The digital world we all live in is a busy one: consumers bounce quickly among search, social media, and favorite websites as they’re researching purchases. For home services companies, it can be daunting trying to figure out how to break through with ad creative to earn the attention of a new prospect.
At Realize, we’ve found that success in home services advertising is all about getting the details right — attracting attention, engaging your prospect, and closing the deal with tailored images. Here’s how one customer worked with Realize home services advertising expert Jeremy Bade to cut out channels and tactics that weren’t delivering, and instead reach the right prospective customers for their product.
Ditch the Agency Tactics and Build High-Intent Creatives
To help amp up the work of a brand using Realize to boost its reach and conversions, the first step was delving into how elite home services brands scale their digital presence. It started with some marketing detective work: inspecting the tracking codes and landing pages of the U.S.’s top flooring companies to help this top-tier concrete coating company, which specializes in polyurethane and polyaspartic floors.
The coating company was already spending heavily on Meta and YouTube ads, but struggled to scale Google Search due to industry categorization issues. Inspecting the tracking codes and landing pages of top flooring companies uncovered a useful piece of data: the biggest players in the industry were quietly winning on native advertising.
To replicate the success of these companies, Bade recommended that the coating company move away from so-called black box agency tactics — where it’s often unclear where spending is going — and use the Realize platform to get truly specific with their audience and strategies. In this case, the plan was to build high-intent creatives to convert homeowners over age 40 into coating company customers.
Here’s what Bade recommended:
1. Leverage Motion Ads to Satisfy Visual Intent
To capture attention on premium publisher sites, you must move beyond static imagery. For this coating company, the work they do for their customers was a perfect fit to add some motion.
The recommendation: Replace or supplement static finished product photos with motion ads (GIFs) that showcase the application process.
The reasoning: In the home improvement vertical, the satisfying nature of seeing a product applied — like a smooth coating being poured — acts as a high-intent hook.
“Pouring polyurethane is incredibly satisfying to watch,” says Bade. “You’ll get a much higher click-through rate and higher intent by showing the work in action, versus a static image of a finished floor that the user might just scroll past.”
2. Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion for Hyper-Localization
To make a national brand feel like a local specialist, personalization is key.
The recommendation: Utilize dynamic keyword insertion, or DKI, to call out the user’s specific location directly in the headline.
The reasoning: Homeowners are looking for local contractors. A headline that asks a question about their specific area feels like a local service announcement, rather than an advertisement.
“Go ahead and add in the region, city, or zip code as a dynamic keyword insertion, it does really well on Realize,” suggests Bade. “If you say, ‘What does a garage floor cost in [region]?,’ it becomes hyper-targeted and hits closer to home for the consumer.”
3. Segment Campaigns by Device to Control Reach and Bid
To ensure your budget isn’t eaten up by low-intent clicks, you must control the environment. Realize makes this possible with segmented campaigns for better targeting.
The recommendation: Duplicate your campaigns to isolate mobile traffic from desktop or tablet traffic, instead of running a catch-all campaign.
The reasoning: Mobile cost per click (CPCs) are often lower, causing the ad platform’s algorithm to spend the entire budget there. However, desktop users on premium news sites often represent a high-value demographic for home services.
“If you have all device types in one campaign, you’re not going to get any reach with desktop, because mobile is going to eat up all that budget,” says Bade. “For a sophisticated marketer, you can split those to optimize for the specific behavior of each user.”
4. Implement Tier 1 Blocklists to Ensure Brand Safety
To avoid junk traffic and low-quality leads, aggressive placement filtering is mandatory.
The recommendation: Move away from open-exchange blind buying and instead apply specific blocklists for non-converting categories, like gaming or kids’ content.
The reasoning: High-ticket home services ($4,400+ average jobs) require a professional context. You want your ad next to a Bloomberg article, not a mobile game.
“Realize makes sure you’re only showing up on those sites that are most likely to convert,” confirms Bade. “By putting blocklists in place early, we avoid the nonsense, like kids’ gaming sites, and keep you in premium environments where your demographic actually spends their time.”
Key Takeaways
Home services companies don’t have to start from scratch to build better ad creatives for high-intent audiences. A combination of the right tools and details on what the industry leaders are doing led to better targeting, better use of budget, and more high-intent audiences for a concrete coating company. The use of motion ads, hyper-localization, device segmentation, and blocklists all helped this Realize customer stop wasting money on search traffic. And, they added transparency and control so that native advertising could be a scalable, fruitful channel.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How many creative variations should I test at once?
Creative ad variations can be tested endlessly to find a winner — typically, a business might test as many as they have the time and resources for. Realize experts, though, recommend testing a maximum of 10 high-quality ad variations. More than 17 variations can dilute data, Bade says, and Realize’s capabilities work best when you focus on your top 10 so the algorithm can stabilize and find the winners faster.
What is a realistic lead cost for home services?
Cost per lead (CPL) varies wildly by industry and location, and the home services industry covers a broad range of categories. Estimates show CPL in home services can range anywhere from $45 to $228 in the U.S.
That said, for home services like concrete coatings, Realize experts have found that a CPL between $40 and $80 is the sweet spot for scalability. Realize allows you to monitor this number daily, so you can move budget from underperforming social campaigns into high-performing native ones the moment you hit these targets.
How long does it take to see stable results for high-intent home services ads?
Typically, digital campaigns need a few weeks to learn the audience and see performance metrics. With Realize, the goal is a 7-10-day intensive monitoring period. Realize experts monitor the early learning phase swings to ensure that by the 30-day mark, your cost per acquisition (CPA) has stabilized and your set rates (appointments booked) are meeting your ROI goals.
