Google Ads with seasonal budgets: spend hard when it pays, hold back when you're full

How we set a budget that follows your year

Every month gets its own ceiling. We work it out from three numbers you already know.

1. Average job value. What a typical booked job is worth to you, before materials if you prefer to work on margin.
2. Affordable cost per booked job. The most you'd pay to win one job and still be happy. Many trades land somewhere around 10–20% of job value, but your margins decide.
3. Spare capacity. How many extra jobs the crew can absorb that month.

A worked example: your average job is worth $800 and you're comfortable paying $120 to win one. In April you have room for 15 more jobs, so the April ceiling is about $1,800. In July you're already booked solid with room for 3, so July drops to around $360, mostly to protect your name in search. Same business, very different months.

Targeting Simcoe County properly

Location settings matter more here than in a city, because your customers are spread out and many of them aren't local.

• Town-level targeting. We target the municipalities you serve and exclude the ones you don't, rather than drawing one big radius around Barrie that spills into Muskoka or York Region.
• People interested in your area. Google's "Presence or Interest" location option can show ads to people searching about a place, such as a contractor in Wasaga Beach, even when they're in Vaughan or Oakville at the time. For cottage-focused work that's often where the buyer is.
• Ad schedules. If nobody answers the phone after 6 p.m., ads that run at 10 p.m. generate missed calls. We match ad hours to the times someone can pick up.
• Separate campaigns by season. Spring opening, fall closing and winter heating each get their own campaign, so we can turn them up and down independently.

What's included and the timeline

Setup takes two to three weeks, then the work is ongoing management.

• account audit or new build, owned by you
• keyword research by service and town, with negative keywords to block junk
• ad copy that names the town and the job, written for each season
• call tracking, so you know which calls came from ads
• Local Services Ads setup where your trade qualifies
• monthly budget review against the seasonal plan

Most accounts settle within 60–90 days, once there's enough data to see which searches turn into booked jobs.

How we measure results

We report on booked jobs, not clicks. Clicks are cheap to get and easy to show off; they don't pay the crew.

• Cost per booked job, by month and by campaign
• Calls answered versus missed, because a missed call from a paid click is pure loss
• Share of spend by town, to check money is going where you want to work
• Search terms report, reviewed for wasted phrases every month

Mistakes to avoid

These are the errors we see most often in Simcoe County ad accounts.

• One radius around Barrie. A 50 km circle includes towns you don't serve and misses part of the shoreline you do.
• Running all year at one budget. Overspending in peak weeks and starving the shoulder months.
• Sending ads to the home page. A cottage owner looking for a fall closing should land on a page about fall closings.
• No call tracking. Without it you can't tell ads from referrals, and every budget decision is a guess.
• Ignoring missed calls. If your crew can't answer on a roof or a dock, a text-back system matters. Our sister site CallText.chat explains how missed-call text-back works.

Where to go next

Ads work best on top of a site that converts, so check our websites service if yours is slow or vague. Our guide to seasonal ad budget maths walks through the calculation in more depth, and plan prices are on the pricing page.