Every spring, somewhere in your service area, a homeowner opens the blinds and finds a pile of tiny wings on the windowsill. Ten minutes later, they're on their phone typing "termites with wings." Across town, a family buying a house with a VA loan is told they need a termite report before closing. Both of those searches are termite business. They just don't arrive on the same calendar.
Chapter 3 made the case for planning a pest budget month by month. Termites are where that plan gets specific, because termite demand isn't one wave. It's three different buyers, searching for three different reasons, on three different schedules. Treat them as one line in the budget and you'll overpay for one, starve another and miss the third entirely.
Swarm Sightings, Hire Searches and Home Sales Peak at Different Times. One Termite Budget Can't Chase All Three.
We pulled a year of monthly US search volumes from Google's Keyword Planner for three kinds of termite searches. The difference between them is the whole chapter.
Swarm sightings explode. "Swarming termites" went from 1,600 searches in January to 49,500 in May, about 31 times as many. "Swarmer termites" rose about 21 times, and "flying termites" and "termites with wings" each rose about 11 times, from 5,400 to 60,500. These are people who just saw something with wings and want to know what it is.
Hire searches climb, but gently. "Termite inspection" went from 40,500 in January to 135,000 in May. "Termite control" and "termite treatment" followed the same shape. All three landed at roughly three times their winter volume. These are people who already know what they have and want someone to deal with it.
Home-sale searches barely move. "WDO inspection," "WDI inspection," "wood destroying insect inspection" and "VA termite inspection" each stayed within about a twofold range all year, with no May spike. These people aren't reacting to bugs. They're reacting to a closing date.
A flat termite budget fits none of those shapes. It's too small for May, too big for January, and it spends the same money chasing curiosity as it does chasing a buyer with a contract to close.
Winged Termites Indoors Mean a Colony Is Already Working on the House. A National Chart Won't Tell You When They Fly.
The swarm spike has a biological cause. Termite colonies send out winged adults, called swarmers or alates, to start new colonies. North Carolina State University's extension service says swarming "usually occurs during the daytime, frequently in spring... and often after a nice rainstorm."
For a homeowner, the important part is what the swarm means. NC State calls swarmers "an indicator of a potential problem, rather than a problem in and of itself," because the damage is done by worker termites the homeowner never sees. Penn State Extension is blunter about swarms inside: "The presence of swarming termites or their wings alone is a sure sign that termites are working in a building."
That's why the searcher who types "termites with wings" matters. They may not know it yet, but a lot of them are about to need an inspection.
Penn State adds a detail that shapes the ad: "Winged termites are often confused with winged ants." Plenty of people searching in May aren't sure what they found. The company that answers that question plainly is the one they call.
The timing is where national numbers mislead. Mississippi State University's extension service describes how much it varies within one state: eastern subterranean termites can swarm "as early as late January" in coastal counties, with the peak in "late February to early April," while further north "swarming usually occurs from April through June." Formosan termites there usually swarm "in late April through mid-May," at or shortly after dusk, and southeastern drywood termites "normally swarm in May and June," mostly at dusk.
In other words, "termite season" in your market depends on which termites you have and where you are. The national May peak is an average of a lot of local calendars. Before you plan your spring, pull your own service area's monthly searches in Keyword Planner, the same tool Chapter 5 used, and look at when your termite searches actually rise. In our example market, "termites" searches peaked in May at about six times the December through February level, a sharper swing than the national figure. Your market will have its own shape.
Termite Ads in a Shared Campaign Spend the Roach Budget in May. Separate Budgets Keep Both Funded.
Here's the mechanical reason termites deserve their own campaign. Google's average daily budget is, in Google's words, "the average amount you're willing to spend per day in that campaign." Budgets live at the campaign level. Every ad group inside a campaign draws from the same pool.
Chapter 4 split the account by bug, one ad group per pest, and Chapter 7 gave each ad group its own bid ceiling. That handles relevance and price. It doesn't handle volume. If termite ad groups share a campaign with roaches, ants and rodents, a busy May can drain the whole budget by lunchtime, and the roach calls you'd normally get in the afternoon never happen. Or the opposite: you raise the shared budget for termites and hand the extra money to every other pest too.
A separate termite campaign fixes that. Its budget can rise in spring without touching the rest of the account, and drop back in winter without starving it. Chapter 3 covered how Google's daily budget can overspend on busy days while the monthly total stays capped. With termites in their own campaign, that flexibility works for termites instead of against everything else.
