Google Ads for landscapers: planning the year around patios, fencing and garden builds

How does a landscaper get better jobs from Google Ads? Run hard landscaping, soft landscaping and maintenance as separate campaigns, move budget with the season, starting in January when homeowners plan and cutting back once you are booked, and let photos of your own finished gardens do the selling. Unavoidable Marketing is a Leeds-based agency that runs Google Ads, search and Performance Max, for UK landscapers, and founder Andrew Heppinstall is on every strategy call.

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Last updated: 18 October 2026

A landscaping account runs on the calendar

Few trades swing with the seasons like landscaping. A flat daily budget all year means overspending when you are booked solid and missing out when people are making plans. We build the year in four phases.

Hard, soft and maintenance are three different businesses

Lumping everything under “landscaper” is the most common mistake we see. The customers, job values and lead times are completely different.

Hard landscaping

Patios, driveways, walls, steps, decking, fencing and garden rooms. These are the highest-value jobs and the most researched. Searches are specific: “porcelain patio installers”, “Indian sandstone patio”, “block paving driveway near me”, “resin driveway installers”, “new fence panels fitted”. Each of those deserves its own ad group and, for the big ones, its own landing page. Someone looking for a resin driveway does not want to land on a page about lawn care.

Soft landscaping

Turfing, planting schemes, borders, artificial grass and garden design. Often smaller per job but brilliant for filling spring weeks. “New lawn laid”, “turfing services”, “garden planting design” all perform well when the ad and page match the job.

Maintenance

Regular grass cutting, hedge trimming and tidy-ups. Lower value per visit, but repeat work. If you take it, run it in its own small campaign with its own budget, so it never eats the money meant for a patio. If you do not want it, add “gardener”, “grass cutting” and “lawn mowing” as negatives.

Keywords that point to a real job

• Put money behind service plus place: “patio layers Harrogate”, “fencing contractor Wakefield”
• Bid on materials people already chose: porcelain, sandstone, block paving, resin, composite decking
• Watch “ideas” and “inspiration” searches. They are cheap clicks but rarely book in the same season
• Add negatives for DIY, retail product searches, “how to lay”, “fence panels for sale”, “slabs price”, courses, jobs and garden centres
• Keep “cheap” searches out of hard landscaping if you are not the cheap option

Show the work: image assets and Performance Max

Landscaping is the most visual trade there is. A homeowner can tell in a second whether a patio is laid well. Google Ads lets you add image assets to search ads, so your ad shows a photo of a finished job next to the text. Use your own photos: a new patio from above, a fence line straight down the garden, a lawn freshly laid. Stock photos look like stock photos.

Performance Max goes further. It shows your ads across Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and the Display network, using images and video you give it. For landscapers with a good library of finished work, it can reach homeowners while they are still browsing ideas. It needs care:

• Feed it strong photos and short video clips of real jobs, ideally before and after
• Give it accurate conversion tracking, or it will chase cheap form fills
• Run it alongside search campaigns on your best keywords, not instead of them
• Check the placement and search term insights and exclude what does not fit
• Pause or reduce it once you are booked, as with any other campaign

Storm fencing: be ready before the wind

After a big storm, searches for “fence blown down”, “emergency fence repair” and “fence panel replacement” jump overnight. Most landscapers miss the first days because their ads are not set up for it.

We build a storm fencing campaign in advance and leave it paused. When a named storm is forecast, it goes live with a budget set for the days after. Ads say what you can do and how quickly: replace panels, reset posts, make safe. The landing page covers insurance photos and timescales. When the rush passes, it goes back to paused. You only pay while it is running.

Landing pages for big garden jobs

A patio or driveway is a big decision. The page has to show you can be trusted with someone’s garden for a fortnight.

• A gallery of your own finished jobs for that service, with town names
• Your process: survey, design, dig out, sub-base, laying, clean-up
• Guarantees on workmanship, if you offer them
• Trade memberships you hold, such as the Association of Professional Landscapers, shown as trust signals
• A form asking for the job, rough size, postcode and timescale

Tracking cost per booked job

Clicks in January look expensive if you only count that month. A homeowner who enquires in January and signs in March for a large patio is one of the best leads you will get all year. We track calls and forms, follow them through to survey and signed job, and report cost per booked job by campaign and by season. That is how we know whether January planning ads are worth it for you, rather than guessing.

How we do it