1. You are buying the wrong searches
Broad keywords bring volume and the wrong people. If your account is bidding on "plumber" rather than "emergency plumber Puyallup" and "water heater replacement", you are paying for curiosity, price shoppers, and people three counties away.
Read the search terms report. If most of what you see is not the work you want, the fix is tighter match types and a real negative keyword list, not a bigger budget.
2. The ad promises something you do not do
Ad copy written to maximize clicks will get clicks from people you cannot serve. If you do not do mobile home repairs, commercial work or that one brand of boiler, say so in the ad. Filtering people out before they call is cheaper than filtering them out on the phone.
3. Nobody answers, or answers badly
This is the biggest one and it is not a marketing problem. Pull your call recordings, or just check the missed call log against the hours your ads run. Two patterns show up constantly: calls ringing out during jobs, and calls answered by someone who cannot quote or book.
If your ads run at 7pm and the phone goes to voicemail at 5pm, either extend the answering or pause the ads. Paying for a call nobody picks up is the most expensive thing in this article.
4. The landing page sets the wrong expectation
A page that leads with "free estimates" and mentions no prices attracts everyone including people with no budget. A page that gives a starting price, explains a dispatch fee, or names a minimum job size filters for people who can afford you. Fewer calls, more jobs.
5. You are competing on the wrong thing
If every caller asks the price and disappears, the ad, the page and the phone script are all leading with cost. Give them something else to compare: response time, warranty, licensing, financing, photos of real work. Customers compare on price when nothing else is offered.
6. You are measuring calls instead of jobs
Sometimes the campaign is fine and the reporting is wrong. If you count every call as a lead, including wrong numbers, existing customers and suppliers, your cost per lead looks good and your cost per job looks terrible. Count only calls over a minimum length, and where possible tie the ones that booked back to the campaign.
How to find which one is yours in an afternoon
- Export the last 30 days of search terms and mark each one as wanted work or not.
- Pull the call log for the same period, count missed calls and note the hours.
- Listen to five answered calls that did not book, and write down what the caller asked first.
- Open your landing page on a phone and read it as a stranger.
By the end of that you will know whether the problem is the searches, the phone, or the page. Fixing the wrong one wastes another month.
Common questions
Should I pause the campaign while I fix it?
If the phone is not being answered during ad hours, yes, pause those hours today. Everything else can be fixed while it runs.
How many calls should become jobs?
It varies by trade and by job value, so the useful comparison is your own number over time rather than an industry average. Measure it monthly and watch the direction.
Is call tracking worth it?
Yes. Without it you cannot separate ad calls from organic calls, and every conversation about performance becomes guesswork.
Could the problem be the market?
Occasionally. If cost per job stays above what a job is worth after a genuine effort, the honest answer is that paid search is not right for that service, and we will say so.
Where to start
Start with the missed call log. It is the fastest check and the most common culprit. If the phone side is clean, the answer is in the search terms report. Our Google Ads management page explains how we track calls back to campaigns so this stops being guesswork.