Most contractors already own the best advertising material they'll ever have, and most of it is sitting in a phone's camera roll.
We profiled the websites of 12 remodelers, builders and design-build firms in our example market, Raleigh-Durham. Ten of them carry galleries of their own finished jobs: kitchens with the before and the after, additions framed and then finished, decks at dusk. Two post job videos as well. That's a remodeling business's proof, shot by the people who did the work.
Performance Max is the campaign that can put that proof in front of homeowners across Google: on YouTube, in Gmail, on Maps, on websites and in search results, all from one campaign. It's also the campaign that, left alone, will fill its empty slots on its own. Leave the video slots blank and Google's help page says it may assemble a video from your other photos and text by itself.
This chapter covers when a contractor's account is ready for Performance Max, what to give it so it doesn't have to invent anything, and the three controls that keep it from spending your money in the wrong places.
A Remodeling Account Earns Performance Max at About 30 Booked Estimates a Month.
Of everything in a remodeler's account, Performance Max hands Google the most of the steering wheel. You supply the booked-estimate goal, the money and the job photos; Google chooses the channel, the homeowner and the price of every showing. That's a lot of decisions, and every one of them is learned from your conversions.
That's why it comes late. Our gate builds on the one Chapter 6 used for broad match: Performance Max starts once the account is booking about 30 quality conversions a month with the exact match and broad match campaigns both running, and holding that pace. For most contractor accounts that's around months 6-7. That's the usual calendar, not the rule. A remodeler with a bigger budget and a busier phone gets there sooner.
Launch it before that and it has almost nothing to learn from, spread across six different places to spend. In our experience, that's when Performance Max spends on whatever is cheapest to buy, not on what books estimates.
Two settings for the launch:
- The goal is booked estimates, the same conversion Chapter 1 set up, counted rather than valued. In our experience, a remodeler's estimates vary too much in size for value bidding to help this early.
- No target cost per estimate at launch. Let the campaign spend its first month learning, then set the target from what it actually paid, the same way Chapter 7 handed Isolation's real cost to broad match.
The location setting carries over from Chapter 9: Presence, and the same map your crews drive.
Ten of 12 Contractor Sites We Checked Already Have the Photos Performance Max Needs.
Every Performance Max campaign runs on asset groups: a bundle of images, videos, headlines and descriptions tied to one landing page. Google's limits are generous. Each asset group takes up to 15 images and up to 15 videos, each video at least 10 seconds long, in horizontal, square and vertical shapes.
What happens if you don't fill them matters more than the limits. Google's help page on video assets is direct about it: if you don't add a video, Google may create one automatically from the other assets in the group. The way to opt out is simple. Upload a video of your own. The same page also cautions that an auto-generated video can show a customer something different from what's on the page they land on.
For a remodeler, that's an easy call. You already have the footage, or you can have it by Friday.
Look at how much one small firm already has. Kozub Remodels, a kitchen and bath remodeler in our example market, keeps a "Proof of Work" page listing 8 projects and 41 photos. That's enough to fill a kitchen asset group and a bath asset group with real work and have photos left over, before anyone picks up a camera again. Most of the 12 sites we profiled were in the same position: the photos exist, they just live on the website and not in the ads.
Video is where most contractors are thin. Only 2 of the 12 sites posted job videos. That's the gap Google fills with an auto-made slideshow if you let it, and the cheapest one in this whole guide to close: a phone, a finished room and a steady hand.
What to put in each asset group:
- Real job photos, never stock. A homeowner can tell a stock kitchen from a real one in a second, and the stock one tells them you didn't have a real one to show. Use your own work: the finished room from several angles, a before shot, the details you're proud of, the crew on site.
- Short phone videos. Ten to thirty seconds walking through a finished kitchen, shot once horizontal, once square, once vertical. No music, no titles needed. Steady and well lit beats polished.
- No assets Google makes for you. With text customization on, Google says it may generate headlines, descriptions and other assets, including images pulled from your landing pages, and its own help page tells advertisers who don't want that to switch text customization off. Do that, and skip any AI image tool too. A generated kitchen is a promise you can't keep, and it's the opposite of the proof you already have.
