Google Ads for home inspectors: what to run, what to kill, what a lead really costs
Budgets, campaign structure, negative keywords and realistic cost per booked inspection for a home inspection firm buying search traffic in a referral market.
Home inspection is an awkward fit for paid search, and pretending otherwise is how inspectors lose $2,000 in a month. Most buyers never search. Their agent hands them two or three names and they call down the list. The searches that do exist come from a narrow set of people: buyers whose agent gave them nothing, buyers checking the names they were given, sellers looking for a pre-listing inspection, and investors and out-of-state buyers with no local agent yet.
That is still a real pool. It is just smaller and more expensive per click than a trade like plumbing, and it punishes lazy setup harder.
What a click and a lead actually cost
Expect $6 to $18 per click on core inspector terms in a mid-sized US metro, and more in coastal Florida, Texas and southern California markets where the field is crowded. Our dataset shows 27,687 inspection firms across 51 states, with Florida, California and Texas holding the largest counts, and the auction reflects that.
Realistic outcomes for a well-built account:
- 6% to 12% click-through rate on exact-match inspector terms
- 8% to 15% of clicks turn into a call or form
- $45 to $130 per booked inspection
- At a $450 average fee with radon or a sewer scope attached, that is workable, and it is why the ancillary attach rate in the pricing guide decides whether ads pay
If you are paying more than $150 per booked job on search, the problem is almost never the bid. It is the phone or the landing page.
The three campaigns worth running
1. Core buyer intent, exact and phrase only. Terms: "home inspector near me," "home inspection [city]," "home inspection cost," "certified home inspector [county]." Budget $20 to $40 a day. Schedule it to hours you answer, which for this trade means 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. plus Saturday morning. Only 31.6% of inspectors list Saturday hours, so Saturday is both cheap and underserved.
2. Ancillary and specialty. Separate campaign, separate budget, much cheaper clicks: "radon testing [city]," "sewer scope inspection," "mold inspection [city]," "4 point inspection," "wind mitigation inspection," "11 month warranty inspection." These convert well because the searcher already knows what they want, and half of them turn into a full inspection anyway. $10 to $20 a day.
3. Pre-listing, aimed at sellers. "Pre listing inspection," "seller inspection," "inspection before selling house." Small volume, high value, and it is the one paid campaign that keeps working when buyer volume drops. Pair it with the offer in the slow-season plan.
What wastes money
Broad match. Broad on "inspection" will buy you vehicle inspections, food safety inspections, elevator inspections and someone's OSHA compliance search. If you use broad at all, use it in one small isolated campaign with a $10 cap and read the search terms report weekly.
Performance Max as a first campaign. It will spend, it will report conversions, and you will not be able to see which searches produced them. Get exact-match Search profitable first, then test PMax with a real conversion history behind it.
Statewide radius. A 50-mile radius around a metro is defensible. A whole state is not, unless you genuinely drive it. Set location targeting to "presence" rather than "presence or interest," or you will pay for people in Ohio reading about Phoenix inspections.
Running ads at hours nobody answers. The most common single leak. A click at 7 p.m. that hits voicemail is a full loss.
The negative keyword list to paste in on day one
Add these as campaign negatives before you turn anything on:
jobs, salary, school, training, course, certification, license, how to become, InterNACHI login, checklist template, free, insurance inspection, vehicle, car, auto, elevator, restaurant, food, city inspector, code enforcement, septic pumping, appraisal, appraiser, real estate agent, foundation repair, roofer, contractor
The two that matter most are the career cluster ("how to become a home inspector" is a high-volume search) and "appraisal," which people confuse with inspection constantly. Those two alone typically account for 20% to 30% of wasted spend in an untuned inspector account.
The landing page
Do not send paid traffic to your homepage. Build one page per campaign with these six things above the fold or immediately below:
- The city or county named in the headline
- A price range, not "call for pricing"
- A tap-to-call button and an online booking link
- Turnaround time stated plainly ("report in your inbox the same evening")
- A link to a redacted sample report
- Your license number, certifying body and insurance status
The sample report is the differentiator on a paid page. A buyer clicking an ad has never seen an inspection report and is comparing three strangers. Show them the deliverable. More on this in the website guide.
Tracking, or you are guessing
Three things, none optional:
- A call-tracking number on the landing page only, so you know which calls came from ads and not from an agent referral. Keep your real number everywhere else so your listing citations stay consistent.
- Call conversions counted at 60 seconds, not at connect, so a wrong number does not register as a lead.
- A weekly search terms report. Fifteen minutes, and it is where the negatives come from.
Then reconcile monthly against actual booked inspections, not conversions. Google will report a form fill as a conversion whether or not the buyer showed up. The number that matters is booked jobs divided by spend.
A realistic first 90 days
- Month 1: $700 to $900 in spend, exact and phrase only, one campaign, one landing page. Expect it to look mediocre. You are buying search-term data.
- Month 2: cut the bottom third of keywords, add 30 to 60 negatives, launch the ancillary campaign, raise bids on the terms that produced calls.
- Month 3: add the pre-listing campaign, test call-only ads for mobile during business hours, and decide honestly whether cost per booked job is under half your average fee. If it is not, the money belongs in reviews and referral work instead.
Frequently asked
Should I run Local Services Ads? Check whether Google lists a home inspection category in your market, because coverage varies and changes. If it is available, it is usually cheaper per lead than Search, and it puts your review count in the ad itself, which is a problem when the median firm has 4 reviews.
What about bidding on competitor names? Legal and cheap, but it damages agent relationships in a small market where everybody knows everybody. Our opinion: not worth it in this trade.
Is $500 a month enough? It is enough to learn from, not enough to scale. Under $300 a month you will not gather enough search-term data to tune anything, and the account will look random.
Google Ads management is one of the services in the free 14-day trial; we build it in your account and you keep it. Text or call (385) 832-6175, or check the benchmark report first.