Electric Medic's blog has a post about a circuit breaker that keeps tripping. Buckeye Electric's has one on electrical safety for do-it-yourselfers. Both are useful, honest articles, the kind that earn an electrician free visits from Google search and a reputation for knowing the trade.
They're also landing pages, whether you meant them to be or not. In a Performance Max campaign, Google picks which page on your site each paid click goes to, and unless you tell it otherwise, an article on resetting a breaker is on the menu.
We pulled the sitemaps of the 12 electrical contractors in our example market, Columbus, Ohio. At least nine of them publish how-to and advice articles. At least six have a careers page. Three sell plumbing and heating and cooling too, with hundreds of pages about drains and furnaces. Every one of those pages is somewhere Performance Max can spend an electrician's ad budget. This chapter covers when Performance Max earns its turn and how to fence it in before it does.
Performance Max Gets Its Turn Only After Search Logs About 30 Quality Conversions a Month
Performance Max is a single campaign that runs across all of Google's ad space at once: Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and the display network. You give it a goal, a budget and a set of assets, and Google's automation decides where each dollar goes.
That automation learns from conversions, and it learns badly from a few. So Performance Max waits. In this method, the Search campaigns from Chapters 6 and 7 go first, and Performance Max launches once the account logs about 30 quality conversions a month, the real calls, forms and bookings Chapter 1 set up. For most electrical contractors that's around months six or seven. A contractor spending more each month reaches that count earlier. The calendar doesn't open the gate. The phone does.
Three settings at launch:
- The goal is conversions, not conversion value. Value-based bidding needs steady job-value data, and most electrical accounts aren't there yet.
- No target cost per conversion at first. Let the campaign spend for a few weeks and show what its leads cost, then add a target based on that number, the same way Exploration got its target in Chapter 7.
- Location stays on Presence, for the towns your trucks reach, exactly as Chapter 9 set up for Search.
Final URL Expansion Comes Switched On. It Can Land a Paid Click on a "Breaker Keeps Tripping" Article.
When you build a Performance Max campaign, you give it a landing page, say your panel upgrade page. Then Final URL expansion lets Google trade that page for any other page on your domain it judges a closer fit for the person searching. Google's help page is clear on two points: the setting starts out on, and it can send traffic to any page on your domain you haven't excluded.
Here's what that covers on the example sites:
- How-to and advice articles: at least 9 of 12 sites. Counts run from 8 posts on Buckeye's blog to 33 on Safe Electric's site, and R & T Yoder's sitemap lists about 379 article-style pages across its three trades.
- Careers and job pages: at least 6 of 12.
- Plumbing and heating-and-cooling pages: 3 of 12, all of them multi-trade companies, from 59 pages at Peterman Brothers to 328 at R & T Yoder.
We didn't find a sitemap for one site, and we counted only the Columbus pages of the two national franchises. Both franchise sites carry hundreds of blog posts written for other territories, which we left out, so the real totals are higher, not lower.
Chapter 2 split electrical searches into two kinds: people who want an answer, and people who want a truck. "Breaker keeps tripping" is mostly the first kind. Somebody reading how to reset it costs the same click price as somebody pricing a panel swap, and Chapter 2 showed which of the two calls an electrician. Final URL expansion is good at matching a question to the page that answers it. That's exactly the problem. The best answer on your site is often the page least likely to put a truck in a driveway.
Careers Listings and Plumbing Pages Left Open to Performance Max Can Spend Money Meant for Panel Jobs
The fix is a short list of exclusions, set before the campaign spends a dollar. In the campaign's URL settings, Google lets you exclude specific pages or write rules, such as "URL contains /blog/." For a typical electrical site, the rules look like this:
- Articles. Exclude /blog/, or the folder your articles live in. If your posts sit at the top level of the site, exclude them by the words their addresses share.
- Careers. Exclude /careers/, /job-openings/ or /join-our-team/. A job seeker who lands on an electrician's careers page from an ad is a click you paid for to fill your own hiring funnel, at ad prices.
- Expired offers. Exclude old coupon and specials pages, so an ad can't promise last spring's $100 off.
