Lead promises
Anyone who names a number of leads or a cost per lead before looking at your market and your phone handling is guessing. Ads do not work like a vending machine.
Hiring guide
Who Should Run Your Foundation Repair PPC?
A homeowner who finds a stair-step crack in the brick or a door that suddenly will not latch is about to make one of the largest repair decisions of their life, and most of them start by typing the symptom into Google. Foundation repair PPC puts your company on that results page the day the worry turns into a search. Whoever manages the account decides whether those clicks become booked inspections or a bill with nothing to show for it. This page is a buyer's guide: what to ask, what a good answer sounds like, and the warning signs we would walk away from.
Before the interviews
What a Manager Really Controls in Your Ad Account
Google Ads for a foundation contractor looks simple from the outside: pick some keywords, write some ads, pay when people click. In practice a handful of decisions made early in the account decide almost everything that follows, and those are the decisions you are hiring someone to make well.
The first is which searches you show up for. A homeowner typing "foundation repair near me" is ready to book an estimate. A homeowner typing "what causes cracks in a slab" is learning, and one typing "foundation repair grant" or "foundation jobs" will never hire you. The word foundation also belongs to makeup, charities, plants and nonprofits, so an account that is careless with match types fills the search terms report with strangers. Your manager should be able to show you, on the first call, how they keep those out.
The second is what counts as a win. For a foundation company, a form fill is not a win and neither is a ten second phone call. A win is a conversation with a homeowner in your service area about a structural problem you actually fix, ending in an estimator visit on the calendar. A manager who reports clicks, impressions and "leads" without separating those things is giving you a vanity report.
The third is how the account treats your sales cycle. Foundation work is high ticket and the decision is slow. Homeowners call three companies, ask for an engineer's opinion, think about financing and sometimes wait for a home sale to close. A good manager knows that the signed contract may come weeks after the click, and builds tracking that can follow the thread back to the ad that started it.
The fourth is who owns the account. The Google Ads account, the call recordings and the history should be yours. If an agency runs everything under its own manager account and will not give you administrator access, you are renting your own marketing history.
With that in mind, the table below is the interview we would want any foundation contractor to run before signing with us or with anyone else. Pay attention to the specificity of the answers. Vague, confident answers are the most common thing we see from managers who have never run a structural repair account.
The interview
What to Ask a Manager, and How to Read the Answer
Print this or paste it into an email. Anyone serious about pay per click for a structural repair company will answer every row without being rushed.
| Question to ask | A good answer sounds like | A weak answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| How will you separate emergency calls from research clicks? | Separate campaigns for urgent symptoms such as sinking, bowing walls and active water entry, and for planned work such as slab leveling or crawl space support, each with its own ads and budget. | One campaign with every keyword in it and "the algorithm will sort it out." |
| Which words will you block before we spend anything? | A written starting list: jobs, salary, training, DIY, kits, grants, makeup and charity meanings of foundation, plus work you do not take, such as mobile homes or new construction. | They plan to "add negatives as we go" and have no starting list. |
| How do you measure a good call? | Call tracking with recordings, a minimum length, and a tag for calls that became a scheduled estimate. They offer to listen to the first batch of calls with you. | They report total calls and treat every ring as equal. |
| Can you track the signed contract, not just the call? | Yes, by sending signed jobs back to Google Ads from your CRM or a spreadsheet, so bidding learns which clicks led to revenue. | They say signed jobs "cannot be tracked" or change the subject to click-through rate. |
| What happens to my service area and schedule? | Radius or ZIP targeting that matches the crews you have, adjustments for places that are a long drive, and phone hours that follow when your office actually answers. | Nationwide or state-wide targeting "to capture more volume." |
| Do you build separate pages for piering, slab work and wall repair? | Each service gets its own landing page with a short explanation of how the repair works, what the estimate visit involves and a visible phone number. | Every ad goes to the home page. |
| Who writes the ad copy and how is it approved? | The manager drafts, you approve, and no claim about engineers, warranties or financing goes live unless you can back it up. | Copy is written from a template, with promises you never reviewed. |
| What will I see every month? | The search terms that triggered ads, spend by campaign, calls and booked estimates, and a plain list of changes they made and why. | A dashboard screenshot with clicks and impressions. |
| Who owns the account if we part ways? | You do. You hold administrator access from day one. | The account lives under their manager account and "transfers are complicated." |
Questions contractors ask
PPC for Foundation Repair: Questions Owners Ask
What does foundation repair Google Ads management include?
