Should contractors run Google Ads? A real autopsy

Let’s do this one with receipts instead of opinions.

I recently pulled six months of analytics for a design-build contractor. Buried in the data was something nobody at the company knew: a Google Ads campaign, set up in 2017, still running. Nine years. Nobody had looked at it. It was just quietly spending money in the background, the way a tap left running fills a basement.

Here’s exactly what it bought.

The autopsy

Over the six-month window measured:

• Paid Search sessions: 4,551 — about half of all traffic to the site (49.6%)
• Average engagement time from paid visitors: 3.6 seconds
• Average engagement time from organic visitors: 55.9 seconds
• Engagement rate: paid 15.8%, organic 60.8%
• Leads attributable to paid: zero recorded

Read those numbers again. Half the site’s “traffic” was people who landed and left in under four seconds. Not customers. Not even browsers. Bounces — misclicks, bots, wrong-intent traffic — bought at a price, for nine years.

The lesson isn’t “ads are bad”

Let’s be fair, because the honest answer matters more than a satisfying one. That campaign wasn’t failing because Google Ads is a scam. It was failing because it was abandoned. Nobody was watching it, tuning it, or measuring it against actual jobs. Someone set it up, everyone moved on, and it ran on autopilot into the void.

Google Ads can work for contractors. Genuinely. But only under conditions most trades never meet:

• Someone actively manages it — negative keywords, geography, ad scheduling, landing pages. Weekly, not annually.
• Conversions are tracked to real jobs, not clicks. Clicks are vanity; booked work is the only number.
• The landing page is built for it — sending paid traffic to a generic homepage is how you buy 3.6-second visits.
• You know your cost per job and it’s comfortably under your margin.
• You have the volume to make the math work — or the ticket size to survive an expensive lead.

If you can’t honestly tick all five, ads will bleed you slowly, and you may not notice for years. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the case study above.

The comparison that should decide it

Same site, same six months. The organic side — the free side, the side built on architecture and content — produced visitors who stayed 56 seconds, engaged at 61%, and generated roughly eight qualified inquiries a month for five-and-six-figure projects.

Meanwhile paid produced a bigger traffic number and nothing else. If you’d judged that site by “visits,” paid looked like half the business. Judged by jobs, it was zero.

That’s the whole argument for why organic search is the better first investment for most trades: ads stop the instant you stop paying; rankings you’ve earned keep working. Ads rent attention. SEO builds an asset. For a business where one job is worth five figures, owning the asset wins.

When I’d actually tell a contractor to run ads

Honestly, three situations:

1. You’re brand new and need work now. SEO takes months to compound. Ads can bridge the gap while the organic engine spins up — as a deliberate, temporary bridge with a taper plan, not a permanent tax.
2. You have a specific, urgent, high-margin service. Emergency work where the searcher hires within the hour and the job is profitable enough to absorb a pricey lead.
3. You’ve saturated organic and want incremental volume on top, with tracking mature enough to know what a job costs you.

Outside those, the money is better spent making the website findable for free, forever.

Go check yours right now

If you’ve ever had an agency, a marketing person, or a well-meaning nephew set up ads: log into your Google Ads account today and look at whether anything is running. Then look at what it cost and what it produced.

The contractor in this story is a real business with real revenue and competent people. The ad ran for nine years anyway. Not because they’re careless — because nobody who set it up was ever accountable for looking again. That’s the industry pattern this whole business exists to argue against, and it costs more than any invoice you’ll ever question.