Google Ads + LSAs · Electrical
Electrical paid search serves two buyers who should never share a campaign. The first has a burning smell at the panel and decides in minutes, tonight. The second is comparing generator brands and rebate programs and will book an estimate three weeks from now for a five-figure project. Running both through one campaign with one bid is how electrical companies end up overpaying for service calls while losing the panel and generator searches that could pay for the entire month. Google Ads for electrical contractors works when structure, bids, and call handling reflect what each search is actually worth.
Emergency demand is constant and searches convert in minutes. Outages, tripping breakers, burning smells, and failed panels don't keep business hours, and the homeowner calls whoever is visible and answers. Local Services Ads put a vetted, badged profile near the top of those searches, which matters in a trade where trust screens harder than almost any other. For electrical, LSA coverage with a real answer path is often the single highest-return paid channel available.
Project searches are bid on surprisingly cheap in most markets. 'Panel upgrade cost', 'EV charger installation', 'standby generator installation', these are five-figure-adjacent keywords that electrical competitors largely ignore because they run one generic 'electrician' campaign. A structured account can bid what a panel upgrade or generator install justifies while competitors bid like it's a routine service call. The economics are simply different when the campaign knows what the click is worth.
The ticket spread makes attribution the whole game. In few trades is the gap between the smallest and largest job so wide, which means blended reporting is uniquely misleading. A campaign looks 'expensive' or 'cheap' depending entirely on which jobs its calls became. Intent-tiered campaigns plus call tracking by job type is what turns paid search from a leap of faith into a rate-of-return decision you can make monthly.
Electrical accounts tend to blend everything: one campaign, one bid, one landing page, stretched across service-call searches and five-figure project searches. Here is what that costs.
Emergency calls, routine repairs, and project inquiries are different searches with different economics. A blended bid means you overpay for small service calls while losing panel and generator searches to whoever bids what a five-figure ticket justifies. Max CPCs should be tied to the ticket and close rate of each service line, not averaged across all of them.
Local Services Ads depend on profile health: accurate categories, current insurance and license documentation, responsive review handling, and fast dispute management for bookings you genuinely served. Companies that let LSA profiles go stale or ignore the dispute process watch their badge visibility slide while still paying for clicks elsewhere.
Broad match pulls in 'how to become an electrician', apprenticeship and school queries, DIY wiring questions, tool and part sales, and commercial or industrial searches you don't serve. Without a maintained negative list, budget leaks constantly at a level that never looks dramatic but compounds month after month.
Emergency campaigns scheduled overnight into voicemail are worse than no campaigns: the homeowner now has your number and a bad impression. Answer rate is part of the media plan. If after-hours coverage exists, emergency ads should run overnight; if it doesn't, the schedule should be honest about that rather than buying calls that never connect.
We build electrical accounts around what each search is worth, LSA profile health, emergency coverage with a real answer path, and reporting tied to booked jobs rather than clicks.
Emergency, routine repair, and project searches are separated into their own campaigns with their own bids, ad copy, and landing pages. The 10 PM outage call and the generator comparison shopper never compete for the same budget or the same message.
Maximum CPCs are set per service line, tied to the average ticket and close rate for that line. A panel upgrade campaign and a service-call campaign have completely different bid economics, and structure is what lets you bid accordingly on both instead of compromising in the middle.
We keep LSA profiles current, license and insurance documentation accurate, categories complete, review responses moving, and disputes filed promptly with photo evidence when bookings you served get charged back. Profile health is treated as ongoing campaign work, not a one-time setup.
Targeting is configured to match where you actually dispatch, with exclusions for the areas you won't serve. Every click from a town you can't reach is money spent on a call you can't book, and that waste scales quietly if targeting is left on a generous radius.
Emergency campaign scheduling is aligned to your actual answering capacity. Where overnight coverage exists, emergency campaigns run overnight. Where it doesn't, we fix the answer path first or restrict the schedule, because buying voicemails is worse than not advertising.
Reporting is tied to jobs and revenue by service type, not impressions and click-through rates. The number that matters is what each campaign costs per booked service call, per panel upgrade, per generator install, and whether that cost leaves margin after the ticket is collected.
When emergency calls, repairs, and project inquiries all flow through the same account, attribution has to separate them before the numbers mean anything.
Each campaign uses a distinct tracking number, so cost per call is calculable by service line. You can see what the emergency campaign costs per call versus the generator campaign, and bid and budget decisions follow from real numbers instead of blended averages.
Calls are segmented by source plus intake categorization, so the midnight outage calls, the weekday repair bookings, and the project estimate requests are visible separately. A cost-per-lead figure that mixes them tells you nothing useful about either.
Long-cycle project leads, panels, generators, rewires, are marked and followed to close, so credit lands correctly when the job is booked weeks after the first click. Without this, project campaigns look weak in monthly reports and get cut, exactly the campaigns paying for the whole account.
DIY questions, price-shopping calls, and out-of-area inquiries are counted separately from real leads. An account can look cheap while half its calls were never bookings; you only find that by categorizing calls, not counting them.
We review what overnight spend actually produced: calls answered, jobs booked, and revenue collected. If after-hours coverage is profitable, we scale it. If it is buying voicemails, we fix the answer path or reallocate the budget.
Each month: cost per call, cost per booked job, and revenue by service type. The monthly question is simple: is each campaign profitable, and where do we adjust bids, budgets, or targeting next.
Google Ads works best when it is part of a connected system. These pages cover the adjacent services and industry context most relevant to your situation.
Book a strategy call to talk through your current campaign setup, what is burning budget, and what a better-structured account would look like for your market.
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