AdStack

09/23/2026

Most owners running Google Ads don't know this: the number on your ads might stop being yours.

Google's free forwarding numbers stay connected to your business for 60 days per caller. Customer calls again on day 45, the clock resets. But if 60 days pass quiet, the connection breaks and the number goes back into Google's pool, where it gets assigned to another business running ads.

A homeowner gets a furnace tune-up in October and saves the number. Furnace dies in February. They call the saved contact and a different company answers.

And it's not just repeat calls. Referrals travel by saved number. "Call the guys we used, here's their number." On day 61, the neighbor dialing it reaches whoever holds it now.

There's a second problem. Forwarding numbers only track calls from ads. The customer who found you on Maps or organic search? Never measured at all.

You'll never see any of this happen. No report, no missed call, nothing. Customers just quietly stop coming back.

Dedicated tracking numbers are yours and stay yours. They track every source that makes the phone ring. That's not an upgrade. That's the floor.

09/03/2026

Why buy when you can lease month to month?

The case for Website as a Service.

Every contractor understands equipment leasing. You lease the excavator because tying up $80k in a machine that depreciates, breaks, and needs a mechanic isn't the business you're in. Moving dirt is the business you're in.

A website is the same decision. Buy one and you've tied up $15k to $50k in an asset that is worth zero to any other company day one, needs constant maintenance, and becomes your problem the moment something breaks. Marketing isn't the business you're in either.

Now here's where it gets better than an equipment lease. The equipment lease locks you in for 36 months and penalizes you for leaving. Ours is month to month, walk anytime with 30 days notice. We earn our clients' business each and every month. And a leased excavator is the same excavator in year three that it was on day one. The website gets pages added, content built, and speed tuned every month. It's the only lease where the thing improves the longer you're in it.

And if you already bought the site you're on, stop throwing good money after bad. Every patch, every plugin renewal, every developer invoice on a site that's past its useful life is money spent maintaining the wrong asset. Sometimes it's just time to trade in and trade up, especially when trading up costs no down payment, no setup fee, and a commitment of exactly one month.

Own the business. Lease the website. Keep your capital in the part that makes you money.

09/01/2026

"My buddy says WordPress is fine and way cheaper. Why is my site built in React?"

Fair question. Here's the answer we give every time.

WordPress is great for those who like to use it. No knock on it.

But a WordPress site means managing nearly a million lines of code, plus a database, just to run a contractor website. Almost none of that code is doing anything for your business. It's plugins, themes, page builders, and compatibility layers stacked on top of each other, and every layer needs updates, patches, and babysitting, forever. Miss an update and you find out what breaks.

Our builds are custom React. Every line written is there because the site needs it to run. No plugin stack to maintain, no database to manage, nothing to update and pray over. Deployed on the edge, so it loads fast everywhere in your service area.

That is like driving a semi truck hauling 45,000 lbs of cargo to the store when you have keys to a Ferrari in your pocket. Both will get the milk home. One of them was built for the trip.

Faster site, nothing to babysit, nothing to break. That's the whole argument.

08/25/2026

Starting October 1, Google will charge you for LSA calls you never answered.

Here's the rule. A missed call during your business hours becomes a billable lead if the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds. Twenty seconds is about five rings. That's it.

There's a second piece people are missing. If the first call doesn't qualify as a charged lead, follow-up calls between you and that customer can be charged instead. So the meter didn't stop, it just moved.

Now stack that on what LSAs already do. Answer rate is a ranking factor. Miss calls and you drop in the rankings, which means fewer leads at a higher effective cost. As of October 1, you also pay for the ones you missed on the way down.

Put a number on it. Say your LSA leads run $80 and you miss twenty calls a month, which is not a high number for a shop with two people answering phones between jobs. That's $1,600 a month for conversations that never happened, plus the ranking hit, plus the jobs those callers gave to whoever picked up.

Google's framing is that this rewards businesses that answer their phones. Fine. But the practical effect is that every unanswered ring now costs money twice.

So the question before October is simple: what happens right now when a call comes in and everyone is on a job? If the answer is voicemail, that's a line item on your ad bill in six weeks.

Fix the answering before you touch the budget. Whether that's an AI receptionist, an answering service, or one more person on phones, the math changed and the deadline is real.