- The headlines that already work. Move the best-performing headlines from your Search ads (Chapter 8) into each group. Each kitchen or bath group has room for 15 short lines and 5 longer ones, so there's space for every review line that earned its place.
A practical shot list for one kitchen asset group, all from a single finished job:
- Three wide shots of the finished room, from the doorway, from the far corner and from the island.
- Two before shots from the same spots, if you took them.
- Four details: the counter edge, the cabinet hardware, the tile, the lighting.
- Two of the crew working, taken during the job, faces only with permission.
- One of the homeowner in the finished kitchen, only with written permission.
- Three more from a second kitchen so the group isn't a single project on repeat.
Then the three walk-through videos. Make it a habit at every final walk-through, and in a year you'll have more than any asset group can hold.
Build one asset group per project, the same way Chapter 5 built one ad group per project: kitchens, baths, additions, basements, outdoor living. Each one points to its own project page from Chapter 4 and carries only that project's photos. A homeowner looking at bathroom ads shouldn't see your deck.
A Homeowner Typing Your Company Name Already Picked You. Performance Max Shouldn't Pay for That Click.
Performance Max can show your ads on search results, and left alone it will happily show them on searches for your own business name. Those are homeowners who already know you. Chapter 9 gave them their own small brand campaign with its own budget. Performance Max shouldn't be competing with it and taking credit for the conversion.
Google's tool for this is the brand exclusion. It blocks your ads from searches for your business name and common misspellings, and Google's own help page recommends it for exactly this case: an advertiser who already runs brand traffic in a separate campaign. Add your company name, and any older names the business has traded under.
The second control is the landing page. Final URL expansion is turned on by default in Performance Max, which lets Google send a homeowner to whatever page on your site it decides fits. Turn it off for a launch, or at least exclude the pages that aren't for buyers:
- The blog and project-cost articles
- The careers page
- Commercial or multifamily work, if you list it
- Old promotions and expired offers
Every asset group already has its own project page. Google doesn't need to pick a different one.
Audience Signals Are Suggestions. Feed Them Your Clients' Searches and Your Rivals' Sites.
The last piece is telling Performance Max who your customers are. Google calls these audience signals, and the name is accurate: they're suggestions, not a fence. Google states plainly that the campaign can wander past them to any homeowner it rates as a likely buyer.
So the signal's job is to give the campaign a good place to start. We build three before launch:
- A custom segment from searches. The exact remodeling searches that booked estimates in your Search campaigns: "kitchen remodel contractor," "home addition contractor," and the long-tail ones broad match found in Chapter 6.
- A custom segment from websites. The sites of rival remodelers and design-build firms in your market, the same ones Chapter 5 used for keyword research. This describes the kind of person who researches remodelers. It isn't remarketing to anyone's visitors.
- Your own client list, where your clients agreed to it. Past clients are the people most likely to look like your next one.
Build all three before launch. A signal added in month three can still help, but the campaign has already spent its first weeks guessing without one.
In the first month, look at where its conversions come from. If most of them trace back to searches for your own company name, the brand exclusion isn't doing its job, or the campaign is taking credit for homeowners who already knew you. Fix that before you judge anything else.
Once it's running, judge Performance Max the way you judge everything else in the account: cost per booked estimate, checked against the exact match and broad match campaigns. If it books estimates at a price your margins can carry, give it room. If it mostly takes credit for searches your Search campaigns would have won anyway, pull it back.
If you'd rather have us build and watch Performance Max for you, our Google Ads management adds it to a contractor account only once the numbers say it's ready.
Next: Homeowners Start Planning a Remodel Long Before They Search for a Contractor.
Chapter 11 looks at reaching homeowners earlier, while they're still collecting ideas, and what Google's audience tools can and can't do for a remodeler.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Contractors, our sixteen-chapter guide for residential general contractors and construction companies anywhere in the US.
