Google Ads for solar installers
Solar has expensive clicks, a long sales cycle and a market full of aggressive lead sellers. Without offline conversion tracking, a solar account is essentially flying blind and paying for the privilege.
No sales call required. WhatsApp, text, email or the form — written answers only.
Get your free audit
No sales call, ever. Tell us about your business and we’ll reply in writing, usually within one business day.
How customers in this market actually search
The gap between a solar enquiry and a signed contract is measured in weeks or months, and it involves a roof assessment, a credit decision, a utility interconnection and usually a second household member. That means everything happening inside Google Ads — clicks, form fills, cost per lead — is a leading indicator at best. The account cannot improve unless it eventually learns which leads became installs.
Demand is also policy-driven to an unusual degree. Federal and state incentives, utility rate changes and net metering rules move search volume far more than seasonality does. When a rate change is announced in a state, interest rises sharply and briefly, and accounts that can move budget quickly capture disproportionate value.
The campaigns worth separating
These are the splits that usually matter in solar. Each one deserves its own budget, because a shared budget always drifts toward whatever converts most cheaply — which is rarely what pays you best.
- Residential rooftop solar installation
- Battery storage and backup power, increasingly the stronger motivator
- Solar panel repair, cleaning and maintenance — cheap leads, underserved market
- Commercial solar, a separate business with a separate sales cycle
- System monitoring and inverter replacement for existing owners
- Roof and solar combinations, where your business supports them
Negative keywords from day one
Every solar account we build launches with a negative list, and it grows every week from the search terms report. A starting point for this trade:
This is a fraction of a real list. Mature accounts in this category typically carry several hundred negatives, most of them discovered from actual search terms rather than guessed in advance.
Timing and seasonality
Utility rate announcements, incentive deadlines and state policy changes are the real seasonality in solar. Spring and early summer produce a general lift in home-improvement research, but a well-publicised rate increase will outperform any month of the calendar. Budgets should be flexible enough to respond to those announcements within days rather than at the next monthly review.
What counts as a conversion here
Offline conversion import is not optional in this vertical. Form fills are abundant and mostly worthless; what the account needs to learn from is which enquiries reached a site assessment, which received a proposal and which signed. Feeding those milestones back from your CRM is the difference between a solar account that improves over six months and one that simply gets more expensive.
What the landing page needs
Paid traffic in this category should not land on a homepage. The page that receives the click needs, at minimum:
- Current incentives for the specific state, kept genuinely up to date
- Financing and monthly payment comparison against the current utility bill
- Equipment brands, warranty terms and expected system life
- Local installation photos and permitting experience in named jurisdictions
- A savings estimate that is honest rather than optimistic, because trust is the barrier
We build these when the existing site cannot carry the traffic — it is the one design service we offer, precisely because the campaign depends on it.
The mistakes we see most often in solar accounts
- Optimising to form fills, which in solar reliably produces the worst possible leads
- No CRM feedback loop, leaving the account permanently unable to learn
- Running the same message in states with completely different incentive structures
- Competing with national lead sellers on generic ‘solar quotes’ keywords
There is no phone number to call on this website, and that is deliberate. Everything happens over WhatsApp, text message, email or the contact form. You get written answers you can re-read, forward to a partner and hold us to — instead of a forty-minute discovery call you have to schedule two weeks out.
When something is genuinely easier shown than written, we send a short screen recording or a voice note you can watch whenever it suits you.
The order the work happens in.
- Week 1: free written audit of the account or the market
- Week 1: conversion tracking rebuilt so a lead means a lead
- Week 1–2: campaigns split by value and urgency, negatives loaded, ads written
- Week 2: controlled launch on a limited budget
- Week 3 onward: weekly search term work and a written Monday report
Who owns the account?
You do. Built under your billing, and everything stays with you if you leave.
What does it cost?
$899 a month for management, published on the pricing page. Your ad spend goes directly to Google.
How long am I tied in?
Month to month, thirty days’ notice, no exit fee.
Will you tell me if this is a bad fit?
Yes, in the audit, before you have paid anything.
Questions from solar owners
Why do my solar leads never answer the phone?
Usually because the campaign is optimised for whatever produces the most form submissions, and that is almost always low-intent traffic. Fixing it means changing what the account counts as success — site assessments and proposals, not enquiries.
How long should I give a solar campaign?
At least ninety days, and realistically a full sales cycle plus one. Leads generated in month one are often still in proposal in month three, so early cost-per-acquisition numbers will look alarming and mean very little.
Is battery storage worth advertising separately?
Increasingly yes. In areas with outages or unfavourable net metering, backup power motivates buyers more reliably than savings do, and the searchers are noticeably better qualified.