Google Ads for painters: get estimate requests without wasting budget
How to split interior and exterior campaigns, which searches to exclude and how to track estimates and booked jobs in Google Ads for painters.
Google Ads can bring estimate requests from people who need a painter this week. It can also spend your budget on people looking for colour ideas or how to paint their own house. The difference is in how you set up the campaign.
Split jobs into separate campaigns
Painting a bedroom and painting a full exterior are jobs with different prices, seasons and customers. If you mix them in one campaign, Google decides for you where the money goes.
A simple structure to start:
- Interior painting: rooms, whole homes, ceilings.
- Exterior painting: siding, trim, full exteriors, only in season.
- Kitchen cabinets: usually its own customer and price range.
- Commercial, if you do it: offices, retail, condos.
That way you can raise the exterior budget in spring and lower it in November without touching the rest.
Exclude searches that are not customers
Review search terms every week, especially at the start. In painting you will see a lot of:
- DIY questions: "how to paint", "best roller for walls".
- Paint brands and paint stores.
- Colour ideas and trends.
- Jobs: "painter jobs", "painters hiring".
- Areas you do not cover.
Each of those goes on the negative keyword list. It is maintenance work, but it is where most budget is saved.
Send each ad to the right page
If someone searches for exterior house painters and lands on your homepage, they have to search again. Send each campaign to a page about that job, with photos of similar homes, your service area and an estimate button that is easy to find on a phone. If you do not have those pages, start there. More ideas in what a painting company website needs.
Measure estimates, not clicks
A click is not a customer. Set up calls from ads, successful form submissions and, if possible, calls from your website as conversions. Then compare with your own schedule:
- How many requests were in your area.
- How many got an estimate.
- How many became a booked job.
With that data you can compare cost per booked job for interior and exterior work and move budget based on real numbers.
Match budget to capacity
If your crew is booked for the next three weeks, more ads will not help. They can even hurt your reputation if you are slow to reply. A sensible budget is the one that brings the estimates you can handle well.
When Google Ads is not the first step
If your website shows no real projects, nobody replies to requests the same day or you are not sure which jobs you want, fix that first. The marketing checklist for painting contractors helps you review it.
If you want us to look at it with you, see how we run Google Ads for painters in Calgary.