Solved: Google Ads Campaign Not Scaling for Service Biz

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a good look through the situation with your Google Ads, and to be honest, it's a classic story I've seen dozens of times. You've got a campaign that's showing a little bit of life, but the agency managing it doesn't seem to have a clue how to properly scale it, and you're left feeling frustrated. The good news is that pretty much all the issues you've described are fixable, but it's not going to be by following Google's automated suggestions or by just throwing more money at the problem.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of guidance on what I would be looking at. The root of the problem isn't just your budget or radius; it's a fundamental issue with the strategy and structure of the campaigns. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at... why your agency is stuck in first gear

Let's start with the elephant in the room: your agency. Their reluctance to increase spend isn't them being careful with your money. Tbh, it's a sign that they don't have confidence in the campaign's ability to perform under pressure. A properly built campaign for a local service business should be crying out for more budget, because every pound in should be generating a predictable return. When an agency is hesitant, it usually means one of a few things:

• -> They've set up a very basic campaign that works by accident more than by design. It's fragile, and they know that increasing the budget will likely just amplify its flaws—leading to a higher cost-per-lead (CPL) and an unhappy client.
• -> They don't understand the underlying economics of your business. They haven't asked the right questions to figure out what a lead is actually worth to you, so they have no benchmark for what an "expensive" or "cheap" lead is. They're managing to a budget, not to a profit target.
• -> They are prioritising their other, maybe larger, clients. Your account is on autopilot, and doing the actual work required to scale it—deep keyword research, ad copy testing, landing page analysis, bid management—is more effort than they're willing to put in.

The fact that your leads are inconsistent and often far away confirms this. They're running a wide net and just hoping to catch a few fish. That's not a strategy; it's gambling with your money. A professional approach involves building a highly efficient, targeted spear-fishing operation first, proving it works, and then building more of them. You don't scale by making the net bigger; you scale by adding more expert fishermen. For service businesses, where profit is directly tied to geography and job type, this precision is everything. We've worked with countless service businesses, from a local HVAC company to cleaners, and the story is always the same: success comes from ruthless focus, not broad strokes.

I'd say you should... stop listening to the Optimisation Score

Now, onto Google's recommendations and that tempting 62% optimisation score. I'm going to be blunt: for a business like yours, the optimisation score is one of the most dangerous and misleading metrics in the entire Google Ads interface. It is not a measure of how well your account is performing for *your business*. It is a measure of how well you are adopting the features *Google wants you to adopt*. These two things are very, very different. Google's primary goal is to increase its revenue. Your primary goal is to increase your profit. These goals are often in direct conflict.

Let's dismantle the main suggestions Google is pushing on you:

Create a Performance Max campaign (9.6%): This is the big one, and it would likely be a catastrophy for your business right now. PMax is a 'black box' campaign type. You give Google your budget, some assets (text, images), and a goal, and its AI does the rest. It runs ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and more. For an eCommerce store with thousands of products, it can sometimes work wonders. For a local service business that needs highly qualified leads from a very specific geographic area, it's often a disaster. You'll end up paying for clicks from people watching YouTube videos 100km away or seeing a banner ad on a mobile game. You lose almost all control over where your ads show and what search terms they appear for. You need *more* control right now, not less. Applying this recommendation is like handing the keys to your car to a drunk robot.

Get more conversions by adding broad match versions of your existing keywords (7%): This is probably the single biggest cause of wasted ad spend for small businesses. Let's say you're a plumber and your keyword is `plumber near me`. With exact match `[plumber near me]`, your ad only shows for that exact search. With broad match `plumber near me`, Google's AI will show your ad for anything it deems 'related'. This could be "plumber training courses", "jobs for plumbers", "how to fix a leaky tap myself", "best plumbing tools". You'll get a flood of clicks, your budget will get spent, and almost none of them will be from people who actually want to hire you. For service businesses, you should be using almost exclusively Phrase Match and Exact Match keywords, supported by an extensive list of negative keywords to filter out the junk. Your agency should know this; it's day-one stuff.

Reach additional customers on partner sites (2.7%) & Use Display Expansion (0.9%): This is just a watered-down version of the PMax problem. You're allowing your highly specific, high-intent search ads to be shown on a vast network of low-quality websites and apps. The traffic from the Search Partner Network and the Display Network is almost always lower quality and has a much lower conversion rate than Google Search itself. It's a box that should be unticked in almost every local service campaign.

Set a target CPA (1.3%): Target Cost Per Acquisition can be a powerful automated bidding strategy, but only when you have a healthy volume of consistent, reliable conversion data. You mentioned your leads are inconsistent. This means your data is choppy. If you tell Google to aim for a specific CPA right now, and the system doesn't have enough data to work with, it can severely limit your ad delivery. It might stop showing your ads during competitive times because it's 'afraid' it can't hit the target. You need to fix the foundations—targeting, keywords, ad copy—to get consistent lead flow first, and only then consider a tCPA strategy.

The other suggestions like structured snippets, customer match lists, and business logos are fine. They are small improvements, like polishing the hubcaps on a car with a broken engine. They won't fix the fundamental problem but are good practice once the core issues are sorted. Never, ever just click "Apply All". An expert needs to evaluate each suggestion on its own merit within the context of your specific strategy.

You probably should... rebuild your campaign from the ground up

The core problem here is that your campaign structure is fundamentally flawed for a local service business. It’s not something you can patch up with Google's recommendations. You need to rebuild it with a foundation of control and profitability. Here’s how.

