Google Ads for tradies: what to set up, and what it costs

Why search ads suit trades better than most industries

Google Ads works well for trades because the intent is unusually clear. Nobody searches "emergency electrician near me" for entertainment. They have a problem, they want it fixed today, and they will call one of the first few numbers they see.

Compare that with most industries, where you are interrupting someone who was not thinking about you. In trades, you are turning up at the exact moment somebody has decided to spend money. That is why the maths often works even at ten or fifteen dollars a click: one job can cover a fortnight of ad spend.

It also means the failures are predictable. Trade accounts rarely fail because the ads were badly written. They fail because the budget went to the wrong searches, the calls were never tracked, or nobody answered the phone.

What a realistic budget looks like

Work backwards from a job, not forwards from a number you feel comfortable with. Three inputs give you an answer in about five minutes.

1. 1Your average job value, and your margin on it. A $280 callout and a $9,000 bathroom are different businesses with different tolerances.
2. 2Your close rate on enquiries. Most trades convert somewhere between a third and two-thirds of genuine calls. Guess honestly, then check later.
3. 3What a click costs in your trade and city. Trade keywords in Australian capitals commonly run from around five dollars to well over twenty, with emergency terms at the top end.

If a click costs $12, and one in ten clicks becomes a call, a call costs you $120. If you win half of those, a job costs $240 in ad spend. That is excellent on a $3,000 job and terrible on a $200 one. The number that matters is cost per job against margin per job, and everything else is noise.

For a single-trade business in one city, a starting budget of roughly $1,500 to $3,000 a month gives enough data to learn something within a few weeks. Below about $30 a day you will collect clicks slowly and struggle to tell signal from randomness. There is a fuller method in our guide to setting a PPC budget.

More budget is not a strategy. It only makes the current strategy louder. If the calls you are getting are the wrong calls, doubling the spend just gets you more of them.

The setup that stops you paying for the wrong calls

Nine times out of ten, a struggling trade account is not badly written. It is badly aimed. Here is the structure that keeps the money pointed at real jobs.

• Search campaigns only, at least to begin with. Not Display, not Performance Max, not "smart" campaigns that spray your budget across the internet. Search puts you in front of people typing a problem.
• One campaign per service you want to sell. Hot water, blocked drains, and renovations have different values, different urgency and different budgets. Bundled into one campaign, the cheapest clicks eat everything.
• Phrase and exact match, not broad. Broad match on a small budget is an expensive way to discover what people search for. Start tight, widen later when you can afford the experiments.
• A real negative keyword list from day one. Negative keywords are what stop you paying for "plumber apprenticeship", "plumber salary", "DIY blocked drain" and "plumber jobs". Add "course", "training", "salary", "jobs", "how to", "DIY", "free" and every competitor name before you spend a dollar.
• Location targeting set to presence, not interest. The default setting can show your ads to people merely interested in your area, which for a trade business means someone in another state reading about your suburb.
• Ad scheduling that matches who answers. If nobody picks up after 6pm, do not bid at 9pm. Unless you genuinely run emergency work, in which case bid harder at 9pm, because that is when the competition thins out.
• Call assets and a click-to-call phone number. Most trade enquiries are phone calls made on a mobile in under a minute. Make the phone the obvious action.

Then read the search terms report every week for the first month. It shows what people actually typed, as opposed to what you told Google you wanted. That report is where the wasted spend hides, and clearing it out is usually the single biggest improvement available in a young trade account.

Where the clicks should land

Send hot water clicks to a hot water page. Send blocked drain clicks to a blocked drain page. Sending everything to the homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake in trade advertising, because you make somebody with an urgent problem go hunting.

The page needs four things above the fold on a phone: what you do, where you do it, a phone number they can tap, and a reason to believe you (license number, review rating, years in business, a photo of actual work). Everything else can wait until they scroll.

Speed matters more here than almost anywhere. These are people on mobile data, often standing next to the problem. A page that takes six seconds has already lost to the listing above it. Our guide to building a high-converting landing page covers the structure, and what a tradie website costs covers what you should pay to get one.

Track the calls, or you are just guessing expensively

This is the part trades skip, and it is the part that decides whether any of the above is working. If your enquiries come by phone and your phone calls are not tracked, your reporting shows clicks and cost and nothing about revenue.

We see the same pattern often enough that it has a name in our office. A business is convinced Google Ads is failing. The account is actually generating calls, but calls, form submissions and completed jobs were never connected, so nobody can tell which searches produce paying work. The first win is not a new campaign. It is fixing measurement so you can see which enquiries are worth paying for.

Set up conversion tracking for calls from ads, calls from the website, and form submissions. Then add the bit most people miss: mark in your own system which of those calls became a job. Google can optimize towards leads, but only you know which leads were worth having.

Lead volume without lead quality is a reporting problem dressed up as success. Forty calls at $30 each looks better on a dashboard than twelve at $90, right up until you notice the forty were price shoppers and the twelve booked.

When not to switch Google Ads on

Do not run ads if you cannot answer the phone during the hours they run. This is not a small point. Paid search sends people who are ready to book right now, and they will simply call the next result. Every missed call is money you have already spent. If you are on the tools all day and cannot pick up, either schedule ads for when you can, or sort out a call answering service first.

The other times to keep the card in your wallet:

• You are already booked out. Ads are for filling gaps, not for building a longer waiting list. If you are three weeks behind, raising prices is the cheaper experiment.
• Your budget is under about $500 a month. In a competitive trade in a capital city, that buys a handful of clicks and no useful information. Spend it on finishing your Google Business Profile and asking for reviews, which is covered in SEO for tradies.
• You have nowhere for the click to land. If the website is one page from 2016 with a contact form that emails an address nobody checks, fix that before you pay for traffic to see it.
• You want commercial work only. Consumer search terms bring consumer jobs. B2B trade work is usually won through relationships, tenders and reputation, and search ads are a poor substitute for a phone call to a builder.

One honest trade-off worth naming: ads stop the day you stop paying. SEO and your Google Business Profile keep working. The sensible pattern for most trade businesses is ads for the urgent searches and the quiet months, with local SEO building underneath so you need the ads less over time. There are more account-level tactics in our Google Ads tips, and if you would rather hand it over, that is what our Google Ads for service businesses work is.

Frequently asked questions