Solved: Google Ads Wasted Spend on Boiler Services

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I've had a look over the situation with your Google Ads campaigns for the heating and plumbing business. It's a classic problem for local services – you're doing the 'right' things like using exact match and setting location targeting, but you're still leaking cash on clicks from outside your patch. It’s frustrating, and it feels like you're just feeding the Google machine with no real control.

The good news is, you're not wrong, but the problem is a bit deeper than just a setting in the campaign. The solution isn't just about telling Google *where* to show your ads, but making your ads so ridiculously, undeniably local that someone in the next county over wouldn't even think to click them. It's about building a fortress around your service area, not just putting up a fence.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a roadmap. We're going to go through how to stop that wasted spend, attract only the customers you actually want, and make that budget work a lot harder for you.

The Real Problem Isn't Just Location Targeting... It's Intent

Right, let's get this out of the way first. You've set your location targeting to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations." This is the setting everyone recommends, and it's the best option available. But it's not foolproof. It's a bit of a leaky bucket, and it's important to understand why before we try to fix it.

Google determines someone's location based on a whole cocktail of signals: their device's IP address, GPS data, Wi-Fi networks, and even their past search history. So, if someone lives in your area but is currently at their office two towns over and their boiler breaks at home, they might search for "emergency boiler repair near me". Google knows their 'home' location and might show them your ad. On the surface, that's great. But what if they search for "boiler repair Reading" because they're looking for a plumber for their elderly parent's house? Google might see their search history is full of your local area and mistakenly show your ad. That's a wasted click and wasted money.

This is why relying solely on Google's location settings is a defensive strategy, and a weak one at that. You can't just trust the machine to get it right 100% of the time. We need to go on the offensive. The goal is to build campaigns that are so laser-focused on your specific service area that they actively repel clicks from anyone outside of it. The user's intent, revealed by their search query and their reaction to your ad copy, is a far more powerful filter than any setting Google gives you. Let's start with the keywords you're using.

We'll need to look at your keywords... Beyond 'Exact Match' is Where the Money Is

I know it feels safe to use only exact match keywords. The logic is sound: you only want to show up for the precise phrase someone types in. But in practice, you're tying one hand behind your back. You're forcing yourself to guess every single possible variation of how a real person, in a panic about a broken boiler, might search for help. You're missing out on a huge amount of valuable, long-tail traffic.

For example, you might be bidding on `[boiler repair south london]`. But what about the person who searches for "leaking worcester bosch boiler repair near clapham common"? Or "get a quote for a new vaillant boiler installation in sw12"? With exact match, you're invisible for these searches. These are people with incredibly high intent, telling you exactly what they need and where they are, and you're not even in the game.

The real power comes from using Phrase Match combined with a truly aggressive and ever-growing Negative Keyword List. This approach gives you the best of both worlds: you capture all the relevant variations of a search, while actively blocking all the irrelevant junk.

Your strategy should be to bid on phrase match keywords that include both the service and the location. For example:

• "boiler installation clapham"
• "emergency plumber balham"
• "gas safe engineer wandsworth"
• "new boiler quote sw11"

This will capture searches like "cost of boiler installation clapham" or "best emergency plumber in balham". And now for the seceret sauce: the negative keywords. This is where you become the bouncer at the door of your ad campaign. You need to build a massive list of terms that signal the searcher is NOT a potential customer. This is the single most effective way to cut wasted spend.

Your negative list should include:

• DIY terms: how to, fix my own, guide, tutorial, youtube, video, forum, parts, spares
• Informational terms: reviews, cost, price, average, comparison, best, cheap, cheapest
• Job-seeking terms: jobs, careers, training, course, apprenticeship, salary
• Competitor brand names: Unless you have a specific strategy to target them.
• Locations you don't serve: Every town, village, and postcode just outside your service area. Be ruthless.

Every week, you should be digging into your 'Search Terms' report in Google Ads and looking for irrelevant searches that triggered your ads. Every single one is a candidate for your negative keyword list. This isn't a one-time setup; it's a constant process of refinement. It's the most important maintenence job you can do on your account.

