Google Ads for contractors: what to track beyond the click

Google Ads will tell you what a click cost and what a conversion cost. For most contractors, a "conversion" is a phone call or a form, which is a lead, not a job. The campaign that looks cheapest in the ad account can be the one whose callers never book, or book small drain clears while another campaign books water heater replacements. Judge Google Ads on what the schedule and the invoices say, and use the ad account to steer.

This hub covers what the account counts by default, a scoreboard that runs from spend to completed revenue, a monthly review, and where to start. The deep dive on sending job outcomes back to Google is our guide to offline conversion tracking for contractors.

What Google Ads counts by default

Four settings shape every number in the account.

• Conversions. The Conversions column counts your primary conversion actions; All conversions adds secondary ones. Cost / conv. is the average cost of each conversion.¹ If three overlapping actions are primary (a call, a form and a "contact page view"), one customer can count three times.
• Primary vs secondary. Primary actions are used for bidding; secondary actions are reported but not used for bidding, except in custom goals.² Keep the action closest to a booked job as primary.
• Conversion window. Conversions count within a window after the click, 1 to 90 days; Search campaigns default to 30 days.³ Replacement work often needs longer.
• Attribution model. Data-driven is the default for most conversion actions; last click is the other option, and Google retired first-click, linear, time-decay and position-based models.⁴ Either way, the model only divides credit among ad clicks.

Calls need their own setup. Google can count calls from ads and calls to a Google forwarding number on your site, but for a tap on the number on your mobile site it records the click, not the call.⁵ And none of these know whether the call booked.

The four-line scoreboard

For each campaign, keep four lines, monthly. Spend comes from Google Ads; the rest comes from leads and jobs that kept the campaign.

The figures are a hypothetical plumbing shop's month, to show the shape. Read across, not down. Drain cleaning looks fine on cost per booked job and weakest on revenue per dollar: lots of small tickets. The replacement campaign looks expensive per booking and earns the most per dollar outside brand. Brand looks spectacular because those people were looking for you already; don't let it pull budget from the campaigns that find new customers.

For the full step-by-step from leads to new-customer cost, see customer acquisition cost for contractors.

What connects a click to a job

Two things, and most accounts are missing one of them.

The click id on the lead. With auto-tagging on, Google adds a gclid to the landing page URL of every ad click.⁶ Your website form should save it, with the UTM tags, on the lead record. Then the booked job inherits it, and you can later report that click back to Google as a job.

A tracking number on the campaign. Most contractor leads from search are phone calls. A tracking number that belongs to the campaign, with the job booked from that call, is what lets calls count. Our phones and call tracking page shows how a number carries its campaign onto the job.

The monthly review

Once a month, with the scoreboard in front of you, answer five questions:

1. Which campaign produced the most completed revenue per ad dollar, and is it limited by budget?
2. Which campaign has the biggest gap between leads and booked jobs? That's usually an office problem: unanswered calls, slow callbacks, or the wrong kind of caller. Our guide to speed to lead covers the response side.
3. Are we buying work we can't do soon? Look at open technician hours for the next two weeks before adding budget to same-week campaigns.
4. What share of booked jobs from Google Ads have no click id? If it's high, your forms or booking tool are dropping it.
5. Did anything change in the account? New conversion actions, bid strategy changes or a new landing page explain most month-to-month swings.

Google Ads is one paid channel among several. Local Services Ads charge for each valid lead rather than each click,⁷ and belong on the same scoreboard, judged the same way. If TradesForce runs your marketing, it can record daily Google Ads spend in TradesWork once connected, so the spend line of the scoreboard sits next to booked jobs and invoiced revenue instead of in a separate export.

How to measure it from your jobs

Cost per lead is still worth watching as a smoke alarm (our cost per lead glossary entry defines it), but it's the start of the scoreboard, not the end.