It covers building and maintaining the campaigns: keyword research, negative keywords, ad copy, bidding, location and schedule settings, landing page recommendations, call and form tracking and monthly reporting. A good manager also reviews the search terms report regularly and listens to call recordings with you, because the quality of conversations tells you more than the click numbers do.
How much does it cost to hire someone to run foundation repair ads?
There are two costs and they are separate. The management fee is what you pay the person or company running the account; ours is $895 a month for one platform, $1,595 for two and $2,295 for three, with no setup fee and no contract. The ad spend is what Google charges for clicks and goes straight to Google. Set the spend by working backward from what a signed job is worth to you.
Should a foundation company manage Google Ads itself?
Some owners start by doing it themselves and learn a lot. The usual problem is time: a search terms report needs reading every week, and estimators and project managers rarely have it. If you do run it yourself for a while, change one thing at a time and keep notes, so that when you hire help the history is useful rather than a mystery.
How fast should I expect calls after launch?
Ads can start showing within days of approval, so calls can begin early. Do not judge the account on the first week, though. The first few weeks are for learning which searches produce real estimate requests and which waste money. Expect steady tuning, not a switch that is flipped once. Nobody can honestly promise a specific number of calls or a date.
Is Local Services Ads worth considering for a foundation contractor?
Local Services Ads are not available for every category or every area, so check inside your own Google Ads account whether foundation or structural repair is offered where you work. Where it exists it can sit beside regular search campaigns, but it has its own verification steps and rules. Read the current program policy before you plan around it.
What reports prove the manager is doing a good job?
Ask for three things monthly: the search terms that triggered your ads, the calls that turned into scheduled estimates, and the changes made with the reason for each. If you can also see the signed jobs that came from paid search, that is the strongest proof. Impression counts alone prove very little.
Can the same company run my Google Ads and my SEO?
It can, and it helps when the two share what they learn about how homeowners describe their problems. Paid ads cover you while organic pages and your Google Business Profile build over months. Judge each by its own results, and keep them as separate line items so you can see what paid search is delivering by itself.
Do I need a long contract with a PPC manager?
No. Be careful with any agency that wants a long commitment before showing you a single search terms report. Month to month is a healthy sign: it means the manager expects to earn the next month. That is how we work, and it is a fair thing to ask of anyone you hire.
What should I send a manager before the first call?
Send the services you want more of, the cities and ZIP codes your crews will drive to, the jobs you turn down, your office phone hours, how estimates are booked and a rough sense of what a signed job is worth. Access to your existing Google Ads account and your call log is a bonus. That one email saves a week of back and forth.
Walk-away signs
Red Flags When Hiring a Foundation PPC Manager
Hidden accounts
If you do not have administrator access to the Google Ads account that is spending your money, you cannot verify anything you are told.
Click reports
A report full of clicks and click-through rates that never mentions booked estimates is built to look busy.
Statewide reach
Foundation crews drive to jobs. Ads that run well outside the area you serve only buy calls you will have to decline.
One page for everything
Piering, slab leveling and wall repair answer different worries. Without a matching landing page, the click and the message feel disconnected.
Long lock-ins
A multi-month contract signed before you have seen a search terms report puts the risk entirely on you.
Auto-everything
Google recommends changes that raise spend as often as they help. A manager who clicks apply on all of them is not managing.
Test the hire
A 60-Day Way to Judge Your Manager
Week one: agree the target
Write down what a good call is, which services you want, and which cities you serve. Put it in an email so everyone starts from the same page.
Week one: fix the tracking
Before spending meaningfully, confirm that calls, forms and booked estimates are being counted and that call recordings are saved.
Weeks two and three: read the searches
Open the search terms report together. Mark every irrelevant phrase and make sure each one becomes a negative keyword.
Weeks three and four: listen to calls
Listen to a batch of recorded calls with your office manager. Note which questions homeowners ask and whether the ad promised something the phone team cannot deliver.
Day 45: connect to signed work
Match booked estimates and signed contracts to the ads that started them. Even a rough spreadsheet shows which campaigns deserve more room.
Day 60: decide with evidence
Review what changed, what you learned and what the next month looks like. If you cannot explain why the account is set up the way it is, ask again or look elsewhere.
Nearby trades
PPC Guides You Might Want Next
Want the whole picture for foundation repair? There is a full foundation repair marketing site at foundationrepair.getphound.com.
Want the organic side or the lead side too? See getting more leads, buying leads, lead generation programs, SEO, internet marketing, and best keywords for foundation repair.
Get in Touch
Want a second opinion on your Google Ads account?
Call 610-825-4363 or email hello@getphound.com. Send us a screenshot of your search terms report and we will tell you what we would change first.