We manage Google Ads for Minnesota contractors and small businesses. Every number on this page comes out of a live account we run. No stock screenshots, no borrowed case studies.
Both figures cover the twelve months ending October 18, 2026. A tracked lead means a submitted contact form or a tapped phone number, measured by conversion tags we installed and verified ourselves. It does not mean a signed job, because no honest agency can promise you that from an ad platform.
$12,103 of ad spend produced 2,954 clicks at an average of $4.10 each. A 7.6% click-through rate on search is roughly double what most local service accounts run, which is what happens when the keyword list is tight and the ad copy names the actual service instead of the industry.
$7,435 of ad spend across 52,350 impressions. Pole barns and remodels are a far longer decision than a sprinkler repair, so people research before they call and the click rate sits lower. On jobs this size the cost per lead is almost beside the point. One signed project pays for the entire year of advertising many times over.
Cost per lead is the number every agency quotes and the number that tells you the least on its own. A $63 lead is expensive if you sell a $200 service call and almost free if you build pole barns. The contractor above averages projects in the six figures. Against that, a full year of advertising costs less than a fraction of one job.
So run it against your own numbers rather than ours. Take your average job, multiply by the share of quotes you actually win, and compare that to $63. If the answer is obvious, the channel is worth a conversation. If it is close, we will tell you to spend the money on SEO instead, because paid traffic stops the day you stop paying and rankings do not.
The honest limitation: these are tracked leads, which means forms filled and numbers tapped. Some of those were price shoppers and a few were wrong numbers. The number we would rather show you is cost per signed job, and getting there means feeding closed deals back into the account from your side. We set that up for clients who want it, and it is the single best upgrade available to any ads account.
We found all three of these in our own account, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to publish and also the reason we know exactly what to look for.
The single most common failure. Google Ads shows a green "Recording conversions" badge while the tag quietly fires on the wrong page, double counts a lead, or imports from Analytics through a broken handoff. Every optimization decision after that point is made on fiction. We rebuild tracking in Google Tag Manager and test it live before we touch a single bid.
Someone read that broad match wastes money, moved everything to phrase and exact, and paused the ad group that was carrying the account. Impression share goes up, impressions collapse, and it reads like a win on the dashboard. The fix is volume plus a real negative keyword list, not a smaller and smaller box.
Pull the search terms report on any neglected account and you will find money spent on DIY website builders, people looking for jobs, and competitors' brand names. One review of our own account found roughly half the budget leaking that way. This is thirty minutes of work a month that most managers never do.
Google Ads works best alongside local SEO and a site built to convert. If you want the organic side covered too, that is the monthly package. For Facebook and Instagram, see Meta ads.
Search ads catch people who already have the problem and typed it into Google. That is why they work so well for irrigation, concrete, plumbing, roofing and the rest of the trades: a pipe bursts, somebody searches, somebody calls. If you sell something nobody searches for by name, ads are the wrong first dollar and we will point you at SEO or content instead.
You should also know what a working account costs to feed. At roughly $4 a click and a realistic lead rate, a $15 a day budget buys a few leads a month. That is enough to prove the machine works. It is not enough to fill a calendar. We would rather tell you that before you sign than after.
One more thing, because it cost us real money to learn: ads produce leads, follow-up produces customers. We have watched qualified leads land in an inbox and go cold. If nobody is calling them back the same day, fix that first and spend the ad budget later.
Ad spend is billed separately and goes straight to Google. You always know what we are paid and what Google is paid, because they are two different numbers on two different invoices.
For a business with a decent site that needs the phone to ring.
Everything, including me on site with a camera twice a month.
One-time project. Most Minnesota small business sites land in here.
Month to month. No contracts. We recommend giving any ads account at least ninety days before judging it, because the first few weeks are the platform learning and you are paying for that either way.
Clicks in Minnesota home services run around $4 to $6. At $15 a day you are buying roughly 85 clicks a month, which is a few leads once tracking and targeting are right. $25 to $30 a day is where most of our accounts start to feel steady. Spend the smaller number first and prove the machine works before you raise it.
You do. We work inside your account, or we build you one and hand you admin access. If we part ways you keep the account, the history, and the conversion tracking. We do not hold accounts hostage and we do not run your ads out of an agency account you cannot see.
Ads start serving the day they are approved, so faster than SEO by a wide margin. Useful data takes about a week, and we avoid changing things daily because that resets the bid learning. Give it ninety days before you judge the channel.
Usually, yes, and we would rather. An account with history is worth more than a fresh one. The first thing we do is audit the conversion tracking, the search terms, and the geography, then tell you what we found before we change anything.
No, and be careful with anyone who does. The numbers on this page are what two real accounts produced over twelve months. Your auction, your service area, and your website all move that figure. What we will commit to is honest tracking, so the number you see is the number that happened.
No. Trades are most of the client list so that is where most examples come from, but search ads work the same way for anyone whose customers type a problem into Google. We have run them for irrigation, pole barn and remodel construction, drywall, and manufacturing.
