Most contractors don't have a traffic problem. They have a leak: paid clicks arriving on pages that give the homeowner nothing to trust, and leaving seconds later. Pouring more budget into the top of a leaky funnel is the most expensive habit in contractor marketing. Here's how video ads work when they're built as a system — the ad, the landing page, and the tracking, together.
Why contractor clicks bounce
The homeowner who clicked your ad clicked three others in the same minute. Four tabs, four companies — and four nearly identical pages: a stock photo, a bullet list, a form. Nothing on any of them answers the actual question, which is never about features. It's: who are these people, and can I let them into my house. The first page that answers it in a human voice gets the call. The rest paid for a visit.
Where video ads run for contractors
- YouTube. In-stream and Shorts, in your service area, in front of homeowners watching exactly the how-to and home-project videos that precede a service call.
- Demand Gen. Google's placements across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail — video reaching people researching, before they search.
- Facebook and Instagram. Vertical cuts in the feed, geo-targeted, captioned — because most of the feed is watched on mute.
Different placements want different lengths and shapes, which is why the system produces cutdowns and vertical cuts, not one master file.
The click is half the ad
A video ad that lands on a wall of text is half a system, and the half you paid for is the half that gets wasted. Message match is the whole game: the person in the ad should be the person at the top of the landing page, saying the next sentence. The homeowner clicks a human, meets the same human, and the trust built in the feed carries through to the call button instead of resetting to zero.
That pairing — the hero video on the landing page plus the cutdowns built for the placements — is what the Conversion Kit exists to produce.
What a contractor video ad needs
- The trade and the area in the first seconds — the wrong viewers should scroll on, cheaply.
- The owner or a real tech on camera, not a voiceover on stock footage.
- Captions on every cut.
- One call to action. A phone number is a better ending than a slogan.
- Formats per placement: 30 seconds for in-stream, verticals for Shorts and the feeds.
Ad-spend rules we run by
Your ad budget is paid directly to the platforms — it never passes through us, we never mark it up, and we never take a percentage of it. Management is a flat fee, so the incentive is the same as yours: booked calls per dollar, not dollars spent. The budget itself gets set in the Funnel Map session, against your call capacity and season — not against a template.
Measure to booked calls, not views
A view is not a number you can deposit. Every campaign runs wired to call and form tracking, and the monthly proof report shows what ran, what it cost, and what it booked. Read how the tracking works, end to end, in Video Marketing ROI.
Frequently asked questions
Do video ads work for contractors?
They work when they're a system: an ad that reaches the right homeowner, a landing page that continues the ad instead of resetting it, and tracking that ties the two to booked calls. Any of the three alone underperforms — which is where most contractor video-ad budgets go to die.
How much should a contractor spend on video ads?
Ad spend stays yours and gets set together in the Funnel Map session, against your trade, your area, your season, and how many more calls your board can actually take. A budget built from someone else's template is a leak with a decimal point.
What does it cost to make the ads?
Published, exact: the video production cost guide.
Fix the funnel, then feed it
The Conversion Kit builds the landing-page hero and the ad cuts; the Growth Engine runs the campaigns month to month. Serving trades companies across Niagara, Hamilton, the GTA, and Western New York. Turn clicks into booked calls.