08/24/2026

If you run Local Services Ads, they're moving into Google Ads. The first wave started this month, and plumbing, HVAC, and pest control are in it.

What stays the same: you still pay per valid lead, not per click. Campaigns stay keywordless. Ads still show only on Search and Maps. They'll technically run as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal, but Google is putting guardrails on them so they don't expand to YouTube, Gmail, or Display.

What actually changes is management. LSAs stop living in their own dashboard and get run from inside Google Ads with everything else.

Three things worth knowing before your date comes up.

Manual max cost-per-lead bidding goes away. Service categories grouped in one campaign share a single campaign-level Target CPA. If plumbing leads and HVAC leads are worth different amounts to you, one blended target is now making that decision for you. Splitting them into separate campaigns gives you back the control, but each campaign then has less conversion data to work with, so it's a real trade-off, not an obvious fix.

Your average weekly budget gets converted to a daily budget by dividing by seven. If you run a restricted schedule, certain days or hours only, check your pacing before that math gets applied to you.

Export your historical LSA performance data before you migrate. You'll want it for year-over-year comparisons later, and after the move is a bad time to discover you needed it.

You get an email 14 days out and a reminder at 7 days. Plan on up to two weeks for performance to settle after the switch, so don't read the first week's numbers as a verdict.

None of this is a crisis. It's a platform consolidation, and the model you're buying is intact. But the blended target and the budget math are real decisions that get made for you if nobody makes them first.

08/21/2026

Google is quietly rebuilding how Shopping ads work, and most advertisers won't hear about it until it's already on.
AI Max for Shopping is in closed beta right now. A small number of accounts have it, most don't, and there's no way to request it. Broad rollout is the obvious next step, probably in the next few months.
Here's what it does. Your Merchant Center feed stops being static. Google's AI rewrites product titles to match what the shopper actually typed, picks which landing page on your site to send them to, and decides whether to show a text ad or a Shopping ad depending on the person. All aimed at conversational, long-tail searches that keyword-matched Shopping campaigns have always missed.
The upside is real. Those searches are happening, they're growing, and static feeds don't catch them.
But the question isn't which campaign type wins. It's what you're actually trying to reach.
If your goal is the shopping carousel, standard Shopping is still the play. That's what it's built for, and AI Max rolling out doesn't change it. I'd expect that to stay true after it opens up.
Where AI Max for Shopping looks genuinely interesting is against PMax and traditional search campaigns, especially for large product sets. If you carry thousands of SKUs, building and maintaining search ads around all of them is a monster of a task nobody wins at manually. Letting the feed drive that is a real answer to a real problem. And with feed-only PMax gone, since Google killed it by forcing asset generation, there's a gap right now that this is aimed at.
That said, nobody should be declaring a winner yet. New campaign types don't all hit it out of the park at launch. Some need two or three iterations before they beat what you were already running. We'll know more after a few months of actual testing, not from the announcement.
So when it does become available, test it on one campaign. Not the account. Clean before-and-after against what you're running now. If it wins, roll it out. If it doesn't, you learned that on a slice of the budget instead of all of it.
Every one of these rollouts follows the same pattern. It shows up as a suggestion, then a default, then just how it works. The time to understand it is while it's still a suggestion.

08/19/2026

08/19/2026

Everyone fights over Google. Almost nobody bothers with Microsoft Ads, and that's exactly why it works.
Bing runs the default search on every Windows machine that nobody reconfigured, which is most of them. Office computers. Older desktops. The laptop the homeowner has had since 2019. Those searches happen all day and most of your competitors aren't bidding on them.
Fewer advertisers in the auction means cheaper clicks for the same searches. Same intent, same service area, less competition driving up the price.
And the audience skews the direction you want in home services: older, homeowners rather than renters, people who own the house that needs the water heater and can write the check to fix it.
Nobody's arguing you should move budget off Google. Google is where the volume is. But if you're only on Google, there's a whole slice of your service area searching for what you do and seeing your competitors, or nobody at all.
Given enough budget to work with, we run it for clients alongside Google, same campaigns, same tracking, so it's measured on the same scoreboard. It's rarely the biggest line in the account. It's often the most efficient one.