- The other trades, at multi-trade shops. Exclude /plumbing/, /hvac/, /drains/ and the like. If the company also runs plumbing or heating ads, those trades belong in their own campaigns with their own goals.
None of this means the careers page doesn't matter. Most electrical contractors need apprentices and journeymen as badly as they need customers. But a job application counted as a customer lead teaches Performance Max to find more job seekers, and it inflates the conversion count Chapter 1 worked so hard to keep honest. When the shop is short on apprentices, recruiting gets its own campaign and its own application conversion, kept apart from the jobs homeowners book.
There are two stricter options. You can turn Final URL expansion off entirely, so every click goes to the pages you named. Or you can give Google a page feed: a list of exactly the service pages it's allowed to use. For a small site with a dozen good service pages, the feed is the cleanest fence. For a large multi-trade site, exclusion rules are easier to keep current.
Whichever you choose, check the landing page report once a month. New posts, job listings and seasonal pages show up on electrical sites constantly. A rule like "contains /blog/" catches the new posts automatically, but a page excluded by name, or an article published at the top level of the site, slips through until someone adds it.
Your Customer List and Your Best Search Terms Teach Performance Max Who Hires an Electrician
Performance Max finds its own audience, but you can tell it where to start looking. Google calls these audience signals. They're hints, not fences: the campaign can and will go beyond them. Good hints still shorten the learning.
- Your customer list. Your field-service software, whether ServiceTitan, Jobber or Housecall Pro, holds the names, emails and phone numbers of everyone who's hired you. Uploaded as a Customer Match list, it shows Google what your customers look like. Google allows only first-party data you collected yourself, and you need consent where the law requires it. Unlike the medical guides in this series, an electrical contractor can use this signal freely within those rules.
- Custom segments. Build one from the searches that already booked jobs in Isolation, and one from the competitor websites you found in Chapter 5. Google uses those to profile people with similar interests. It doesn't retarget visitors of your competitors' sites.
- Search themes. Each asset group holds as many as 25 of them. Take them from your best-converting search terms in Search, such as "electrical panel upgrade," "ev charger installation" and "whole house generator installation," not from guesses.
- Your own company name. Exclude it. The brand campaign from Chapter 9 already covers searches for your name more cheaply, and letting Performance Max claim them makes its results look better than they are.
Real Job Photos and a Phone Video Beat the Ads Google Builds on Its Own
Performance Max ads need headlines, descriptions, images, logos and video. If you leave gaps, Google fills them. Fill them yourself.
Headlines and descriptions come from the work Chapter 8 already did. The lines that drove calls in Search, "Trip Fee Told Up Front" or "Problems Explained Plainly" if they're true at your shop, go into the asset group. Skip the AI-generated text option at setup. It writes from your website, which, as this chapter has shown, is full of articles.
Images should be your own: a finished panel with neat labels, a charger mounted in a real garage, your van with your name on it, your crew. Stock photos of smiling models with hard hats look like every other ad in the feed, and homeowners can tell.
Video is where most electrical shops leave a gap. Google's specs are blunt about it: if you don't upload a video, Google will make one for you from your images and text. An auto-built slideshow of stock clips and your logo runs on YouTube under your name. A 20-second phone video of an electrician explaining a panel upgrade in a real basement costs nothing and looks like a real company, because it is.
Then give it time. Performance Max shifts spend around while it learns, and judging it on its first two weeks is like judging a new hire on their first morning. Read the landing page report, the search terms and the cost per conversion monthly, and compare them against Search, which keeps running alongside it.
Next: EV Charger Buyers Compare Quotes for Weeks. Chapter 11 Reaches Them While the Shortlist Is Still Open.
Performance Max works the searches people already make. Chapter 11 covers Demand Gen, which reaches homeowners on YouTube and Google's feeds before they search, starting with the long, quote-comparing road to an EV charger install. Chapter 9 set up the campaign settings Performance Max inherits, and Chapter 2 explains why an answer-seeking click rarely becomes a job.
The full set of sixteen chapters is gathered on the guide's home page.
When an electrical contractor's account reaches the Performance Max gate under our Google Ads management, the exclusion list is written before the campaign is. Running your own? Open your sitemap, usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, and count the pages that aren't selling a service. That number is how many places Performance Max can send your money by default.
