Send the click to a page that answers the search
The most common waste in a new account is sending every ad to the home page. A person who searched for emergency plumbing wants a page about emergency plumbing, with a phone number at the top and a short form below it. A home page makes them hunt.
Before you write an ad, decide which page it lands on. If that page does not exist, build it first. One page per service you are advertising is the minimum.
Make the form and the phone number work
Submit your own form from a phone. Count the fields and the seconds. Then call your own number from a mobile and see who answers and how fast. Ads produce calls and forms; if either path is broken, you are paying to find out.
- Keep the form to name, phone and one question.
- Put the phone number in the header as a link that dials.
- Set up a tracking number so calls from ads are counted separately.
Set up conversion tracking before launch
Google Ads will optimize toward whatever you tell it is a conversion. If you tell it nothing, it optimizes toward clicks, and clicks are cheap for a reason. Define a form submission and a call as conversions, confirm they fire with a test, and confirm Google Ads can see them.
Do this before the campaign goes live. A campaign that runs for a month without conversion data has taught the system nothing, and you will pay to teach it later.
Check the page on a phone over mobile data
Most ad clicks on a local service come from a phone. Open your landing page on a mid-range phone over mobile data, not office wifi, and watch how long the first screen takes. If you are waiting, the person you paid for is leaving.
The fixes are the same ones that help search rankings: compress images, remove scripts you do not use, and load video only when someone asks for it.
Decide what you are asking for
A page that asks for a call, a quote, a booking and a newsletter signup gets none of them. Pick the one action that matters and build the page around it. Everything else can wait for the follow-up.
When the page, the form, the phone and the tracking are in place, launch. The first weeks of data will tell you which searches bring customers, and that is where the budget goes next.