Service 03
Advertising & Social Media
Google Ads, Local Services Ads and social accounts run by someone who reports booked jobs instead of impressions.
We build, run and optimize Google Ads and Google Local Services Ads for New Jersey and New York City businesses, and manage social media accounts across the platforms your customers actually use. Every campaign is tied to conversion tracking, so the monthly report shows leads and cost per lead — not clicks and “engagement.”
The role paid plays
Ads buy time. SEO buys the future.
Organic rankings and profile authority take months to build. Ads produce leads in days. Used well, paid traffic funds the business while the foundation matures, then keeps owning the searches that are worth paying for permanently.
Used badly — and most local accounts are used badly — ads become an expensive broad-match subscription that pays Google to send you people searching for something else entirely.
The difference is almost always the boring work: negative keywords, match type discipline, tight ad groups, landing pages that match the search, and conversion tracking that actually fires.
What we usually find in an inherited account
- Conversion tracking broken, duplicated, or counting page views as leads
- Near-zero negative keywords, so budget goes to “jobs,” “free” and “how to DIY”
- One campaign, one ad group, forty unrelated keywords
- Every ad pointing at the homepage
- Location targeting set to “presence or interest” — paying for clicks from other states
- Automated recommendations auto-applied, quietly undoing the settings
- No call tracking, so half the leads are invisible
What’s included
Three channels, managed properly.
Channel 01
Google Ads
Search campaigns built around intent, not around budget. Plus Performance Max and remarketing where they genuinely earn their place.
- Keyword research by intent and profitability
- Tight ad groups with matched ad copy
- Negative keyword lists built and maintained weekly
- Geographic targeting down to the county, borough or radius
- Ad extensions: sitelinks, callouts, call, location, lead form
- Dedicated landing pages, not the homepage
- Bid strategy tested against actual lead cost
- Weekly search term review, monthly restructure where needed
Channel 02
Local Services Ads
LSAs sit above everything else on the page and you pay per lead, not per click. For eligible trades in NJ and NYC they are frequently the single best-performing channel.
- Eligibility check for your category and license type
- Google Guaranteed or Google Screened application handled
- Background checks, licensing and insurance documentation
- Service and service-area configuration
- Budget and bidding management
- Lead review and disputing of invalid charges — this alone often pays for management
- Review integration, since LSA ranking leans heavily on reviews
Channel 03
Social media management
Consistent, credible presence on the platforms your customers check before they call. No engagement-farming, no daily posting for its own sake.
- Account setup, optimization and brand consistency
- Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, plus TikTok or Nextdoor where relevant
- Content calendar built from real work: jobs, team, results, FAQs
- 8–16 posts per month depending on plan
- Graphics and short-form video editing from footage you send
- Comment and message monitoring
- Paid social campaigns where the audience justifies it
- Monthly reporting on reach, followers and traffic to the site
How it works
From account access to first optimized month.
Audit & tracking first
Before a dollar moves, we verify conversion tracking end to end: form submissions, phone calls, booking completions, chats. Optimizing against broken data is the most expensive mistake in paid search, and it is extremely common.
Build
Campaign structure, keyword sets, negative lists, ad copy variants, extensions, geo-targeting and landing pages. Everything documented so you can see exactly what was built and why.
Launch small, then scale
We start at a controlled budget and let the data decide where it goes. Scaling a campaign before the search term report tells you what’s working just buys more of the wrong traffic faster.
Optimize weekly
Search term review, negative additions, bid adjustments, ad testing, budget reallocation between campaigns and channels. Small consistent moves beat quarterly overhauls.
Report monthly
Spend, leads, cost per lead, and where possible, cost per booked job. Written in English. If a channel isn’t working, we say so and propose moving the budget — including moving it away from us.
How we charge
Management fee. Not a percentage of your spend.
Percentage-of-spend pricing rewards an agency for spending more of your money. We charge a flat monthly management fee per channel, so our incentive is your cost per lead going down, not your budget going up.
Your ad budget is paid directly to Google or Meta from your own account. We never mark it up, and you can see every dollar in your own billing dashboard.
- You own the ad accounts — permanently
- You see the real spend, not a rebilled number
- No minimum spend requirement to work with us
- Recommended starting budgets given honestly, per category
Realistic starting budgets in NJ & NYC
These are the monthly ad budgets below which a campaign usually can’t gather enough data to optimize. Starting points, not quotes — competitive categories need more.
- Home services & contractors, suburban NJ: from $1,500
- Home services & contractors, NYC metro: from $2,500
- Healthcare & dental practice: from $2,000
- Law firm, general practice: from $3,000
- Law firm, personal injury NYC: from $10,000
- Automotive & auto repair: from $1,000
- Real estate & mortgage: from $1,500
- Professional services (CPA, insurance, IT): from $1,200
- Local Services Ads: from $1,000
A good fit if
- You need leads faster than SEO can deliver them
- You have the capacity to handle more calls
- You know roughly what a customer is worth to you
- You’re in an LSA-eligible trade and not using it yet
- You’re running ads now and can’t tell if they work
Not a good fit if
- Your total ad budget is under $500/month — the data won’t support optimization
- Your website converts poorly and you don’t want to fix it first
- You want to be judged on impressions or followers
- Nobody at your business can answer the phone reliably
Questions
Advertising & social, answered.
What’s the difference between Google Ads and Local Services Ads?
Google Ads are pay-per-click text ads that appear in search results; you pay whether or not the click becomes a lead. Local Services Ads appear above everything else, carry the Google Guaranteed or Google Screened badge, and charge per lead rather than per click. LSAs are available only to certain licensed trades and professions. Where you qualify, we usually recommend running both — LSAs for the highest-intent searches and Google Ads for the wider set.
How much should I spend on ads?
Work backwards from customer value. If a new customer is worth $2,000 and you close one in four leads, you can afford roughly $500 per lead and still be profitable. In practice, most NJ and NYC local businesses need at least $1,500/month in a competitive category before there’s enough data to optimize against. We give you a category-specific number on the audit call rather than a generic one.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. Flat monthly management fee per channel. Percentage pricing gives an agency a direct financial reason to recommend spending more, and we’d rather not have that conversation with ourselves every month.
How quickly will I see leads?
Google Ads typically produce their first leads within 3–10 days of launch. The first 30 days are a learning period where cost per lead is higher than it will settle at; expect meaningful optimization gains between days 30 and 90. Local Services Ads can produce leads within 48 hours of approval, though the Google Guaranteed background check itself takes one to three weeks.
Who owns the ad account?
You do. We build campaigns inside your own Google Ads and Meta accounts and operate as a manager. If we part ways, the account, its history and its learned optimization stay with you — which matters, because that history is genuinely valuable.
Can you dispute bad Local Services Ads leads?
Yes, and we do it routinely. Wrong numbers, spam, out-of-area calls and jobs outside your service list are all disputable. Disputes have to be filed promptly with the right evidence, and recovering those charges often covers a meaningful part of the management fee.
Do I need social media if I’m a contractor or a law firm?
Not for direct lead generation, usually. But people check. A prospect who found you on Google will often look at your Facebook or Instagram before calling, and an account that last posted in 2022 reads as a business that might not still exist. For most trades, a credible presence with a monthly cadence is enough; we’ll tell you if daily posting isn’t worth your money.
Next step
Find out what’s costing you calls
Twenty minutes. We audit your website, Google Business Profile, reviews and ads while you watch, and tell you the three things to fix first — whether you hire us or not.
No contracts to sign · No pitch deck · (201) 677-2824