Part 2
Google Ads Is a Faucet, Not a Well (CPC is vanity)
“Ads can fill next week's calendar. They cannot own the homeowner.”
You needed indoor work. January. So you turned on Google Ads. The phone rang. Some of it was real. Some of it was a guy asking if you do commercial, a spam bot, and a homeowner who already had three Angi guys in the driveway because she Googled you after she bought the shared lead.
That's the faucet. You open it, water comes out. You shut it, the sink goes dry. A well is still there in July.
Ads are right when you need a job this month. Furnace week. A cancelation left a hole on Thursday. A new crew you have to feed. That's a faucet. Use it like one. Set a budget. Turn it off when the calendar fills.
Ads are a problem when they become the plan. Same homeowner you already paid Angi for, now clicking your ad on top of that. You're buying the same kitchen twice. Three times if the portal sold her name and she still tapped the first listing.
CPC is vanity. Cost per click is what Google got paid. You don't get paid in clicks.
Three numbers. Last month. That's it:
- Booked jobs from the ads. Not “leads.” Jobs that hit the calendar.
- Dollars out. What Google billed you.
- Junk-call rate. Spam, wrong trade, wrong town, tire-kickers who wanted a $400 job you don't do. Count them against total calls.
If you cannot produce those three numbers, that's the finding. You're running a faucet with no meter.
One more leak: the landing page. If the ad promised water heater replacement in your town and the click dumped them on a homepage blob (five trades, a stock handshake, a form buried under the fold), the budget is on fire. They came for one job. You handed them a company brochure. They bounce. You still paid for the click.
This week: pull last month. Booked jobs. Dollars. Junk-call rate. Write them down. If the junk-call number is a shrug, start tagging calls this week. Three numbers is enough. If the junk is ugly, or the clicks dump onto the homepage blob, turn that campaign off until the page can catch the job. A faucet you can't meter is just a leak.
If the ads are landing on a page that can't catch the job, that's worth a look. Tell us the trade, the jobs you want more of, and how you like to work. We'll tell you whether the faucet is filling a hole or just spraying the driveway. No pitch. Just the picture.
Want an honest answer about your website?
Run the free review — we inspect your live site and tell you where it's losing ground. Or tell us what you do and where you work, and we'll look at what's there.