Stop letting Google's defaults run your home-renovation ads

Google's defaults are designed for Google. The defaults that make your monthly spend predictable for them are the same defaults that bleed your booked consultations. For home-renovation contractors, that gap shows up in three places: where your ads run, who Google's automation thinks you want to talk to, and what gets credited as a 'conversion' on the report your agency hands you. Six settings are responsible for almost all of it. Turn them off this week.

The agencies running your account are not usually doing anything malicious. Most are doing the default thing competently, because the default thing is what Google's interface and Google's reps reward them for doing. The trouble is that 'default' and 'right for your business' stopped overlapping a few years ago, and the longer the defaults run, the more invisible the gap becomes. The point of this post is to make that gap visible enough that you can either fix it yourself in an afternoon or know exactly what to ask the person you are paying to fix it.

Six defaults to turn off this week

Each of these is on by default, each is defended by a Google product manager who is doing their job, and each is wrong for a home-renovation contractor running a finite ad budget against a finite service area.

1. Broad match is your default match type

When you create a new ad group, Google selects broad match for you. For most service categories this is mildly bad. For renovation it is a margin-eating disaster. 'kitchen remodel' broad-matches into 'small kitchen makeover ideas pinterest', 'before and after kitchen', 'kitchen remodel cost calculator', and a thousand other inspiration queries that pull homeowners who are six months from a project, if they ever start one. Renovation is the most inspiration-saturated query category on the open web. Broad match treats that as a feature, not a bug.

Set match types to phrase or exact on every new ad group. Reserve broad match for a single explicit 'exploration' ad group with a strict target CPA and a fresh negatives list, and audit its Search terms report weekly for the first month. The keepers get promoted into phrase. The rest go into your negatives list, which should be growing every week if you are paying attention.

2. Search Partners and Display Network are checked by default

When you create a new Search campaign, two boxes are pre-checked: 'Include Google search partners' and 'Include Google Display Network'. Search Partners is unmonitored low-quality search inventory across third-party sites. Display Network on a campaign you set up as Search sends your budget to apps and remnant placements that do not book consultations and that you were not planning to advertise on.

Uncheck both on every campaign. If you want a real Display presence, run a separate Display campaign on a controlled placement list, with its own budget cap, where you are paying attention to what you bought. The Search campaign you built to drive consultations should run only on Search.

3. Location targeting defaults to "Presence or interest"

A homeowner in Denver searching 'Boston brownstone kitchen reno' counts as 'interested in' Boston, and Google bills you for the impression. Renovation has one of the highest crew-travel costs of any service category. Every impression you serve outside your truck-roll radius is pure waste, and 'Presence or interest' generates a lot of those impressions silently.

Switch the setting to 'Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations'. Then layer geo bid adjustments by zip cluster against your actual close rate per zip, not against impression volume. The zips where you win the bid war are not always the ones where you close the most jobs. Your CRM knows. Google does not.

4. Auto-applied recommendations are on

Google's recommendation engine will, with your permission, opt you back into broad match, expand keyword themes, swap your ad copy, and add headlines like 'free quotes today' that pull price shoppers you do not want. The change log shows up later. The damage to your pipeline shows up sooner. By the time you go looking for the cause, you have lost a month of context.

Turn off auto-apply for every category. Review recommendations manually once a month. Treat anything labelled 'expand targeting' or 'improve performance' as guilty until proven otherwise. The manual review is your audit trail and your only defense against Google's product team changing the meaning of 'default' on you mid-quarter.

5. "Maximize conversions" with no offline conversion import

Smart bidding optimizes to whatever event you labelled a conversion. If that is a form fill, it learns to find more form fillers, including the ones who ghost your consult call, the ones who turn out to be wholesalers, and the ones whose budget is a tenth of the project you would actually accept. The 'conversions' number on the dashboard goes up. The consultations-booked-per-dollar number, which nobody is looking at, goes down.

Fix the data, not the bid strategy. Pipe qualified-lead status from your CRM back into Google via offline conversion import, or use enhanced conversions for leads, so the bidder learns from the events that matter. Then bid to value (booked consultation, signed contract) instead of count. This is the longest fix on the list and the one that pays the most. Most renovation accounts we touch have not started it.

6. Automatically created assets are enabled

Google generates headlines and descriptions from your site automatically, by default. For a renovation contractor, that means headlines anchored to the cheapest example project on your portfolio page, or to a blog post about 'kitchen remodel cost', attracting the lowest-margin leads you can still close. The assets that perform best in Google's metric (highest click-through) are often the ones that perform worst against margin.

Turn off 'automatically created assets' on every campaign until you have written and tested your own. Then re-enable only after a four-week head-to-head against your curated assets, judging by booked-consult value, not by CTR. Headlines you did not write rarely sell jobs you actually want to take.

The 30-minute audit

Open the campaign you spend the most on. In order: uncheck Search Partners and Display Network, switch location targeting to 'Presence', turn off auto-apply recommendations, audit your match types and copy any broad-match keywords into a 'to migrate' doc, then disable automatically created assets. That is the half hour. The offline conversion import is the longer fix and the one that pays the most. Start that work this week, even if it takes another month to ship.

If you would rather have someone else run the audit, our marketing practice does it as a fixed-scope engagement. Either way, the test is the same: are you bidding to events your business cares about, or to events Google cares about reporting back to you?