Paid search is the fastest way to make a contractor's phone ring. You can turn it on this afternoon. That speed is also why accounts drift: they get set up once, handed a monthly budget, and judged on cost per click or cost per lead, because those are the numbers the ad platform hands you.
A lead is not a job. A caller who wants a price on a part, a vendor pitching you, an existing customer checking on an appointment, someone two counties outside your service area: in a basic setup, every one of those counts as a lead. An account that is "getting cheap leads" can be quietly buying a lot of them. Meanwhile the searches that do produce jobs, like no heat or water heater leaking at seven in the evening, may be capped by a daily budget that ran out before lunch.
The fix is not usually more spend. It is knowing, for each campaign and search term, how many booked jobs came out the other end and what each one cost. That takes call tracking, a way to match calls to jobs in your field software, and someone who reads the search terms every week and adds the negatives. None of it is exotic. It is the part of PPC for contractors that gets skipped, because the platform's own numbers look fine without it. Our cost per booked job calculator shows the arithmetic with your own figures.
Local Services Ads add a wrinkle. You pay per lead rather than per click, the Google Verified badge may carry weight with homeowners, and how often you are shown depends partly on your reviews and how quickly you respond. An LSA lead that sits unanswered is a lead you paid for and handed to someone else. So Local Services Ads management is half an ads job and half a front-desk job, which is where revenue leak remediation overlaps with this service.
The same goes for where the click lands. Google Ads for HVAC companies and plumbers usually send people to a homepage that tries to say everything. A page built for the search, covered under website content, often does more for cost per booked job than any bid change.