1. Your Radius is Killing Your Profit: You are absolutely right that 35km is too broad. Every minute you spend driving to a job is a minute you're not earning. It adds fuel costs, vehicle wear, and opportunity cost. Reducing the radius to 20km is a good start; I might even suggest starting at 15km and only expanding if you can't spend your budget on quality leads within that core area. You want to own your backyard first. A higher density of jobs in a smaller area is far more profitable than sporadic jobs spread far and wide.

2. Your Ad Schedule and Bidding are Backwards: The reason your budget isn't spending during the day is almost certainly because your bids are too low to compete when everyone else is bidding. The ad auction is more competitive—and therefore more expensive—during peak business hours. At night, competition drops, so your low bids finally start winning impressions, but these are for lower-intent searchers. You're getting the leftover, low-quality traffic.

The solution is to implement an ad schedule. You should be running your ads most aggressively when you are available to answer the phone and when your ideal customers are most likely to be searching with urgent needs. For many service businesses, this is 8 AM to 6 PM on weekdays. Not only should you schedule the ads, but you should also apply a positive *bid adjustment* during these hours, for example, +20%. This tells Google you're willing to pay more per click during these critical times to ensure you show up. Conversely, you could apply a negative bid adjustment (e.g., -50%) or pause the ads entirely overnight. This forces your budget to be spent when it has the highest chance of converting into a profitable job.

3. Your Keyword Strategy Needs Surgery: A "broad keywords" campaign and a "narrowly focused" one is a start, but it's too simplistic. You need to structure your account around customer intent. The best way to do this is to create separate campaigns for different types of services you offer, and within those campaigns, create tightly-themed ad groups. For example, instead of one big "Electrician" campaign, you might have:

• Campaign 1: Emergency Services
  • Ad Group: Power Outage (Keywords: `emergency electrician`, `no power in house`, `24 hour electrician`)
  • Ad Group: Fuse Box Issues (Keywords: `fuse box tripping`, `consumer unit replacement`, `fuse board repairs`)
• Campaign 2: Installation Services
  • Ad Group: EV Chargers (Keywords: `ev charger installation`, `home car charging point`, `tesla wall connector installer`)
  • Ad Group: Security Lighting (Keywords: `outdoor security light fitting`, `motion sensor light installation`)

This structure allows you to write hyper-relevant ad copy for each specific search. The ad for "emergency electrician" can talk about fast response times, while the ad for "EV charger installation" can talk about specific brands you work with. This relevance increases your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Quality Score, which in turn lowers your Cost Per Click (CPC) and gets you better ad positions. It’s more work to set up, but it’s the only way to build a truly scalable and efficient account.

You'll need... to understand the math that really matters

This is probably the most important shift in thinking you need to make. Stop focusing on the daily budget and start focusing on your Maximum Affordable Cost Per Lead (CPL). Scaling becomes simple once you know this number. It removes the guesswork and emotion and turns it into a straightforward business calculation.

The question isn't "Should we spend $200 a day?". The question is "How much can we afford to pay for a single lead while remaining profitable?". Here's how you work it out, and it's based on the same logic we use for all our clients, from software companies spending tens of thousands a month to local services just starting out.

1. Average Revenue Per Job: What's the average value of a job you get from a new customer? Let's say it's £500.
2. Gross Margin: What's your profit margin on that job after accounting for materials and your direct labour? Let's say it's 60%, so you make £300 in gross profit per job.
3. Lead-to-Sale Conversion Rate: How many leads do you need to speak to in order to close one job? If you close 1 out of every 4 qualified leads that come in, your conversion rate is 25%.

Now, the calculation is simple:
Max Affordable CPL = (Gross Profit Per Job) x (Lead-to-Sale Conversion Rate)
Max Affordable CPL = £300 x 0.25 = £75

This is your magic number. It means you can afford to pay up to £75 for a qualified lead and you will still break even on that job. Anything less than £75 is pure profit. Suddenly, scaling isn't scary. Your new instruction to your agency (or your new agency) becomes: "My break-even CPL is £75. I want you to find me as many qualified leads as possible for under, say, £50 each. Spend whatever it takes, as long as you stay below that CPL target."

This reframes the entire conversation from an arbitrary budget to a performance-based target. Use the calculator below to plug in your own numbers and find your own magic number.

This is the main advice I have for you:

So, what should you do? Your idea to keep the campaigns, reduce the radius, and increase the budget is heading in the right direction, but blindly accepting Google's recommendations would be a mistake. Here is a more structured plan that an expert would likely follow. This is the kind of methodical approach needed to turn a struggling account into a reliable lead generation machine.

As you can see, this is a far more deliberate and strategic process than just increasing a budget and clicking "apply all". To be frank, the fact that your current agency is not doing this is a serious concern. This isn't advanced, secret knowledge; it's the fundamental blocking and tackling of competent Google Ads management for a service business. Their failure to implement this kind of structure suggests a lack of expertise or a lack of effort—neither of which you should be paying for.

Working with a specialist who understands these principles can make a dramatic difference. It’s not just about getting more clicks; it's about building a predictable, scalable system that fuels your business's growth. We've taken over accounts exactly like yours and, by implementing this kind of rigorous process, have seen them transform from a source of frustration into their most reliable source of new customers. For instance, our best consumer services campaign was for a home cleaning company. By implementing this kind of rigorous process, we were able to achieve a cost of just £5 per lead, turning their ads from a source of frustration into their most reliable source of new customers.

I hope this detailed breakdown gives you a much clearer picture of what needs to be done. It's a lot to take in, I know, but it's important to understand the 'why' behind the strategy. If you'd like to go through your account on a live call and have us point out exactly where these issues are and how we'd begin to fix them, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session. It might be the most valuable 30 minutes you spend on your markering this year.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh