Google Ads for solar companies: campaigns, keywords and cost per signed job

Google Ads for solar companies work best as a few separate campaigns, one for each thing you sell: home solar, batteries, commercial, and your own company name. Give each one its own keywords, its own landing page and its own budget, block searches from people who want free panels, a DIY kit or a job, and judge every campaign by what each signed job cost, with the ad spend and any management fee counted separately.

Start with this layout. It keeps budgets apart, so a cheap campaign can't hide an expensive one, and it lets each ad match the search behind it.

Keep commercial in its own campaign even if it's small. A commercial job is worth many home jobs, the sales cycle runs for months, and its searches cost differently, so mixing it with home solar lets one campaign's budget starve the other. Batteries get their own campaign for a similar reason: the buyer is often someone who already has panels, and the offer changes whenever a rebate or credit does, so the ads and page need updating on their own schedule.

Your brand campaign usually costs little and protects searches you already earned. If a competitor or lead site bids on your name, you will see it there first.

Use phrase and exact match for the keywords that show buying intent: installer, company, quote, cost, near me. Add broad match only once conversion tracking counts signed jobs, because broad match spends on whatever Google thinks is related.

Then build the negative list on day one. These searches look like solar demand and aren't:

Google's own help page says negative keywords don't match close variants, so add plurals and common misspellings yourself: "job" and "jobs", "kit" and "kits". Read the search terms report every week for the first two months, and add anything that would never sign. Most waste starts there.

Target the area you actually install in, by radius or by city, and exclude the places you don't want to drive to. A lead two hours away costs the same click as one down the road and is far less likely to sign. If you plan to advertise finance, read the policy notes below first, because ZIP code targeting is off the table for those ads in the US and Canada.

Set an ad schedule that matches when someone can answer. If your phones go to voicemail at 5pm, either lower bids after hours or make sure an automatic reply and a booking link go out the moment a form arrives. Paying for a click at 9pm and calling back at 10am the next day wastes the click you paid for.

Run both, and measure them apart. They bring different people.

Lead form assets let someone send their details without leaving the ad. Google offers them on Search and Performance Max campaigns. You need a privacy policy linked on the form, a good policy record, and an account outside Google's sensitive verticals. Google keeps the leads for 60 days, so connect the form to your CRM with a webhook or Zapier rather than downloading files by hand. A lead form is easy to send, which helps volume and hurts quality, so add one or two qualifying questions, such as whether they own the home and what they pay for power.

Calls suit people who want to talk now, and commercial buyers often do. Turn on call reporting so Google can count calls from ads as conversions, and set a minimum call length that filters out wrong numbers and quick hang-ups. Count calls from your website separately. A call that lasts long enough is still only a lead, so tag what each call became in your CRM.

In the US, there is a third route: Local Services Ads list "Solar energy contractor" among their categories, and you pay for leads rather than clicks. Australia isn't in Google's country list for them, so Australian installers rely on Search ads.

Send each campaign to a page about that one thing. A battery searcher who lands on your home page has to hunt for the battery offer, and many won't.

• Match the ad. If the ad says battery rebate, the page opens with the battery rebate and the date it was checked.
• Keep the phone number at the top, tappable on a phone.
• Use a short form. Name, phone, email, postcode or ZIP code, and one or two questions. Say what happens next and how fast.
• Show proof from real jobs: photos, reviews, license and accreditation numbers.
• Say how you use their details. If you will call or text, say so next to the button, and link your privacy policy. The consent rules for calls and texts differ between the US and Australia, so check yours before you dial.
• Load fast on a phone. Test it on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi.

Then answer every lead within minutes. A fast reply costs nothing extra, and on a shared or comparison search your rivals are calling the same person.

Two costs go into Google Ads: what you pay Google for clicks, and what you pay whoever runs the account. Keep them separate on every report. Spend tells you whether the campaigns work. The fee tells you whether running them through someone else pays. Mixed into one number, a good campaign with an expensive manager looks the same as a bad campaign with a cheap one.

Put your own numbers into the cost-per-signed-job calculator. It asks for ad spend and management fee as separate inputs, and compares the result with what bought leads cost you. Our guide to shared or exclusive solar leads has published lead prices for that side of the comparison.

Smart bidding learns from whatever you count as a conversion. If that is every form fill, it finds you more form fills, including the tire-kickers. Once your CRM records which leads signed, upload those signed jobs back to Google Ads as offline conversions, with the value of each job where you can. Bidding then has a reason to prefer the searches that turn into contracts.

Give it time and volume before you judge. A campaign with a handful of signed jobs a month doesn't have enough data to learn quickly, so keep manual or simpler bidding and tight keywords until it does.

Most disapprovals in solar come from a handful of rules. These are general notes from Google's own policy pages, read on 10 November 2026; they change, so check the page before you launch.

• Savings claims. Google's misrepresentation policy bars presenting an improbable result as the likely outcome. "Cut your power bill to zero" is the kind of line it is aimed at. Say what depends on what, and show the assumptions on the page.
• "Free" and payment terms. The same policy requires you to disclose the payment model or full expense clearly. If a lease, power purchase agreement or loan means no upfront cost, say that, not "free solar".
• Government programs. Don't imply you are part of a government body or program. Name the rebate or credit, say who runs it, and link the official page. Ads that look like a government offer are one of the patterns the policy names.
• Finance in the US and Canada. If an ad promotes a loan, Google may treat it as consumer finance. Google lists home loans and appliance loans as examples. In the US and Canada, those ads can't target by gender, age, parental status, marital status or ZIP code; radius targeting of at least 1 km and city targeting still work. Installers who target by ZIP code should check this before adding a finance offer.
• Finance disclosures. Google's financial products and services policy asks for your physical address and all fees, and has extra rules for personal loans. It excludes loans to buy a fixed asset from its personal-loan definition, but doesn't say how that applies to solar, so ask Google Ads support about your offer.
• Verification. Some locations, Australia among them, require financial services verification before finance ads run, and it can apply to a business promoting a lender's finance as well as to the lender.

An owner with a few hours a week can run one home solar campaign, a brand campaign and a strict negative list, and many do. It gets harder with several campaigns, a battery offer that changes with each rebate step, and finance in the ads. If you hire someone, ask for three things in writing: the ad account stays in your name, reports show signed jobs by campaign with spend and fee as separate lines, and you can leave on short notice.

Our Growth package runs Google Ads, Local Services Ads where they're offered, SEO and landing pages for US$2,500 or A$2,500 a month, with ad spend paid by you straight to Google. For where paid search sits among everything else, read solar installer marketing.