Google Ads works. It also loses money faster than any other marketing channel when it's set up wrong. Both things are true.
Realistic starting budgets in Brooklyn range from about $1,500/month for niche services in narrow geographies to $5,000+/month for competitive trades across the borough. Anything under about $1,000/month usually can't gather enough data to optimize.
The single biggest waste of money is missing negative keywords. Without them, you pay for clicks from people searching for jobs at your company, DIY tutorials, and out-of-area work. A weekly negative-keyword review is not optional.
The second biggest waste is sending ad clicks to a homepage. Homepages are built for browsing. Landing pages are built to convert. Even a rough landing page usually beats a polished homepage on ad traffic.
The third: unrecorded calls. If you don't track calls, you don't know which keyword produced the job. You'll pause the wrong campaigns and scale the wrong ones.
Healthy contractor Google Ads accounts share a few traits. Focused geographic targeting. A negative keyword list that grows every week. Ad copy that mentions your service and location by name. A landing page per service. Call tracking on every campaign. And a monthly review that ties ad spend to booked jobs, not clicks.
Everything else is optimization on top of that foundation.
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