Solar attracts a wider range of irrelevant searches than almost any other category — DIY kits, wholesale panels, apprenticeships, accreditation courses, secondhand equipment and people researching policy rather than looking for an installer. A single campaign covering "solar" will spend on all of it. This guide sets out a structure that holds up: campaigns split by intent, timing that respects rebate cycles, negatives that do real work, and landing pages that qualify before your team picks up the phone.
Split by intent, not by keyword volume
Three campaigns cover most installers, and they should never share a budget.
Residential installation. The highest volume and the most contested. Terms cover installation, quotes, system sizing and suburb-level searches. Ad copy should reference accreditation, warranty handling and the site assessment process rather than leading with a price.
Battery and retrofit. Lower volume, better qualified, and frequently existing solar owners. Terms cover battery installation, storage, retrofits, hybrid inverters and backup power. Given its own campaign, it produces enquiries consistently; folded into residential, it disappears.
Commercial. Lowest volume, longest cycle, highest value. Terms lean towards business system sizing, tender and procurement language, and industry-specific queries. The conversion action should be a feasibility conversation rather than a quote request, and the budget should be paced for months rather than weeks.
Some installers add a fourth campaign for service, fault finding and inverter replacement. It is cheap, poorly contested and often opens the door to an upgrade conversation.
Rebate-cycle timing
Solar demand moves with policy announcements and program changes. Federal certificate values step down on a schedule, and state and territory programs open, change and close at their own pace. Each change produces a wave of research and enquiry activity.
Two rules follow. First, keep campaigns running at a base level year-round so the account has conversion history and responds properly when you lift budgets — accounts switched on cold during a demand spike cost more and perform worse. Second, keep budget headroom available so you can respond within days of an announcement rather than at the next monthly review.
What you should not do is build ad copy or landing pages around specific rebate amounts. Figures change, out-of-date claims mislead, and the compliance risk is not worth the click-through rate. Refer to the scheme by name, explain that eligibility and value vary, and point to the official program page for current detail.
Negative keywords that matter
Build the list before launch and prune weekly for the first two months. The recurring categories in solar:
- DIY and kits — kit, self install, how to install, off-grid caravan, camping, portable.
- Wholesale and supply — panels for sale, wholesale, distributor, price per watt, secondhand, used.
- Careers and training — jobs, apprenticeship, accreditation course, licence, salary, TAFE.
- Policy research — scheme explanations, government pages, eligibility checkers where the searcher wants information rather than an installer.
- Adjacent products — solar hot water where you do not install it, pool heating, garden lights, solar hire.
- Complaint and comparison — reviews of specific competitors, ombudsman, faulty product searches, unless you genuinely service them.
The search terms report is the only reliable guide. If nobody has read it this month, the account is not being managed.
Landing pages that qualify
Sending every campaign to the homepage wastes the click. Each campaign needs a page that answers the exact question the searcher typed and sets expectations about what happens next.
A residential page should display Clean Energy Council accreditation and electrical licence details, explain the assessment steps — enquiry, remote review of roof and usage, site assessment, proposal — show real installation photography, and cover panel, inverter and workmanship warranties separately. The form should ask enough to qualify: roof type, number of storeys, approximate quarterly bill, whether a system already exists.
A battery page needs different content entirely: retrofit compatibility, hybrid versus AC-coupled arrangements, what backup does and does not cover during an outage, and how self-consumption changes the economics.
A commercial page should talk about load profiles, roof structure and access, grid connection considerations, disruption to operations, and the feasibility process rather than a price.
Ad copy that filters
Good solar ad copy repels the wrong enquiries. State your service area so people outside it self-select out. Reference accreditation, warranty handling and the assessment process rather than promising the lowest price. If you do not install budget imported equipment or do not service systems you did not install, say so — it costs a few clicks and saves hours of unproductive calls.
Use sitelinks to separate residential, battery, commercial and service so searchers route themselves, and put licence and accreditation detail in callout assets.
Bidding, schedules and devices
Start with conversion-based bidding only once there is enough conversion data to support it; before that, manual or maximise-clicks bidding with tight keyword control usually produces cleaner data. Feeding an automated strategy on unqualified form fills teaches it to find more of them.
Solar research happens in the evenings and at weekends, while calls cluster during business hours. Check the split in your own account rather than assuming, and make sure that whatever runs outside business hours leads with a form and a clear response commitment rather than a phone number nobody answers. Mobile dominates early research and desktop over-indexes on detailed comparison, which is a good argument for making the mobile experience the priority and the desktop page the detailed one.
Tracking and reporting
Install call tracking with dynamic number insertion so phone enquiries are attributed to the keyword and page that produced them. Agree with your team what counts as qualified — most installers settle on a booked site assessment — and report on cost per booked assessment and cost per installed system by campaign.
Clicks, impressions and click-through rate are diagnostics. In a category where the same homeowner may be talking to three installers, the only number that settles an argument is what an installed system costs by channel.
Common structural mistakes
Three errors account for most wasted solar ad budget. Running one campaign for everything, so panel searches consume the money and battery and commercial demand never surfaces. Pointing every ad at the homepage, so a battery searcher lands on a page about rooftop installation and leaves. And leaving broad match unsupervised, which in this category funds an extraordinary variety of searches that will never become an installation.
The first 90 days
Expect month one to be about data and negatives, month two about structure and landing pages, and month three about scaling what converts and cutting what does not. By the end of that period you should be able to say which intent group produces assessments at an acceptable cost and which needs rebuilding.
For the wider approach, see the solar installer marketing and SEO page and our tradie marketing hub. For budget, read what solar marketing costs in Australia, and for the channels either side of paid search, how to get more solar leads.
