Google Ads for Trades: Emergency Intent and Call Tracking

Separate emergency from planned work

Someone with a burst pipe and someone planning a bathroom renovation need different ads, different landing pages and different bids. Running them in one campaign means the emergency searches subsidise the researchers, and your cost per job looks worse than it is.

Bid for calls, not clicks

Use call assets and call-only formats for emergency campaigns. For a searcher standing in water, a tap-to-call button converts far better than a landing page — and a form that asks for a preferred contact time is actively insulting.

Schedule ads around when you answer

If nobody picks up after 6pm, either stop advertising at 6pm or set up an answering service. Paying for emergency clicks that ring out is the single most expensive mistake in this category.

Track calls properly

Google forwarding numbers tell you which campaigns generate calls. What they won't tell you is call quality or how many rang out. A dedicated call tracking platform will, and for most trade businesses the missed-call number is genuinely alarming the first time they see it.

Tighten your geography

Radius targeting around your base, with "presence" rather than "presence or interest" as the location setting. The default setting shows ads to people merely researching your area, which for a trade is almost always waste.

Prune search terms weekly

This is the unglamorous work that decides profitability. DIY queries, competitor names, job-seeker searches, wrong-suburb searches. Our negative keyword workflow sets out the routine we run.

Match the ad to the page

If the ad says 24/7 emergency callouts, the page headline says 24/7 emergency callouts and shows a phone number above the fold. Mismatch between ad and page is a quiet killer of conversion rate — and of Quality Score. Our Google Ads management treats the two as one deliverable.