Google Ads for Trade Businesses

First, whether you should be running ads at all

Ads amplify whatever your business already does with an enquiry. If enquiries currently go to voicemail and get returned on Thursday, ads will buy you more voicemails. Work through this before you spend anything.

• Can you answer the phone, or call back within the hour? Search ads mostly buy phone calls, and a large share of them are urgent. Miss them and you've paid for nothing.
• Is your Google Business Profile complete, with recent reviews? The unpaid listing sits next to the ad and does a lot of the convincing. Doing the free thing first makes the paid thing cheaper.
• Have you got somewhere useful to send the click? A page about the specific service beats your home page, and both beat no website at all.
• Do you know what a job is worth to you? Without that number you can't tell a campaign that's working from one that's just busy.
• Have you got capacity? Running ads while booked out three weeks deep is paying to annoy people.

Work out your ceiling before you spend anything

We're not going to quote you a cost per click. It varies enormously by trade, by city, by how urgent the search is and by the time of year, and any figure in an article would be wrong for you. What you can do is work out your own limit, which is the number that actually matters.

You need three things, all from your own records:

• What an average job of this type leaves you after materials and labour — the margin, not the invoice total.
• What share of enquiries you convert into jobs.
• What share of clicks become enquiries — you won't know this until you've run for a while, so estimate conservatively at first and correct it later.

Suppose a job leaves you $600, you convert one enquiry in three, and roughly one click in ten becomes an enquiry. Three enquiries make a job, so it takes about thirty clicks to earn $600. Break even is $20 a click — and since you want to make money rather than break even, your working limit is well under that. Run the same sum with a $200 job and break-even drops to under $7 a click, which tells you something important about which services are worth advertising and which aren't.

Setting it up so it doesn't leak

Most wasted trade ad spend comes from four settings, and all four are fixable in an afternoon.

1. Target suburbs, not cities. Set the location to the suburbs you'll actually drive to. Targeting a whole capital city is the single most expensive mistake in trade advertising — you pay metro-wide rates to reach people you'd never quote.
2. Advertise services, not your trade. Bid on the specific jobs you want — switchboard upgrade, blocked drain, ducted air conditioning installation — rather than the trade name. Specific searches cost less, convert better and come from people who know what they need.
3. Build a negative keyword list on day one. The words that must not trigger your ads: jobs, apprenticeship, salary, courses, DIY, free, cheap, hire, near me searches outside your area, and any service you don't offer. Then review the actual search terms weekly and keep adding. This list is where the savings are.
4. Use exact and phrase matching to start. Broad matching hands the platform a lot of discretion about what counts as related to your keyword. Start tight, see what comes in, and loosen deliberately once you can see what you're paying for.
5. Set the hours to when you can answer. If you don't do after-hours, don't pay for after-hours clicks. If you do, price that work accordingly and keep the ads on.

Where the click lands

Half of a campaign's performance is decided after the click. Sending every ad to your home page is the most common waste in trade advertising.

• Match the page to the search. Someone who searched for a hot water system replacement should land on a page about hot water system replacement, not a general services page they have to hunt through.
• Put the phone number at the top, tappable, on a phone.
• Answer the question they were about to ask — what affects the price, how long it takes, whether you cover their suburb, what's included.
• Keep the form to four fields. Name, phone, suburb, what they need.
• Make it fast. A page that takes several seconds on mobile data loses people you've already paid for.

Running it week to week

Ads are not set-and-forget. Half an hour a week is roughly the minimum, and it's mostly the same three tasks.

• Read the actual search terms that triggered your ads and add the irrelevant ones as negatives. This alone usually pays for the half hour.
• Check what each enquiry cost and compare it to your ceiling for that service. Cut what's above it.
• Pause during the crunch. If you're booked out, turn them off. They'll be there when you need them and you'll have saved the spend.
• Judge it on jobs won, not clicks. Clicks, impressions and click-through rates are diagnostics. The only number that decides whether to continue is what the work paid.
• Give it long enough to know. A fortnight is noise. A couple of months with a decent volume of clicks starts to be evidence.

Frequently asked questions