A contractor opening a fresh Search campaign finds the build half-framed already: Google has set a dozen options before the first remodeling keyword goes in. Most of them were made for advertisers in general: online stores, travel brands, national chains. A remodeler who launches with all of them left alone is running an account designed for somebody else.
The first one decides who sees the ad at all. Left alone, the location setting doesn't stop at the people who live where your trucks go. Google's preset, the one it labels recommended, adds anyone it decides is curious about your area. Google says interest can come from the words in someone's searches, from having recently been in the area, or from pages they've viewed about it. Someone in Ohio reading about Raleigh neighborhoods because they're thinking of moving can see a Raleigh remodeler's ad for "kitchen remodel."
A homeowner who doesn't own a house in your service area can't hire you to remodel it. This chapter walks through that setting and the rest of the defaults we change before a contractor's first click, and the few we keep.
"Presence or Interest" Is Google's Default. A Remodeler Needs the Homeowner Who Lives There.
Google's location setting has two choices. "Presence or interest" is the default. "Presence" keeps the ad to homeowners Google places inside your territory, or who spend their days there.
Google's help page on location targeting makes the case for the broad option, and it's worth reading what it actually says. Its tip is that advertisers who switched from Presence to Presence or Interest saw about 5% more conversions, and the advertisers in that test were in travel, real estate and education. Those are businesses where people really do shop for a place they aren't in yet: the hotel in the city you're flying to, the house in the town you're moving to, the college three states away. Read a little further and the same page admits Presence is the better fit for an advertiser who wants local buyers only, not curious people in other places.
That second description is every remodeler we've worked with. In our experience, the out-of-area clicks the broad setting adds are the ones that never turn into a booked estimate, and they cost the same as the ones that do. So every contractor campaign we build launches on Presence, and stays there.
The second half of location targeting is drawing the map, and the trap here is targeting a metro because it's the easy option in the menu. The metro area we've used for Keyword Planner throughout this guide is Google's "Raleigh-Durham (Fayetteville), NC," and it's named that because it reaches all the way to Fayetteville, about an hour's drive south of Raleigh. A remodeler based in north Raleigh who targets that whole area is paying for clicks from homeowners its crews will never drive to.
The local ads we read show the same drift. One general contractor based in the area ran ads naming Fayetteville and, in another, Wilmington, more than two hours away. Maybe they do work there. The question for your own account is whether you'd send a crew to every place your ads reach.
Draw the map from your own jobs instead:
- Pull last year's signed jobs. List the towns or ZIP codes where you actually did work.
- Mark how far your crews will go. Drive time matters more than miles. A 30-mile trip on the interstate can be shorter than 15 miles across town at rush hour.
- Target those ZIP codes or towns, or a radius drawn around your shop that covers them, and nothing beyond.
- Match your Google Business Profile. As a service-area business, you can list up to 20 cities, ZIP codes or other areas on your profile. Your ads and your profile should describe the same territory, so the homeowner who finds you on the map and the one who clicks your ad are in the same place.
Search Partners and Display Don't Belong in a New Remodeling Account.
Every new Search campaign comes with search partners already checked. Search partners are other sites that show Google's ads: other search engines, directories, sites that run Google-powered search boxes. Google itself cautions that partner-site traffic can run less targeted than its own results page.
We've watched junk clicks pile up there first in new accounts, and a remodeler's first month has no booked estimates yet to separate a real homeowner from a bot. We uncheck search partners at launch. Partner sites can come back later as their own small experiment, after a few months of booked estimates give you a cost to beat.
The Display Network option goes the same way. A Search campaign's job is to answer a homeowner who is typing "bath remodel near me" right now. Banner placements on other websites are a different job, and Chapter 2 put that kind of awareness much later in the rollout.
Google Turns AI Max On in Every New Search Campaign. An Exact-Match Launch Turns It Off.