I'd say you need to overhaul your Ad Copy to Scream 'Local'

Once your keywords are sorted, your next line of defense is your ad copy. Right now, your ads are probably quite generic. Something like "Expert Boiler Repairs | Gas Safe Registered | Call For a Free Quote". It's fine, but it does nothing to filter out irrelevant clicks. It could be for a national company for all the user knows.

Your ads need to act as a clear signal to people in your area and a warning sign to those who aren't. The best way to do this is by cramming as much local information into them as possible.

Let's look at a before and after:

Before (Generic & Leaky):

• Headline 1: Trusted Boiler Installations
• Headline 2: Gas Safe Engineers Available
• Headline 3: Get Your Free Quote Today
• Description: We offer fast and reliable boiler installations and repairs across the region. Call our expert team today for a no-obligation quote.

After (Hyper-Local & High-Intent):

• Headline 1: Boiler Installs in Epsom & Ewell
• Headline 2: Your KT19 Gas Safe Engineer
• Headline 3: Call For A Quote in 30 Mins
• Description: Need a new boiler in Epsom? We're your local specialists, based right here in town. Fast, reliable service for all Surrey postcodes.

See the difference? The second ad speaks directly to someone in a specific location. Someone in Manchester isn't going to click an ad that mentions "Epsom" and "KT19". You've pre-qualified the click before it even happens. You should create different ads for each small area you serve, mentioning the town name, the postcode, and maybe even a local landmark if it fits. This not only filters out bad clicks but also dramatically increases your click-through rate (CTR) from the *right* people, because the ad feels incredibly relevant to them.

This ties directly into ad extensions. Make sure you have Location Extensions enabled so your address shows up. Use Call Extensions with a local phone number. Use Sitelink Extensions to link to pages about "Boiler Repairs in [Town]" and "New Boilers in [Town]". Every part of your ad should reinforce the message: "We are here, right on your doorstep."

You probably should restructure your campaigns... The Geo-Split Method

This leads to the next logical step, which is a bit more advanced but is how professionals manage local service accounts. Running one campaign for "Boiler Installs" across your entire service area is inefficient. You have no way of knowing if you're spending £50 in Town A to get one lead, while Town B is generating five leads for the same spend. You're treating your whole service area as one big blob, but customer behaviour and competition can vary wildly from one postcode to the next.

The solution is to restructure your account into hyper-local campaigns. Instead of one campaign, you create multiple, smaller campaigns, each targeting a specific postcode or a small cluster of neighbouring towns.

Why would you do this? Three massive advantages:

1. Budget Control: You can allocate your £22/day budget intelligently. If you know that postocde SW11 is full of high-value homes and is more profitable, you can give that campaign a higher budget. If SW17 is more competitive and CPLs are higher, you can assign it a lower budget or even pause it if it's not profitable. You gain granular control over where your money is spent.
2. Ultimate Relevance: With a campaign dedicated to just one town, you can write ads and landing pages that are 100% focused on that location. Every keyword, every headline, every piece of copy can mention that town by name. This leads to higher Quality Scores, lower CPCs, and better conversion rates.
3. Clearer Reporting: At a glance, you'll be able to see which specific areas are your profit centres and which are draining your budget. You can make smart business decisions based on real-world performance data, not just a blended average.

It's more work to set up, there is no doubt about that. But the clarity and control it gives you is the difference between guessing and knowing. This is how you stop wasting money and start investing it where it delivers the best return.

You'll need a landing page that converts... not just your homepage

All this work on keywords, ads, and campaign structure will be for nothing if you send all this lovely, targeted traffic to your generic homepage. The homepage has too many distractions – links to your 'About Us' page, different services, blog posts... A potential customer in a hurry with a broken boiler doesn't want to navigate your website; they want a phone number, now.

For every ad group, you should have a dedicated landing page. When someone clicks your ad for "Emergency boiler repair in Epsom," they should land on a page with a headline that screams "Emergency Boiler Repair in Epsom." This is called maintaining 'scent' – the user gets exactly what they were promised in the ad. This simple change can massively boost your conversion rates.

