The season is short. Your budget should book driveways, not price checks.

Earlier than most owners switch them on. Demand for driveways and patios arrives in waves, and the firms that catch a wave are already visible when it turns, not building campaigns the week the phone starts ringing. We use the quiet stretch to fix tracking, build the negative lists and learn what a booked job costs, so the budget is aimed properly by the time everyone else is bidding. In the slow weeks you turn the spend down rather than off, which is exactly what month to month is for.

Partly, and it sits in the searches you pay for and the words in the ad. Someone typing a price question is a different buyer from someone describing a green patio, a render that needs a soft wash or a car park, and we bid accordingly. The ad copy does the rest by saying what the job involves, so the callers who only want the cheapest number tend not to ring. You will still get some. The point is that you stop paying for the ones you were never going to win.

Yes, and that is usually where the margin sits. Render cleaning, roof softwashing, block paving and commercial work like forecourts, car parks and communal paths get searched for in different words than a cheap drive wash, so they get their own campaigns and their own budget. We can hold spend back on the searches that only ever bring small one-off jobs. Tell us on the call which work you want more of and the account gets built around that.

About $2.5k£2k a month in ad spend, on top of the fee. Under that a management fee eats the budget before a click is bought, so we say no and sell you an hour of consulting at $140£110/hr instead. If your season is short, we would rather concentrate that spend into the weeks it pays than spread it thin across the year.

Ask them one question: what did a booked job cost me last month? If the answer comes back in clicks or impressions they were selling you traffic. Most inherited accounts fail on the same three things: broad match with no negative list, tracking that counts clicks instead of calls, and nobody touching the account between reports. We fix those first, then tie every booked job to the keyword that caused it.

Then we tell you to pause, not to spend more. If the cost per booked job is not moving the right way by day 30 you hear it from us first, and we would rather lose the retainer than run budget we cannot defend. The ad account, the data and the card are in your name the whole time. If we part ways nothing gets switched off or rebuilt. It keeps running and you keep the history.