This one surprises contractors the most. Per Google's AI Max setup instructions, the feature comes switched on when a Search campaign is born. Under it, two more features come enabled by default: text customization and final URL expansion.
In plain terms, that's three things Google adds on its own:
- Search term matching stretches your keywords to searches you didn't choose, much like broad match.
- Text customization lets Google compose remodeling ad lines from pages on your domain, including pages you never wrote as ads.
- Final URL expansion lets Google send a homeowner to whichever page on your site it picks, not the project page you built in Chapter 4.
Picture what that can look like. Say your site has a blog post about what a basement finish costs, written to answer a question, not to sell. With final URL expansion on, Google is free to send a "kitchen remodel" click to whatever page it thinks fits, and with text customization on, a line pulled from that post can turn up in a kitchen ad. Neither is what the homeowner searched for.
Every one of those undoes something this guide built on purpose. Chapter 6 launched on exact match, so the account learns from searches you chose. Chapter 4 matched every ad group to its own project page. Chapter 8 wrote ads from your own reviews and pages. AI Max left on at launch hands all three back to Google before the account has a single booked estimate to learn from.
The remodeling launch build unchecks all three: AI Max, the ad-writing feature and the page-picking feature. Broad match stays off in that campaign too; it belongs to the second campaign, once the account has earned it. If your account still offers Dynamic Search Ads, leave them off for the same reason. AI Max isn't banned for good. It's the last piece of the house to go up, and Chapter 13 is where it does.
Auto-Tagging, Call Reporting and a Modest Budget Are the Defaults Worth Keeping.
Not every default is a problem. A few are exactly what a contractor needs, and the job is to confirm they're on:
- Auto-tagging. Google switches it on for brand-new accounts. Without it, there's no click ID for Chapter 1's signed-contract upload to attach the deal to. Check an older account by hand; we still find it off.
- Call reporting. Most remodeling estimates start with a phone call. Chapter 1 set up call reporting so those calls count; make sure it's still on at the account level, unless you use a separate call tracking service that needs your own number to show.
- Ad rotation set to "Optimize." Google shows the ads in each ad group that it expects to do best. When the second campaign later bids for conversions, Google uses this setting automatically.
- Your company name gets a separate small campaign. A homeowner who already knows you and types your name shouldn't draw down the money set aside for kitchens.
- Language set to the languages your crews and office can actually serve. If your office takes calls in Spanish, say so in the ads and target the language; if it doesn't, don't.
The schedule is the setting contractors think about least. Google's default is "All day," every day of the week. That's fine for a form on your website, which can take an estimate request at midnight and get a callback first thing in the morning. It's a problem for a call button that rings an empty office at 9 p.m., because the homeowner who calls and gets voicemail is the review you read in Chapter 8. Run the search ads all day if your forms are answered the next morning, and schedule anything that puts your phone number front and center to the hours someone actually picks up. Check those hours against your Google Business Profile, too, so the ad, the map listing and the voicemail greeting all tell the same story.
Budget is the last setting, and it works differently than most contractors expect. You set an average daily budget, but Google can spend up to twice that on a busy day, as long as the month doesn't go over 30.4 times your daily number. A $50-a-day campaign can spend $100 on a Tuesday and still bill about $1,520 for the month.
Start modest. The first weeks are for reading what the clicks in your market really cost, ad group by ad group, which is exactly what Chapter 7's manual bids are for. Raise the budget on the projects that book estimates at a price your margins can carry, once you've seen them do it.
And the goal question Google asks on the first screen of a new campaign? Pick any honest answer and move on. In our experience, the choice doesn't change how a Search campaign runs once the settings above are in place.
Every remodeling account our Google Ads management team builds goes through this punch list before it spends a dollar.
Next: Project Photos Are What Performance Max Has to Work With.
Chapter 10 covers Performance Max, the campaign that runs across every Google channel at once, and why a contractor's own job-site photos matter more there than anywhere else.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Contractors, our sixteen-chapter guide for residential general contractors and construction companies anywhere in the US.