A high-converting landing page for a local service business is brutally simple. It needs:

• A big, bold, local headline: "Your Trusted Gas Safe Engineers for Boiler Repairs in Epsom & KT19".
• A prominent phone number: Make it click-to-call on mobile. It should be the most obvious thing on the page.
• A simple contact form: Only ask for the absolute essentials: Name, Phone Number, Postcode, and a brief message. Nothing more.
• Trust signals: Your Gas Safe Register logo, Checkatrade or Trustpilot ratings, and ideally, a few testimonials from customers *in that specific area*.
• No main navigation menu: The only way off the page should be to call you or fill out the form. Remove all other escape routes.

Think of the landing page not as a brochure, but as a direct line to your business. Its only job is to get a potential customer to pick up the phone or send you their details.

Let's talk about tracking... because you're probably flying blind

This is probably the most critical point of all. You mentioned you have conversion tracking for form fills and calls. That's a great start, better than most small businesses. But I'm going to be brutally honest: it's also probably lying to you.

Your current setup is treating every single form fill and every phone call as a success. But you and I both know that's not true. How many of those form fills are spam? How many of those calls are from people asking for a service you don't offer, or who are located in an area you don't cover (the very problem we're trying to solve)? How many are just price shoppers who never book?

Right now, your Google Ads algorithm is optimising for *all* of this activity. It's learning to get you more calls and form fills, regardless of their quality. It might learn that a certain keyword generates lots of cheap calls, so it pushes more budget towards it. But if all those calls are tyre-kickers, you're just teaching the system to waste your money more efficiently. Its a dangerous trap to fall in to.

The gold standard for a service business like yours is to track what actually matters: booked jobs. The ultimate goal is to tell Google, "Don't just get me a call; get me a call that turns into a paying customer."

This is done through a combination of a CRM (even a simple spreadsheet can work to start) and something called Offline Conversion Tracking. The process looks like this:

1. A user clicks your ad. Google assigns a unique ID to that click (a GCLID).
2. They call you or fill out a form. You use call tracking software or hidden form fields to capture that GCLID along with their contact details in your CRM/spreadsheet.
3. You mark in your CRM whether that lead turned into a booked job and what its value was.
4. You then periodically upload this data back into Google Ads, telling it, "Hey, that click from last Tuesday? That GCLID? It turned into a £2,000 boiler installation. Find me more people like that."

Now, this is technically complex to set up. It’s not a five-minute job. But it's the single biggest leap you can make in performance. It changes the entire game from optimising for leads to optimising for *profit*. It ensures every penny of your ad spend is chasing actual revenue, not just vanity metrics like 'leads'. Without this, you're always just guessing at what's truly working. We have run campaigns for similar businesses, I remember one for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and their cost per qualified lead was around $60. Another home cleaning client saw leads for £5. The range is huge, but you'll never know your true cost per *customer* until you track it properly.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Okay, that was a lot of information to take in. The key thing to remember is that this is a process of building layers of relevance. Each change reinforces the others, creating a powerful, efficient lead generation system that filters out the junk and attracts the right customers. Here's how it all fits together in an actionable plan.

So, what now?

As you can see, turning a leaky Google Ads account into a predictable lead machine involves a lot more than just flicking a few switches. It requires a strategic approach that aligns your keywords, ads, landing pages, and tracking with a single goal: attracting profitable local customers. Implementing all of this correctly takes time, expertise, and a lot of ongoing attention to detail.

Getting it wrong can mean you end up spending more money with even less to show for it. Getting it right means you can confidently increase your budget, knowing that every pound you invest is generating a measurable return for the business.

This is where professional help can make a huge difference. We specialise in taking accounts just like yours and implementing these exact systems to stop wasted spend and scale up what works. We've done this for dozens of service businesses, and we know the pitfalls to avoid.

If you'd like to go through your account together and get a more tailored plan, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can look at your current campaigns, show you where the biggest opportunities are, and give you a clear sense of the potential for improvement.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh