Google Ads for Tradies: What It Costs and How to Stop Wasting Budget

There are three ways an Australian tradie can pay for a lead, and they are not interchangeable.

Channel	You pay for	Typical cost	Lead exclusivity
hipages and similar	A credit to unlock each lead	Roughly $30 to $80 per lead plus monthly subscription	Shared with 2 to 3 competitors
Google Local Services Ads	A qualified lead (call or message)	Around $20 to $60 per lead for trades	Exclusive to you
Google Search Ads	A click, whether or not it converts	$2 to $9 per click depending on trade	Exclusive to you

The distinction that matters: on Search Ads you pay for clicks, and only a portion of clicks become calls. If your landing page converts at 10% and your cost per click is $7, your real cost per lead is $70, not $7. Tradies who ignore this are the ones who conclude that “Google Ads does not work”.

This guide is about the paid side only. If you want the free traffic side, our guide to SEO for tradies covers that separately, and the two work best together.

Start with Local Services Ads if your trade is eligible

Local Services Ads sit above everything else on the page, carry the Google Guaranteed badge, and charge per lead rather than per click. For most trades this is the best first dollar spent.

They are available in Australia for a range of service businesses including plumbers, electricians and cleaners, with Google adding categories over time.

What the application involves. Licence verification, proof of public liability insurance, and in some categories a background check. Expect two to six weeks. Some categories also require a minimum number of reviews before your ad goes live, so if you have fewer than five Google reviews, start collecting them now rather than waiting for the application to stall.

How to run them well.

• Set your service areas tightly. LSA pushes leads based on proximity, and a wide radius produces enquiries you will not drive to.
• Set your weekly budget as a lead target, not a dollar figure. Think “I want 8 leads a week”, then work out what that costs.
• Dispute bad leads. If you get a wrong number, a spam call, or someone outside your service area, report it in the dashboard. Google credits legitimate disputes and most tradies never bother.
• Answer the phone. LSA ranking is influenced by responsiveness. Missed calls hurt you twice, once as a lost job and once as a ranking signal.

The main limitation is that LSA gives you almost no control. You cannot choose keywords, write ad copy, or send traffic to a specific page. That is where Search campaigns come in.

How to structure a tradie Search campaign

The default structure most agencies inherit (one campaign, one ad group, all keywords thrown in) fails for trades because tradie search intent splits sharply by urgency and job value.

Structure by intent instead:

Campaign 1: Emergency and urgent. These convert fastest and tolerate the highest cost per click, because someone with a burst pipe is not shopping around.

Campaign 2: Planned replacement and installation. Higher job value, longer consideration, lower conversion rate. Needs a different landing page and different ad copy.

Campaign 3: Brand. Your own business name. Cheap, and it stops competitors bidding on you.

Split each campaign by service, one ad group per service, so your ad copy can match the search. Someone searching “switchboard upgrade” should see an ad about switchboard upgrades, not a generic “Melbourne Electrician” ad.

Real search volumes and costs by job type

These are actual Australian monthly search volumes and cost per click estimates, which gives you a sense of where the money goes:

Search term	Monthly searches (AU)	Estimated CPC
electrician near me	17,000	$4.00
plumber near me	17,000	$7.00
emergency plumber	7,300	$9.00
hot water system replacement	3,800	$3.50
emergency electrician	3,500	$2.50
ev charger installation	2,300	$2.00
roof repairs	2,200	$1.10
blocked drain	2,100	$6.00
switchboard upgrade	1,300	$3.50
air conditioning installation	900	$4.00
knockdown rebuild	900	$2.00

Two things worth noticing. First, “near me” terms carry enormous volume and are worth bidding on despite the cost, because intent is high. Second, the cheapest clicks are not always the best value. EV charger installation clicks cost $2 and lead to jobs worth over $1,000, while emergency plumbing clicks cost $9 and may lead to a $180 callout. Bid according to job value, not click price.

The negative keyword list every tradie needs

This is where most tradie ad budgets bleed. Without negatives you pay for people looking for a job, a course, or a YouTube tutorial.

Add these as campaign level negatives before you launch:

Employment: jobs, job, careers, hiring, vacancy, vacancies, salary, wage, wages, pay rate, apprentice, apprenticeship, traineeship, resume, recruitment, seek, indeed

Training: course, courses, training, tafe, certificate, cert iii, licence, license, qualification, how to become, school

DIY: diy, how to, tutorial, youtube, guide, yourself, step by step

Free and cheap: free, cheapest, bargain, second hand, used, gumtree

Wrong intent: wikipedia, definition, meaning, salary calculator, union, award rates

Competitors and platforms: hipages, airtasker, oneflare, serviceseeking, yellow pages

Run a search terms report every fortnight for the first three months and keep adding. On a new tradie account it is normal to add 30 or more negatives in the first month.

Also set your match types deliberately. Broad match on a small budget will drain it. Start with phrase and exact match, prove what converts, then test broad match with a solid negative list in place.

Location settings that stop you paying for the wrong suburbs

Two settings cost tradies more money than any other:

Location targeting. Target by suburb or postcode, not by radius around a city. A 25km radius from Melbourne CBD includes suburbs you will not drive to at 6am.

Location options. Google’s default is “Presence or interest”, which means your ad can show to someone in Perth researching Melbourne electricians. Change it to “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations”. This one setting routinely cuts wasted spend by a noticeable margin.

Ad scheduling. If you do not take calls after 6pm, either pause ads then or send after hours traffic to a form based page instead of a call focused one. Paying $9 for a click that rings out is the worst outcome available.

Assets and extensions that matter for trades

Fill these out. They increase click through rate and cost nothing extra:

• Call asset. Essential. Enable call reporting so you can see which campaigns generate calls.
• Location asset. Links your Google Business Profile to your ads.
• Sitelinks. Point to specific services, not “About Us”. Four sitelinks minimum.
• Callout assets. Licensed and insured, 24/7 emergency callout, no call out fee, upfront pricing, family owned since 2009.
• Structured snippets. Use the “Services” header and list your job types.
• Lead form asset. Useful for after hours capture.

Include your licence number in a callout. In NSW, contractors are required to display their licence number on advertising, and across all states it functions as a trust signal that separates you from the unlicensed operators.

Where the traffic should land

Sending paid clicks to your homepage is the second most common way tradies waste budget. Someone who searched “blocked drain Preston” should land on a page about blocked drains, not a page listing all fourteen of your services.

The minimum viable tradie landing page has the phone number as a tap-to-call button above the fold, a response time promise, the licence number, and a short form asking for four fields at most. Every extra field costs you conversions.

Our guide to web design for tradies covers the page structure in detail, and if you want dedicated pages built for campaigns, that is what landing page development is for. The broader principles are in our conversion rate optimisation checklist.

The budget maths

Work backwards from jobs, not forwards from budget.

Say you are an electrician who wants 10 extra jobs a month:

1. Your average job is worth $850.
2. You close 40% of quality enquiries, so you need 25 enquiries.
3. Your landing page converts clicks to enquiries at 8%, so you need about 310 clicks.
4. At $4 per click, that is roughly $1,250 a month.
5. Cost per job: $125 against $850 revenue.

That maths works. Now change one variable. If your landing page converts at 3% instead of 8%, the same 25 enquiries need 830 clicks and $3,300, and your cost per job triples to $330. This is why the landing page matters more than the bidding.

Run the same calculation with your own numbers before you set a budget. If you do not know your close rate or average job value, find those out first. Our breakdown of Google Ads costs in Australia has benchmark data across industries.

A practical floor: below about $1,000 a month, Search campaigns in competitive trades struggle to gather enough data to optimise. Below that threshold, put the money into Local Services Ads and Google Business Profile instead.

Five mistakes that cost tradies the most

1. Leaving location options on the default. Covered above. Change it today.
2. No call tracking. If you cannot attribute calls to campaigns, you are optimising blind. Enable call reporting and use a tracking number.
3. Running ads to a homepage. Halves your conversion rate for no reason.
4. Ignoring the search terms report. The gap between the keywords you bid on and the searches you actually pay for is where budget disappears.
5. Turning ads off when you get busy. Rebuilding campaign performance after a pause costs more than running a reduced budget through the quiet weeks.

Frequently asked questions

Should tradies use Google Ads or SEO?

Both, sequenced. Ads produce enquiries this week and let you find out which services and suburbs actually convert. SEO takes months and then delivers those same leads without a cost per click. Use the ad data to decide which SEO pages to build first.

How much do Google Ads cost for a tradie in Australia?

Cost per click ranges from around $1 for roof repairs to $9 for emergency plumbing. A functional monthly budget for a suburban trade business generally starts around $1,000 to $1,500.

Are Local Services Ads better than regular Google Ads?

For lead generation trades, usually yes as a starting point, because you pay per lead rather than per click and the ads sit at the top of the page. The trade off is almost no control over targeting or messaging. Most established tradies eventually run both.

Can I run Google Ads myself?

The interface is accessible enough. The parts that need experience are the negative keyword discipline, bid strategy selection, and knowing when a poor result is a campaign problem versus a landing page problem. Many tradies start solo and bring in help once spend passes a few thousand a month.

What about Facebook and Instagram ads for tradies?

Different job. Search captures people who already have a problem. Social ads create demand for planned work like renovations, outdoor living or solar. Useful for high value planned jobs, weak for emergency work. Our guides to Facebook ads and Facebook ads costs in Australia cover that channel.

Next steps

Before you increase your budget, do these three things: change location options to “Presence”, add the negative keyword list above, and build one dedicated landing page for your highest value service. Those three changes typically improve cost per lead more than any bidding adjustment.

If you want the account structured and managed properly, our Google Ads and PPC teams do this for Australian service businesses. Contact us for an account review and we will show you where the spend is leaking.