Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Ads that pay for themselves, or get cut. Google and Microsoft search ads for businesses in metro Detroit and across Michigan, built on your own search terms, kept honest by a negative keyword list that grows weekly, and reported in jobs rather than clicks.
Talk to usIn short
Search ads built on the searches that already called your Michigan business, shown only to the people who might, landing on a page that keeps the ad's promise, and measured in jobs by campaign, in an account that stays yours.
- Built from your search terms and your calls
- Negative keywords before launch and every week after
- Every call and form tracked to its ad, jobs marked
- Your account, your data, reported in jobs
Why the list matters more than the ad
The ad is the easy part. The searches it must never show for are the work.
Across every industry, a lead from search ads cost $66.69 on average in 2026. For a roofer it was $228; for a cleaning company, $47. Your trade sets the range. Where in it you land is decided by the account. And most of what decides it is not the ad. It is the negative keyword list, the page the click lands on, and whether anyone tracked which click became a job.
We build the account from the searches that already called you, write the ads in the searcher’s words, add the negatives before launch and every week after, land the click on a page that keeps the promise, and track every call to its ad. Then we report jobs by campaign and move the budget toward what produced them. The account is yours throughout.
Illustrative. The figures are the shape of what a negative keyword list does, not a forecast. The list is built from your own search terms report and grows every month.
- $66.69
- the average cost of a lead from search ads across all industries in 2026, down for the first time in five years
- $228
- the average cost of a roofing lead in 2025; a cleaning company's cost $47. The trade sets the range. The account decides where in it you land.
LocaliQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks, 2026; LocaliQ, Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks, 2025.
What the ads look like
One offer, three ads
The search ad
Sponsored
Furnace Repair, Farmington Hills | Tonight, Not Tomorrow
Answered by a person, any hour. A technician in Oakland County today, the visit booked on this call.
Call nowWritten in the words of the search, with the one thing the searcher fears answered in the headline. No slogan; they did not search for one.
The display banner
Oakland County
The furnace picks the coldest night.
Book the tune-up before it does.
Seen by someone who was reading something else. One line, one reason, one thing to do, and the business name only where the brand rules say it goes.
The social ad
If your furnace is older than your teenager, read this before November.
Three signs it will not make the winter, and what a tune-up finds. Farmington Hills and the rest of Oakland County.
Read the checklistHas to earn a stop in a feed, so it opens with the reader, not the business, and sends them to something worth reading rather than a form.
The business advertised here is invented. Showing a client’s ads would need their permission, and inventing a client to demonstrate advertising would rather defeat the point.
In the work
The terms, the list, the ad, the page, the tracking, the budget
Built on your search terms
The exact searches that produced your calls, from Search Console and the search terms report, not a keyword list from a tool. An account built on what already worked starts ahead.
Negative keywords, from day one and every week
Jobs, salary, DIY, manual, filter size, reddit, free. The searches your ad must never show for, added before launch from experience and every week after from the report. This is where most wasted budget in a small business account goes.
Ads written in the searcher's words
The headline answers the fear in the search. The description says what happens on the call. The assets, call button, sitelinks, location, are the ones that get a phone tapped.
Landing pages that keep the promise
The page the ad sends to says what the ad said, loads on a phone over cellular, and has the number at the top with tap-to-call. An ad that lands on the home page pays for a click and loses the customer.
Call and conversion tracking
Every call and form from an ad counted, recorded with the caller told, and the ones that became jobs marked so the account is measured in jobs. Clicks are how the platform charges you; jobs are how you pay for it.
Budget by hour, day and place
Ads scheduled to when calls are answered, targeted to the counties and cities you serve, bid toward the searches that book. With the AI phone desk answering, the schedule can be all night, because the call is.
Getting there
Audit, build, launch small, cut and move, report
- 01
Audit, or start clean
An existing account is read for wasted spend, missing negatives and untracked calls before anything changes. A new one is built from your search terms and your calls.
- 02
Build
Campaign structure, keywords, the negative list, the ads, the landing pages, the tracking. Nothing launches until a test call from an ad shows up in the report.
- 03
Launch small and watch daily
A modest start, the search terms read every day for the first fortnight, the negatives growing from what people actually typed.
- 04
Cut and move
Weekly: budget away from what produced clicks and toward what produced jobs. The account gets better the way a garden does, by what is removed.
- 05
Report monthly
Spend, calls, forms, jobs, cost per job, by campaign. What was cut, what was moved, and what next month tests. Jobs, not clicks.
Fitted work
What comes up here, specifically
The storm week
Hail across Oakland or Macomb County on a Tuesday night is a roofing market on Wednesday morning. The budget goes up that morning, to those cities, and comes back down when the roofs are sold. A national agency sees it in the monthly report.
The county line
Targeted to the counties and cities you actually serve, excluded from the ones you do not, so an Ann Arbor searcher never costs a Farmington Hills plumber a click. The service area map and the ad targeting are the same map.
Winter hours
A furnace fails at 2 am in January. If nobody answers at 2 am, the ad is off at 2 am. If the AI front desk answers, the ad runs, because a booked emergency visit at 2 am is the most valuable click of the month.
The brand campaign, reported honestly
Ads on your own name reach customers who had already chosen you, and they make any account look good. We run them where a competitor is bidding on your name, report them separately, and never count them as new business.
Right time when
When this is worth doing
A good fit
- You need calls this month, not in six
- A job is worth enough that a lead at the benchmark cost pays
- You have run ads before and could not say what they produced
- Someone answers the phone when the ad is running
Not a fit
- A job is worth less than a lead costs in your trade, in which case the report will say so in month one
- Nobody answers the phone, in which case the front desk comes first
- You want the account held for you, which we will not do
Scope
What we do not do
Spend to a budget
The budget follows the jobs, not the month. If the account is producing jobs at a cost you would pay again, it gets more; if it is not, it gets less, and the report says which.
Hold the account
The Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts are yours, with the history, the data and the billing. We are added as a manager and can be removed in a click.
Report clicks
Clicks, impressions and click-through rates appear in the report only where they explain a call. The page you read is jobs and what each one cost.
Reasonable to ask
Before you commission it
How much should we spend?
The audit answers that for your trade and your area, from the benchmark ranges and from what your own search terms show. There is no number on this page because the right number for a roofer in Macomb County and a dentist in Farmington Hills are not the same, and both are decided by what a job is worth to you.
Google or Microsoft?
Google first, because that is where most searches are. Microsoft Advertising is added where the search terms and the costs justify it, which for some trades and older customers they do. The report shows both separately.
Do we need a new landing page?
Usually one per campaign, and usually yes, because the home page does not say what the ad said. It is a page on your site, built to load on a phone with the number at the top, and it stays yours.
What about Local Services Ads?
Where your trade is eligible, the Google Guaranteed listing is set up and run alongside search ads, with the same call tracking. It has its own rules, its own review requirement and its own report.
How do we know it is working?
Every call and form from an ad is tracked, and the ones that became jobs are marked, in your CRM or job system. The monthly report is jobs by campaign and what each cost, and the decision to continue is made with that in front of you.
Send us your search terms report.
If you have run ads, the report is in your account under Insights. We will tell you what share of the spend went to searches that were never going to call, and what the negative list should have been.
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