Insect IQ · Google Ads 954-976-5330 · August 31, 2026
A search campaign for bat removal in Tampa Bay, built and paused in the account. This is the spend decision, the reasoning behind it, and the two things still blocking launch.
The finding that shapes the budget
The last bat campaign lost 64% of its available impressions to ad rank and only 15% to budget. Raising the budget would not have fixed it.
It ran 22 keywords on broad match with zero negative keywords, pointed at a service page that sits at position 61 in organic search. So it bought queries like "local pest control in my area" (22 clicks, $85.53, no leads), "bat rescue near me", and "bats be gone spooner wi". The fix is match types, negatives, and a real landing page, not a bigger number.
The clock
Florida rules 68A-4.001 and 68A-9.010 prohibit bat exclusion during maternity season, April 16 through August 14, because sealing a roost traps flightless pups inside. The window reopened two weeks ago and closes April 15, 2027. Every dollar of this campaign has to earn its return inside those 227 days, and demand follows the same curve.
Monthly searches for "bat removal", Tampa DMA
Peak demand is right now. August and September carry roughly four times the search volume of December. Launching in the next two weeks is worth more than any budget increase.
Deliverable 1
$10 /day cap
Hillsborough County only
A real test, not a real program. You will not spend the full cap, because Hillsborough alone does not hold $10/day of bat searches. Three months to learn anything, and the season is only eight months long.
$20 /day cap
Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco
Enough volume to reach statistical signal inside one season and to feed smart bidding later. This is what the campaign is built at today. Covers Brandon, Temple Terrace, and East Tampa, where the calls are already coming from.
$35 /day cap
Adds Manatee, Polk, Sarasota
Buys reach, not efficiency. Worth it only if crews can absorb 15 or so bat jobs a month across six counties, including drive time to Sarasota and Polk.
Cost per lead barely moves between the three tiers. You are not buying efficiency with a bigger budget, only more of the same auction.
That is the whole decision. Pick the tier by how many bat jobs the crew can actually take per month, not by what you hope the cost per lead does. Efficiency comes from the landing page and ad rank, and both are already handled in this build.
Do not go above roughly $40/day on bat terms. Past that the bat inventory is exhausted and Google spends the difference on the loose, unrelated queries that wasted the last campaign.
Where these numbers come from. Cost per click of $7 to $9 is derived from this account's own history on bat keywords ($5.98 in 2024, $4.48 in 2025 on broad match) plus Keyword Planner top-of-page bid ranges of $5.29 to $30.27. Click-through of 8 to 12% assumes the new landing page and ad, against 3.5% historically. Lead rate of 12 to 15% is a normal range for emergency home services with tap-to-call. These are modeled, not guaranteed. Google's own forecast tool returns empty for this keyword set because the volumes sit below its reporting floor, which is itself a signal about how small this category is. To turn cost per lead into return on spend I need your average bat job ticket and close rate.
Deliverable 2
| Name | Search - Bat Removal - Tampa Bay 2026 |
|---|---|
| Bidding | Manual CPC, $9.00 max. Deliberately not Maximize Conversions, because the account has no conversion history for it to bid on. Switch after 15 to 20 recorded conversions. |
| Networks | Google Search only. Search partners off, Display off. The old campaigns leaked spend into both. |
| Location | Presence only, not "presence or interest", so you stop paying for people merely reading about Florida bats. |
| Ad groups | Bat Removal - Core Intent (15 keywords, commercial intent) and Bats in Attic - Problem Aware (11 keywords, symptom-led). |
| Match types | 5 exact, 21 phrase. No broad match anywhere. |
| Negatives | 76 campaign-level, built from the actual junk the old campaign bought: free, rescue, sanctuary, bat house, baseball bat, halloween, plus informational prefixes (how to, what do, why do) and out-of-market cities. |
| Ads | Two responsive search ads, 15 headlines and 4 descriptions each, leading on the legal window and the free inspection. |
| Assets | Call asset on 855-930-2847, 6 callouts, 4 sitelinks, 1 structured snippet. |
| Landing page | insectiq.com/bat-removal-tampa |
Your question
You are right that there are two audiences, but they do not split in search, because commercial bat demand barely exists as a query. Keyword Planner across the whole Tampa DMA:
| Commercial query | Searches / month |
|---|---|
| commercial bat removal | 10 |
| bat removal for schools | 0 |
| commercial bat exclusion | 0 |
| bat removal commercial building | 0 |
| municipal wildlife control | 0 |
| bat removal contractor | 0 |
A separate commercial campaign would have almost nobody to show ads to, and splitting this little volume across two campaigns or two landing pages would starve both of the data they need to optimize. So: one campaign, one landing page. The commercial audience is handled on the page instead, with a dedicated section for schools, municipalities and facilities managers, and a required property type field on the form (Home / School or campus / Business / Municipal / Multi-family). That field is what tells us the real commercial mix, and once there is enough of it to justify one, we split then, on evidence.
Worth saying plainly: the school calls you are getting are almost certainly not coming from search. They are coming from reputation, referral, and the brand. Search will not scale that channel. If commercial is a growth priority it needs outbound and procurement relationships, not a bigger ad budget. One warning if you are tempted by the broader term: "commercial pest control" runs $51 to $100 per click in this market. That is a different and far more expensive fight.
Before this can go live
GTM-PDCWG2CX is published and live with the Google tag, Ads remarketing on AW-994228677, a conversion linker, and GA4 on G-KNCQV38S6D. Both Ads conversion tags carry labels that map to the right live conversion actions. Consent Mode grants ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data and ad_personalization by default, so this site is not affected by the blanket-deny problem on other client sites.
Both website conversion actions show zero conversions for 365 days. That is expected rather than alarming: the tags were built around May 2026 and the campaigns stopped spending in December 2025, so no ad click has ever passed through them. It does mean the setup is unverified. Run one click through to a real form submit and a real tap-to-call before trusting the numbers, and check both land in Ads within 24 hours.
The GA4 imports that used to fire (ClickToCall at 588, page_view_thank_you at 91 in 2025) are currently removed. Leave them removed. They measure the same two actions as the GTM tags, so turning them back on would double count every lead and corrupt bidding. One action, one source.
Both ads point at insectiq.com/bat-removal-tampa, which returns 404 today. The page must be created in Duda and published at exactly that path, or the ads need repointing. The page is built to fire the existing triggers: every phone CTA is a real tel: link, and a successful form submit redirects to /thank-you, which already returns 200.
Bat calls happen at dusk and on weekends, which is exactly when nobody is answering. The campaign runs around the clock on purpose, because restricting hours in a market this thin would cut volume badly. That makes the form the after-hours safety net, and it makes call answering the single highest-leverage thing outside the ad account. A missed call at 9pm is a lost job at this cost per lead.
Context
Search Console confirms there is no organic path to this revenue. The bat removal service page has 4 impressions, 0 clicks, average position 61.5 over 16 months. All of the site's bat visibility is informational blog traffic like "bat sounds at night" and "are bats loud at night", running at 0.4% click-through: 2,740 impressions producing 12 clicks. Site-wide the domain gets 3,309 clicks against 611,000 impressions, a 0.54% click-through at average position 21.7, and the commercial queries that do rank are for bee removal, not bat.
The useful consequence: because the service page has no organic equity to protect, an orphan landing page costs nothing to run. There is nothing to cannibalize. Separately, that blog post at position 14 with 8,685 impressions is a real asset going unused, and pointing it at the new landing page is close to free traffic.