Google Ads for Burnaby businesses, with a ceiling on what a lead may cost

How paid search works for a Burnaby service business

Paid search is an auction held every time someone searches. Your bid, your ad's relevance and your landing page all affect where you appear and what each click costs.

Two features matter most for a business that only serves part of Metro Vancouver:

• Location targeting. Google lets you choose between reaching people physically in your areas and people who have merely shown interest in them; its help page on geographic targeting explains both. For a trade that only drives to certain streets, the presence-only setting is usually the safer starting point.
• Ad scheduling. You decide which hours ads run. If nobody answers after 7 pm, an ad running at 10 pm is paying for a missed call.

Local Services Ads, where available for your category, appear above regular ads and usually charge per lead rather than per click. They suit trades that can answer quickly and pass Google's screening.

Who it suits

Paid search fits Burnaby businesses that:

• need calls soon, while slower organic work builds;
• sell urgent services, such as drain clearing, lockouts, roof leaks or appliance problems;
• have a clear average job value and can answer most calls live;
• already spend on ads but can't say what one lead costs.

It fits poorly if you can't answer the phone during the day, or if your jobs are so small that a $60 lead would wipe out the margin.

The ceiling: working out what a lead is worth

Before any campaign launches we agree one number: the most you can pay for a lead and still make money.

A painting firm with that profile can afford competitive keywords. A gutter-cleaning business at $280 a job with a 40% margin can pay at most $112 × its close rate, so its campaign must be far narrower. The same tool, two very different plans.

What's included

• Account audit or setup in your name, with conversion tracking for calls, texts and emails.
• Campaigns split by service and by area: Burnaby town centres, plus any neighbouring cities you choose to serve.
• Negative keywords that block job seekers, do-it-yourself searches and services you don't offer.
• Ad scheduling matched to your answering hours.
• Landing pages, or improvements to existing pages, so each ad leads to a page about that service. Our websites page covers this.
• Local Services Ads setup and dispute handling where your category qualifies.
• Ads in other languages when your market calls for it; see multilingual campaigns.

Timeline

How results are measured

Clicks and impressions are not results. Each month we report cost per lead, cost per booked job (if you share which leads booked), lead volume by area and service, and the share of calls that went unanswered. If a campaign runs above the ceiling for two months, we change it or stop it.

Mistakes to avoid

• Targeting "all of Metro Vancouver" when you serve half of Burnaby.
• Sending every ad to the home page instead of a page about that service.
• Letting broad match run unchecked, which pays for loosely related searches.
• Judging by clicks rather than booked jobs.
• Running ads while the phone goes to voicemail. A missed-call text-back tool such as CallText.chat can help crews who can't answer on a job.

Plan costs are on the pricing page, and the Burnaby service-area guide helps you decide which areas to target. We manage marketing; we don't do trade work or sell leads. To check whether ads make sense for you, call, text or email.