Guide
Paid advertising for contractors is often described in vague terms, which makes it hard to judge a proposal or a report. Here is the plain version: what the channels do, what the money buys, how results are measured, and how long it realistically takes for an HVAC, plumbing, or roofing business to see a steady flow of booked work.
Google captures the owner who is already searching: "furnace not heating", "emergency plumber near me", "roof leak repair". Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, reaches people before they search, using service area, home age, and life events to put an offer in front of the right household. The two channels do different jobs. Google answers demand that exists today; Meta creates demand that was not yet a search.
A workable starting point for most trades is a few thousand dollars a month in ad spend on top of management, enough to fund a service-area radius, a handful of campaigns, and the weeks of data needed to tell a good keyword from a bad one. Spend that is too thin cannot produce a reliable read, which is why we would rather tell you to wait than take a small budget and blame the market.
Call tracking numbers sit alongside form tracking, so every booked job can be traced back to the campaign that produced it. That is what makes the weekly cut possible: keywords and audiences that never convert get removed, and budget moves to the campaigns that already fill the schedule. Without it, the report is a screenshot of clicks.
Most accounts see calls in the first two to four weeks while the campaigns gather enough data to be judged. Steady, dependable volume usually takes a couple of months of testing and trimming. Anyone promising a fixed number of leads in week one is guessing, and a fixed number is a number nobody can honestly guarantee.
TikTok is an option, not a default. For some trades it works well: a drain cleaning crew with good before-and-after footage, an HVAC company that can show a fast install. For others it produces views without booked jobs. We test it when the creative exists and the audience matches, and leave it out when it does not.
Google takes the demand that already exists, Meta creates demand with an offer in front of the right service area, tracking ties booked jobs back to a campaign, and the campaigns get cut and scaled on that evidence every week. Accounts are built inside yours, run month to month, and reported in calls, forms, and booked work.
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