Ad budget planning and paid search

What the service is

The method is three divisions, done in order:

1. Jobs needed = revenue target from ads ÷ average job value
2. Leads needed = jobs needed ÷ booking rate (the share of calls and messages that become paid jobs)
3. Budget = leads needed × cost per lead

If your average job is $1,800, you want $36,000 of ad-sourced revenue in May, and you book one lead in three at $120 a lead, that is 20 jobs, 60 leads and $7,200. The arithmetic is simple. The hard part is trusting the inputs, and that is where most of our time goes.

After the plan, we build or rebuild the campaigns so they match it: the services, towns and hours you actually want, with spend shifted toward the months and job types that pay.

Who it is for

This suits owners who already spend on Google Ads, Local Services Ads or Meta and:

• spend the same amount every month even though the work is seasonal
• run out of budget mid-month in busy season and waste it in slow months
• cannot say what a booked job costs them from ads
• are about to raise spend and want to know how far it can go before returns fall off

If you have never tracked where leads come from, tracking setup comes first. A budget built on guessed booking rates is a guess with decimals.

What is included

• Input check. Your average job value by job type (from the job value analysis if you have done it), booking rate from call records, and cost per lead from the ad accounts.
• A 12-month budget table. One row per month with target jobs, leads and spend, adjusted for your trade's season and your crew's capacity.
• Campaign structure. Campaigns split by job type and value, so a $300 service call and a $9,000 replacement do not compete for the same dollars.
• Geography by drive time. Towns and postal areas you can serve profitably, not a circle drawn around the shop.
• Monthly reporting against the plan: leads, booked jobs, cost per booked job and the gap to target.

Timeline

The plan itself takes about two weeks once we have account access and records. Campaign changes follow over the next two to four weeks. Expect the first full month of clean data in month two, and a meaningful read on cost per booked job by the end of the first quarter. Seasonal businesses should judge the plan over a full season.

How results are measured

Every report answers three questions in the same order. How many booked jobs did ads produce against the target? What did each one cost? And is cost per booked job above or below the break-even figure from your job value worksheet? Clicks and impressions appear only as supporting detail, never as the headline.

Mistakes to avoid

• Setting budget as a share of revenue without checking capacity. If your crews are full in July, extra July spend buys leads you cannot serve.
• One budget for every job type. Emergency calls and planned projects behave differently. Lumping them together hides which one is profitable.
• Cutting spend the moment it gets expensive. Costs per click often rise in peak season. What matters is whether cost per booked job stays below your break-even.
• Forgetting the phone. A budget assumes calls are answered. If a third of calls go to voicemail, your real booking rate is lower than the plan says. Missed-call text-back, which calltext.chat covers in depth, is often cheaper than more ad spend.

To see how this fits with our other work, go back to all services, or check plan prices. We plan and manage advertising; we are not a contractor and never do the trade work being advertised.