You have been running Google Ads for a while. Money goes out every month. Calls come in, sometimes. But you cannot shake the feeling that a chunk of what you are spending is going nowhere. You do not know which calls came from the ads, whether the people calling are in your service area, or whether the campaign is set up the way it should be.
An audit is the structured way to find out. This post explains what a real Google Ads audit covers for an electrical contractor, what problems it almost always turns up, and how to tell the difference between a genuine review and someone clicking around for twenty minutes and declaring everything fine.
What a Real Audit Is
A Google Ads audit for an electrician is a systematic review of every layer that determines whether the account is sending good leads your way or burning through budget on the wrong people.
This is not the same as Google’s built-in “recommendations” tab. Those recommendations are designed to move accounts toward more automation and higher spend. They are not a diagnosis. A real audit looks at whether the account matches your actual business: your service area, the types of jobs you want, the hours you are available, and the way customers actually call you.
For a local electrical business running Search and potentially Local Services Ads, a thorough audit takes two to four hours. What comes out is a specific list of problems ranked by cost, not a list of vague suggestions.
The First Check: Are You Measuring the Right Thing
Before looking at a single keyword or campaign, the most important question is whether the account is measuring what matters.
For an electrician, a conversion is a phone call or a form submission from someone in your service area who might hire you. It is not a click to your website. It is not someone who visited your homepage and left. It is a real person reaching out.
The most common measurement failure I find in electrical contractor accounts is that there is no call tracking in place at all. The account spends money on clicks. Someone clicks the ad, visits the website, and calls the number on the page. Google Ads has no idea whether that call happened. The account records zero conversions while the owner receives calls.
In this state, everything downstream is broken. The bidding algorithm does not know what is working, so it cannot optimize. The owner cannot tell which campaigns are driving calls. They are spending money and guessing at the results.
The second failure is measuring the wrong thing: counting a click to the website as a conversion, or counting a visit to the contact page, or using a single fixed phone number across all sources so there is no way to know which calls came from ads. These problems are less obvious than zero tracking, but they produce the same outcome: decisions made on wrong data.
What correct tracking looks like for an electrician: a call conversion fires when someone calls the number in the ad (Google provides a forwarding number for this), and a separate call conversion fires when someone calls a tracked number on the website after clicking an ad. Form submissions have their own conversion action. Every real lead is counted once.
Geographic Targeting
The second thing I check is whether the ads are showing to people in the service area, and only those people.
Geographic waste is the most straightforward budget loss I find in local service accounts. An electrician serving a 25-mile radius around their city finds, on closer inspection, that their ads are appearing in towns 60 miles away, in areas they do not serve, sometimes in neighboring states if the account was set up with broad location settings.
This happens because Google Ads has two different ways of handling geographic targeting. One option shows ads to people in the area. The other shows ads to people who are in the area or who have shown interest in the area. The second option sounds reasonable until you realize that “interest in the area” can mean someone who once searched for something in that city, or someone planning a visit, or someone reading a news article about that city. These people are not in your service area and will not become your customers.
Many accounts are set up on the second option by default, or because it was selected during the initial automated setup process, and it is never changed. The result is a meaningful percentage of budget going to people who cannot hire you.
What I look for: the geographic report, broken down by city and region, showing where clicks and any recorded conversions are actually coming from. A well-configured account shows concentration in the service area. A poorly configured one shows spend scattered across a much wider geography.
Search Terms: What Queries Actually Trigger Your Ads
For electricians running Search campaigns, the search terms report shows every real query that triggered an ad. This is one of the most revealing parts of any audit.
What I typically find when I pull this report for electrical contractor accounts:
Queries from people looking for a job, not a service. “Electrician jobs hiring near me” and “how to become a licensed electrician” are common. The person searching is looking for employment, not an electrical contractor. These clicks cost money and will never produce a customer.
Queries for DIY electrical work. “How to wire an outlet yourself” and “can I replace my own breaker” indicate someone trying to do the job themselves. They are not calling you.
Queries for products, not services. “Electrical wire price” and “outlet covers for sale” are product searches. Not service searches.
Queries from outside the service area that slipped through despite location targeting. “Electrician Phoenix” when you are based in Tucson.
All of these appear because keyword match types, the settings that control how closely a search query has to match your keywords before your ad triggers, are often set too broadly. A keyword like “electrician” on a broad or phrase match setting will trigger for a very wide range of related queries, many of which have nothing to do with hiring an electrician.
The fix involves tightening match types and building a negative keyword list, a list of terms that should never trigger your ads. A well-managed account for an electrician has hundreds of negative keywords built up over time. An account that has never been audited typically has fewer than twenty.
Campaign Structure
After checking measurement and traffic quality, I look at how the campaigns are organized.
The most common structural problem I find: one campaign, one ad group, all keywords mixed together, one set of ads that tries to speak to every possible service. An electrician who does panel upgrades, emergency service, new construction, and EV charger installation has all of those services bundled into one campaign with generic ads.
The problem with this structure is that the messaging does not match the search. Someone searching “emergency electrician available now” and someone searching “panel upgrade cost estimate” have very different urgency levels, different decision-making timelines, and different things they need to hear in an ad to call. A single generic ad for both means neither search gets a relevant response.
What proper structure looks like: separate ad groups or campaigns for distinct service categories, so that ads for emergency electrical work are highly specific to emergency intent, and ads for panel upgrades address the considerations someone planning that job actually has. This alignment between search intent and ad message improves both click-through rate and, more importantly, the likelihood that the person calling is actually ready to book.
Ad Copy and Landing Pages
I look at whether the ads themselves say anything specific enough to qualify callers. An ad that says only “Licensed Electrician, Free Estimate, Call Now” attracts anyone and everyone. It gives no information about service area, specialty, or availability. It brings in callers who are browsing for prices with no intention of booking.
Specific ads do the opposite. An ad that mentions the service area, the type of work, and a clear reason to call filters for the right caller. It may get fewer clicks, but those clicks convert to booked jobs at a higher rate.
What Audits Usually Find
Across the electrical contractor accounts I have reviewed, the same problems appear repeatedly: no call tracking or tracking that fires on the wrong event, geographic waste from an “interested in the area” setting that nobody knew was on, a search terms report full of DIY and job-seeker queries, and ads that are too generic to attract serious callers.
Most accounts have two or three of these. The accounts that have been actively managed have fewer. The accounts that were set up by a marketing company and left on autopilot for a year have all of them.
Getting This Fixed
Auditing an electrical contractor’s Google Ads account is exactly the kind of work I do for local trades businesses. The problems described above are fixable, and finding them in a structured review takes a fraction of the time it takes for an owner to piece together what is wrong while also running a business.
If your Google Ads spend feels like a money drain without clear results, an audit is the right starting point. Reach out at adnanagic.com/#contact.
Part of the Google Ads for Electricians series, written for electricians who want their ad budget to bring real jobs, not junk calls.
Related Posts
- Why Your Google Ads Bring Calls but Not the Jobs You Want
- Are You Tracking Phone Calls from Your Ads, or Guessing
- Is Your Marketing Company Getting You Electrical Jobs, or Just Sending Reports
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