Why I won't run your ads unless I can change your website
This sounds like a strange rule until you see where ad money actually goes. An ad does not book a job. It sends a person to a page, and the page decides whether that click turns into a call. If I cannot touch the page, I am just helping you spend faster. Here is why I fix both, or neither.
I get asked to just run the ads fairly often. The website is fine, the thinking goes, let's drive some traffic to it. I understand the instinct, but I turn it down, and I want to explain why, because it is the difference between ads that make money and ads that quietly burn it.
Ads are only as good as the page they land on
An ad has exactly one job: send a person to a page. Everything that happens after the click is the page's job. If the page loads slowly, a chunk of people leave before they ever see it. If the phone number is buried, the ones who are ready to call cannot find how. If the form is long, most of them will not finish it. None of that is an ad problem, and no amount of ad tuning fixes it. You can have the best campaign in your trade and still get almost nothing back, because the spend is pouring into a page that leaks.
A real example of what the page is worth
Here is one I can put numbers to. On a Trimlight account, the contact form was 9 fields long. People would click the ad, land on the page, start the form, and give up partway through. I rebuilt it into a short, 2-step form that asked for less up front. Nothing about the ads changed. The conversion rate went from 5.7 percent to 20 percent, and the cost per lead dropped from 42 dollars to 10 dollars. Same traffic, same budget, same offer. The only thing that changed was the page, and it cut the cost of a lead to a quarter of what it was.
The ad gets you the click. The page gets you the job. If I can only control one of those, I am controlling the half that does not decide the outcome. That is why website access is not a preference for me, it is the thing that makes the ad spend worth doing at all.
Why I won't run Local Services Ads for a company that doesn't answer the phone
The same logic goes for Local Services Ads, just with a phone instead of a form. Those ads send you calls, and a call that rings out is a lead you paid for and never spoke to. I will not run Local Services Ads for a company that does not answer the phone, because I would be helping you pay for missed calls. If the phones are the problem, that gets solved first. Then the ads have somewhere to land.
What this means for working together
When I take on ads, I take on the page they point to as well. The speed of it, where the phone number sits, how long the form is, how clear the next step is. That is not me expanding the job for the sake of it. It is me making sure the money you hand to Google or Meta actually comes back as booked work. If I cannot fix the page, I cannot honestly promise the ads will pay off, so I would rather fix both or walk away.
Want ads that actually turn into jobs?
I run the ads and fix the page they land on, so the clicks you pay for turn into calls and booked work instead of leaking out of a slow page or a long form. Let's look at where your spend is going right now.
Frequently asked questions
Why do you need to change my website to run ads?
Because an ad only does one thing: it sends a person to a page. If that page is slow, the phone number is buried, or the form is too long, the visit dies right there and you paid for a click that went nowhere. Running ads without the ability to fix the page means spending your money to send people to a leak.
What is an example of a website change that improved ad results?
On a Trimlight account, the contact form was 9 fields long. I rebuilt it into a short, 2-step form. The conversion rate went from 5.7 percent to 20 percent, and the cost per lead dropped from 42 dollars to 10 dollars. The ads did not change. The page did.
Will you run Local Services Ads for me?
Not for a company that does not answer the phone. Local Services Ads send you calls, and a call that rings out is money spent on a lead you never talked to. If the phones are not getting answered, fixing that comes first. Otherwise I would just be helping you pay for missed calls.