Google Ads for solar contractors

Google Ads is the fastest way for a solar contractor to generate enquiries, and the fastest way to waste money. A single solar close is worth tens of thousands, which means a well-run competitor can rationally bid a great deal, and the auction settles where only good operators profit. The difference between a profitable account and an expensive education is the build. Not the budget.

This is the page we would hand to a new ads manager taking over a solar account on their first day.

Before you spend a dollar

Three things decide whether paid traffic converts, and none of them live in the ad account. Skipping them is how most contractors conclude that Google Ads does not work for solar.

1. 01Response time under five minutes. You are paying up to $300 for an enquiry. Answering it tomorrow is burning it. The full argument is in speed to lead for solar companies.
2. 02A review count that stands comparison. Paid visitors compare you against the map pack results on the same screen. Arriving with eleven reviews against competitors with two hundred means paying for clicks that were never going to convert.
3. 03A landing page that matches the ad. Not the homepage. One form, one offer, proof above the fold, and the headline of the ad repeated at the top of the page.

Every one of those three raises the return on the same ad spend. Fixing them first is not a delay. It is the difference between an account that pays for itself and one that funds an education.

How should the account actually be structured?

Shallow and specific. Solar accounts fail from over-complication far more often than from under-optimisation.

Four campaigns, each with its own budget. Shared budgets starve the campaigns that convert and feed the ones that don't.

Each campaign holds two to five ad groups. Each ad group holds one theme and three to five keywords in that theme. If you cannot write one ad that suits every keyword in an ad group, it is two ad groups.

The brand campaign always runs. Competitors bid on your name; without a brand campaign you pay for the click anyway, in lost traffic.

Which keywords actually generate installs?

High-intent: terms with a buying verb or a local qualifier. 'install solar panels', 'solar installer near me', 'solar quote [city]', 'cost of solar panels for home'. These convert.

Low-intent: terms a reader is using to learn, not to buy. 'how do solar panels work', 'diy solar', 'solar panels for sale'. These do not convert for a contractor and should either sit outside the keyword list or be bid at a tenth of the install-intent keywords.

Match types: start with exact and phrase match. Broad match hands Google permission to spend your budget on close-but-wrong searches, and in solar the close-but-wrong searches are expensive. Move to broad match only once you have at least a month of conversion data and a mature negative list.

The negative keyword list every solar account starts with

Six categories almost every solar account should exclude at the account level before the first click:

• DIY and research. diy, how to, how do, build your own, kit, kits
• Jobs and education. jobs, careers, salary, apprenticeship, course, courses, training, certification
• Free and cheap. free, cheap, bargain, lowest price, discount, used, second hand
• Downloadable and digital. download, pdf, software, calculator (unless you own the calculator)
• Research and comparison intent that will not convert. reddit, forum, youtube, wikipedia
• Unrelated solar terms. solar eclipse, solar system (astronomy), solar lights (garden)

Then mine the search terms report weekly for the first three months. Every search term that triggered an ad and did not convert, that you can see was never going to, becomes a new negative. The list grows into a filter that spends the budget only on traffic worth spending it on. The full starter list is in negative keywords for solar Google Ads.

How do you know if it is working?

Not cost per click. Not even cost per lead. Cost per sat appointment.

The right tracking stack:

• GA4 with enhanced conversions on, so first-party data closes the loop when cookies are blocked.
• Call tracking on the number in the ads. Dynamic number insertion if you are serious; a dedicated number per campaign at minimum.
• Offline conversion imports from your CRM, so Google learns which clicks became sat appointments and closed deals, not just which clicks became form fills.

Most accounts optimise on form submission and ignore the step after. The problem is that half of form submissions never pick up the phone, and the half that do include tyre-kickers that will never book a survey. Importing the sat-appointment event back into Google is what tells its bidding model which clicks are actually worth something. Without it, Google is optimising for the wrong outcome. The best solar contractor software piece covers which CRMs make this import easy and which make it painful.

What budget and bidding should you start with?

The industry floor for a single-product, single-metro solar campaign is around $1,500 a month in ad spend. Below that, Google's bidding does not have enough signal to optimise and the account looks worse than it is. Above about $5,000 a month in a single metro, you are usually running into competitor floors and the next dollar earns less.

Start narrow. One campaign, one metro, one landing page, 30 days. Judge on cost per sat appointment, not on activity. Scale only when the single campaign is paying for itself.

The bid-strategy progression

Four stages, in order. Skipping stages is how accounts stall.

1. 01Manual CPC for the first 30 days. You need the control to see what is happening at the keyword level. Automated strategies hide the detail that matters when the account is new.
2. 02Maximise clicks for a short window only if conversion volume is too thin for the automated strategies to learn, and only on campaigns with clean negatives.
3. 03Maximise conversions once you have 15 or more conversions in a rolling 30 days per campaign.
4. 04Target CPA or target ROAS once you have 30 or more conversions and offline imports are flowing, so Google can bid against the sat-appointment event instead of the form fill.

Jumping to target CPA on week two is the single most common reason a new solar account burns $5,000 learning nothing.

Everything above is what Volt builds when a client turns on the paid-ads add-on. The full list of what Volt covers on the monthly system is on the products page, and what the paid-ads channels cost on top of the plan is on pricing.