The right jobs, not just more jobs

Why does advertising for installation companies work differently than for other businesses?

Because the scarce resource is your engineer, not your customer — so you steer on filling hours with the right jobs, not on as many enquiries as possible. Most installation companies I speak with can barely keep up with the work already on the books. The question is then not how to bring in more work, but how to fill your engineers’ hours with the jobs that pay off the most.

That changes the whole setup. A campaign that celebrates every enquiry equally fills your schedule with small, low-margin jobs. A campaign that knows, per job type, what an enquiry is worth fills your calendar back-to-front with the work your business wants to grow on.

Does Google Ads work for an installation company?

Yes, and it’s nearly always the starting point: people search actively for breakdowns, boiler replacement and heat pumps, so the demand already exists. The gain lies in steering per job type, not in more volume.

Count on € 2 to € 8 per click, depending on job type and region. What it ultimately costs per job depends mostly on your service area and your reachability: a missed call on an emergency campaign is more expensive than any click price.

Why is job type the most important dial?

Because a boiler breakdown, a boiler replacement and a heat pump installation differ tenfold in order value but carry comparable click prices.

Put them in one campaign with one conversion goal, and the algorithm sees no difference and optimises towards whatever converts most often — almost always the smallest job.

The solution is the same as in every skilled trade: separate what differs. Distinct campaigns for breakdowns, replacements and sustainability work, each with its own budget and its own value per enquiry. From that moment on you can steer: more sustainability work if that’s where you want to grow, breakdowns only in your immediate service area, replacements as filler in between.

How do you handle emergency jobs differently from heat pump enquiries?

With a different rhythm: emergencies run on reachability and switch off when nobody answers, sustainability work runs on explanation and has to stay present for months.

The customer with a broken boiler and the customer considering a heat pump are both looking for an installer — and beyond that, nothing about them is the same. The first decides within an hour and calls; there, reachability, opening hours in the ad, and a campaign that switches off when nobody answers are what count. The second takes months, compares quotes, reads up on subsidies and payback periods; there, explanation counts, along with a patient presence throughout that entire journey.

The seasons diverge too: breakdowns and replacements peak in winter, air conditioning in the first warm week, sustainability work around the moments subsidy schemes make the news. A campaign that runs the same all year is too little on the peaks and too much in the troughs.

Are your own campaigns cheaper than buying leads from a platform?

In the long run almost always — a bought lead goes to several installers, your own enquiry comes in exclusively to you.

Lead platforms solve a real problem — enquiries without doing your own marketing — but the model has a built-in flaw: the same enquiry goes to several installers. You pay per lead, race to call first, and give up margin to win the quoting battle. And the platform uses your money to build its brand, not yours.

Your own campaigns flip that calculation around. The enquiry comes in exclusively to you, the cost per enquiry is transparent, and every month something grows that stays yours: search-term data, brand awareness in your region, and a measurable picture of which job type delivers what.

How big should your service area be?

Different per job type: tight for breakdowns and maintenance, wider for the orders that are more than worth a single trip. One radius for the whole business is almost always wrong.

For an installation company, distance is no detail: an hour of driving is an hour of engineer time, and that hour could have been billed. On a € 150 breakdown, forty minutes of driving eats the margin; on an € 8,000 heat pump installation, an hour on the road is a calculation you make happily.

In practice that means an emergency campaign with a ten to fifteen kilometre radius around the depot, with the town names from that area in the ad copy — people search “plumber ” and “boiler engineer ”, and those searches are cheaper than the generic variant. For sustainability work that radius can be two to three times wider, with a landing page that isn’t about a town but about the installation. Virtually every campaign I take over advertises everywhere equally hard, and so pays most for the trips that earn least.

What you can expect from me

I work a fixed number of days per week, fully dedicated to your accounts. You won’t get a junior who handles it alongside ten other clients. Everything runs in your own Google and Meta accounts, so you keep the campaigns, the history and the data — even if we ever part ways.