presence or interest." That covers the homeowners who live or spend time in the area, and also anyone, anywhere, whose searches suggest they care about the place. Interest can come from the words they search. For a hotel, the second group is the whole point. For an electrician, it's mostly people your trucks will never visit: a homeowner three states away reading about Columbus, a student researching the city.
Switch it to "Presence." Google describes that option as the one for advertisers who only want to reach people actually located in their target areas, which describes nearly every electrical contractor. A panel swap can't be done remotely.
Then draw the map from your own website, not from a guess at a radius. Eleven of the 12 example sites already name the towns or counties they cover, from seven suburbs on one site to 49 neighborhoods and towns on another's quote form. The twelfth links a service-area page we didn't open. Those lists are the truck routes. Target the same towns and counties in Google Ads, and leave out the ones the crew won't drive to.
The town list matters for keywords too. Chapter 6 found 64 hiring searches in the example market that pair "electrician" with one of 22 towns around the metro. An account targeting the right towns shows up for those searches. One targeting a 40-mile circle around the shop pays for some suburbs nobody on the crew wants to drive to.
Search Partners Come Switched On in Every New Campaign. An Electrical Account Starts on Google Alone.
Search partners are part of every new Search campaign until somebody unticks them. Those are other websites that show Google's search ads, and you can't see in advance which ones will carry yours. At launch, every dollar should go where the homeowner typed the search into Google itself. Uncheck search partners in the campaign's Networks settings, and come back to test them once the account has enough conversions to judge whether partner clicks turn into jobs.
On the same card, check the Display Network box. Display expansion puts a Search campaign's ads on websites and apps across Google's display network. A banner on a recipe site isn't where someone with a dead breaker goes looking. Make sure it's unchecked.
Three smaller settings round out the build:
- Budget. Start low enough that the first week's spend tells you what clicks really cost against Keyword Planner's estimates. Chapter 7's hand-set bids need a few days of real data before you raise anything.
- Language. Google now matches Search ads by the language of the ad itself, not a campaign setting. If you serve Spanish-speaking homeowners, that means Spanish ads in their own ad groups, pointing to a Spanish page.
- The marketing objective. The goal Google has you choose on the first screen of campaign setup has no effect on how the campaign spends. Pick leads and move on.
AI Max and Automatically Created Assets Write Electrical Ads You Never Approved. Both Come On by Default.
Start a fresh Search campaign for panel upgrades and you'll find AI Max already ticked. Google's setup page says so in four words: "turned on by default." With it on, Google stretches the campaign onto searches beyond your keywords, drafts extra headlines from your site's text, and picks which of your pages each click lands on. In a mature account with steady conversion data, that can find extra jobs. In a brand-new electrical account, it means ads you never wrote, on searches you never chose, landing on pages you never picked.
Picture what that looks like for a shop whose old generator page still mentions a manufacturer rebate that ended last year, or a multi-trade company whose site is mostly furnaces. Chapter 13 covers how to use AI Max safely once the account has earned it. At launch, switch it off in the campaign's settings.
The older version of the same idea goes with it. Automatically created assets, now called text customization, let Google write extra headlines and descriptions from your site. Starting in September 2026, campaigns using it are upgraded to AI Max automatically, so leaving it on is the same as leaving AI Max on. Dynamic Search Ads, which build ads straight from your pages, are scheduled to move under AI Max in February 2027. They stay off too.
One more default to check while you're in there: the keywords in Isolation run on exact match only. Broad match belongs in Exploration, once the account has about 30 quality conversions a month, which Chapter 6 laid out.
Without Auto-Tagging and Call Reporting, No Electrician Can Tell Which Click Rang the Phone
Not every default is a problem. A few settings should be on from the first day, and two of them are what connect a phone call back to the ad that caused it.
Auto-tagging stamps each click with an ID that lets a booked job, weeks later, be credited to the ad and keyword that started it. It's how Chapter 1's job values find their way back to the keyword that earned them. New accounts get it switched on automatically. Check it anyway, in the account settings, because an account someone else set up years ago may have it off.
Call reporting is what lets Google count calls from your ads as conversions and, with call recording, judge which ones were real leads. Chapter 1 built the call conversions. They only work if call reporting is on and the ads carry a call asset or a verified phone number.
Two more belong on the list:
- Ad rotation: Optimize. Google shows the ad combinations most likely to get clicks. Its alternative, "Do not optimize," isn't recommended for most advertisers, according to Google itself.
- Your company name in a campaign of its own. Searches for your business by name are the cheapest calls you'll ever buy. Put those searches in a small campaign of their own, separate from the panel, EV charger and generator ad groups, and don't block them with exclusions either. That way your service campaigns' numbers show what new customers cost, not what returning ones do.
That's the whole build. Six defaults switched off: the all-day schedule, Presence or interest, search partners, Display, AI Max and text customization. A handful switched or checked on. None of it takes more than an hour, and every one of them shows up on the bill if you skip it.
Next: Performance Max Waits for 30 Quality Conversions a Month. Then It Needs Fencing Off From Your Plumbing Pages.
Once Search is booking jobs, the next campaign type comes into play. Chapter 10 covers when Performance Max earns its turn and how to keep it from selling the wrong trade. Chapter 8 wrote the ads these settings will run, and Chapter 6 explains the Exploration campaign that broad match waits for.
The full set of sixteen chapters is gathered on the guide's home page.
Before our Google Ads management team buys the first click for an electrical contractor, every setting in this chapter has already been changed. Setting up your own? Open your campaign's settings tonight and check two things first: the ad schedule and the location option. If they still say "All day" and "Presence or interest," you've found your first two fixes.