Three practical rules for the termite campaign:
- Raise the budget before your local peak, not after. When your own Keyword Planner data shows searches rising in March, the budget goes up in March. A budget raised in the middle of the rush spends the first busy weeks limited.
- Watch for "Limited by budget." Google shows that status in the campaigns table when a campaign is running out of money. In swarm season, that flag on the termite campaign means you're leaving hire searches unanswered.
- Don't reach for seasonality adjustments. Google offers them, but its own guidance says they're "ideal for short events of 1–7 days" and warns they lose effectiveness past 14 days. They also only work with Target CPA, Target ROAS or Performance Max, not the manual bids Isolation uses. A months-long termite season is a budget decision, not a bidding setting.
Swarm Searches Cost a Fraction of "Termite Inspection." They Come From Homeowners Still Asking What Flew Out of the Wall.
The swarm searches are big and cheap. Keyword Planner's range for "termites with wings" was $0.15 to $11.79 a click, and "flying termites" was similar. "Termite inspection" ran $15.57 to $60.96. That gap is tempting.
But the people behind those searches are at a different step. Chapter 2's ladder calls them problem aware: they've seen something and want to know what it is. The person searching "termite inspection" is further along. They know they need a company, and they're choosing one.
That's why swarm searches stay out of Isolation. The first campaign buys hire searches on exact match, as Chapter 6 laid out, and nothing about termites changes that. Once the account is selling plans reliably, swarm searches make a good, cheap test in a campaign of their own, with rules:
- A page that answers the question first. Termite or ant? Show the difference plainly, with your own photos, and say what a swarm inside the house usually means. Then offer the inspection.
- An offer that fits a nervous homeowner. "Found wings on the windowsill? We'll tell you what they are." Not "Call now before your house falls down." Google's own policies push back on fear-driven ads, and customers do too.
- Judged like everything else. The test lives or dies on inspections that turn into sold treatments and plans, the conversions from Chapter 1. Cheap clicks that never become customers aren't cheap.
Time it with your market. A swarm test that starts after the local peak is a test of June, and June is a different month.
A Closing Date Doesn't Check the Weather. Home-Sale Termite Inspections Keep Getting Searched All Winter.
The third calendar belongs to a buyer most pest ads ignore: the home sale.
Plenty of home sales need a termite report before closing, and the loan can decide it. The US Department of Veterans Affairs lists where it wants wood-destroying insect information for VA home loans. It's required for the entire state in 29 states plus the District of Columbia, and only in listed counties in eight more. In the rest, "a wood-destroying insect inspection is not required unless specific issues are noted in the VA appraisal report." The home-sale searches in the first section stayed nearly flat all year, which fits a buyer driven by closing dates rather than bugs. That's our reading of the pattern, not something Google reports.
That buyer behaves differently from a homeowner with swarmers:
- They have a deadline. A closing date doesn't move because your schedule is full. Turnaround time is the headline.
- They need a specific form. Many companies use the NPMA-33 report. Some states have their own, such as Florida's state form. The report is a snapshot of the day, and the NPMA-33 says it "is not to be construed as a guarantee or warranty against latent, concealed, or future infestations." Chapter 14 covered why your ads shouldn't promise more.
- The person searching may not be the owner. It can be the buyer, the seller or a real estate agent arranging the report for a client. Write the page so any of them can order in one step.
So the home-sale buyer gets its own ad group and page, not a line on the termite treatment page. Build it around the searches they actually use, like "WDO inspection," "WDI inspection" and "termite inspection for VA refinance," and answer their questions on the page: how fast you deliver the report, which forms you complete, what it costs and which areas you cover. Keyword Planner priced these searches in the same range as regular termite inspections, up to about $61 a click, so they deserve the same care.
One detail for Local Services Ads users: Google lists "Home inspector" as its own category, separate from pest control services. Whole-house inspections and termite work sit in different places on Google.
Next: Commercial Pest Control
Chapter 16 closes the guide with a different buyer entirely: restaurants, warehouses and property managers who buy pest control on a schedule, for reasons that have nothing to do with the bugs they've seen this week.
If you're catching up, Chapter 3 planned the budget by month, Chapter 7 set a ceiling for every pest and Chapter 14 covered the termite warranty rules. The full series is on the pest control guide's home page.
On the pest accounts in our Google Ads management, termites get their own campaign and a budget that rises before the local swarms start, and home-sale inspections get their own page before the first agent calls.
