What Google Ads really costs a tradie

How Google charges you

Google Ads is pay-per-click. Showing up costs nothing; you pay when someone clicks. What a click costs is set by an auction that runs every time someone searches: what other advertisers are bidding on the same words, and how relevant Google judges your ad and your page to be. A more relevant ad can beat a higher bid, which is why the same keyword can cost one electrician $8 and the one down the road $14.

You tell Google an average daily budget. On a busy day it can spend up to twice that, but across a month it won't charge more than your daily budget times 30.4. A $50-a-day budget is therefore a $1,520-a-month ceiling. There's no contract: you can pause the account any day and owe nothing further. The spend goes on a card attached to the account, which is why the account should be in your business's name, with your card, from day one.

What a click costs a tradie

Roughly $3–20 a click in the Melbourne trade searches we've looked at, more for emergency plumbing and electrical, less for niche work. That's what we've seen, not a national statistic, and it moves with the season and with who else is bidding this week.

The pattern is intent. "Emergency electrician Melbourne" at 9pm has a lot of bidders and a caller who wants someone now, so it's expensive. "Switchboard upgrade Ringwood" or "EV charger installer Box Hill" has fewer bidders and a caller who is planning, so it's cheaper, and often a better job. A broad word like "electrician" on its own costs the most and converts the worst, because half the people typing it want a course, a job or a definition.

The only way to know your number is to run a tight campaign for a month with tracking on and read the search-terms report. Everything before that is a guess, ours included.

From budget to enquiries: the maths that matters

Nobody pays the bills with clicks. Start with the spend, divide by the cost of a click to get visitors, then apply the share of visitors who enquire. That share depends almost entirely on the landing page: a page built for one service, with the phone number tappable at the top, converts far better than a homepage ever will.

Here's $1,500 a month under three sets of assumptions. The click prices sit inside the range above; the enquiry rates (5–12%) are what a decent trade landing page can do and a homepage usually can't.

Assumptions, not results. Your clicks, your page and your trade will land somewhere on this table; the point is that cost per enquiry can swing six-fold on the same budget.

Compare that last column with what an enquiry is worth to you. If, say, a third of enquiries become jobs and a typical job clears a few hundred dollars after costs, a $125 enquiry pays for itself and a $300 one doesn't. Work your own version of that sum before you spend anything. It tells you whether Ads can work for your business at all, and what cost per enquiry you need to hit.

What it looked like for one client

For one electrical contractor we manage, cost per measured enquiry fell from about $400 in September 2026 to about $85 in October 2026, with 104 measured enquiries in October (phone taps, forms and emails) — September's tracking only started mid-month.

Same business, same trade, a month apart. The budget didn't drive the difference; the set-up did. Conversion tracking on calls and forms so every enquiry was counted, one campaign per service line instead of one catch-all, a negative-keyword list that grew every week, and Google's auto-applied recommendations switched off. The September figure is rough because tracking only covered half the month, which is the lesson in itself: until tracking is on, you don't know what you're paying per enquiry, so you can't tell whether anything is working.

What makes it cheaper

• A landing page per service. Send "hot water repair" clicks to a hot water page, not the homepage. Our website-cost guide covers what that should cost.
• Click-to-call and a short form above the fold. Most trade enquiries are phone taps on a mobile. Make the number the biggest thing on the page.
• Negative keywords. "Jobs", "course", "apprenticeship", "DIY", "free", "how to", and the suburbs you don't serve. Read the search-terms report every month and add more.
• A geo radius you'd actually drive to, not the whole state.
• An ad schedule that matches when the phone is answered. Paying for a 2am click nobody picks up is the easiest waste to stop.
• Conversion tracking for calls and forms, tested by you: submit the form, tap the number, watch both land in the account.
• Auto-apply recommendations off. Google's suggestions are tuned for Google's revenue. Some are good; none should go live without a person reading them.
• No Performance Max early. It's an automated campaign type that spends across Google's whole network. It can work once there's conversion history to learn from, and it burns money on a new account with none. Start with search.

Management fees and what to ask an agency

There are three fee models. A flat monthly fee, where $500–1,500 a month is typical for a small trade account. A percentage of spend, usually 10–20%, which quietly rewards the agency for spending more of your money. Or a bundle where the agency "handles the budget" and you never see the split between fee and spend. The third is the one to avoid unless every dollar is itemised.

Questions worth asking anyone who wants to run it for you:

• Do I own the account, and can I log in to it today? The account and its history should be yours; the agency gets access.
• Is my card on the account, or does the spend go through you? If it goes through you, what's your cut?
• What exactly counts as a conversion in your reports: phone taps and forms, or page views and "engagements"?
• Will I see the search-terms report and the negative-keyword list?
• What's the notice period? A month is reasonable. Twelve isn't.
• Who builds the landing page, and who owns it afterwards?

What about Google's pay-per-lead ads?

In some countries Google sells a pay-per-lead product for trades called Local Services Ads, with a "Google Guaranteed" badge. As of October 2026 it isn't offered in Australia. If someone is selling you "Google Guaranteed" leads here, ask what they actually mean; it's usually ordinary pay-per-click ads with a margin on top. Your options in Australia are search ads and the free Google Business Profile listing, which is worth sorting out first because the ad and the map listing back each other up. Our Business Profile checklist takes about an hour to work through.

Pre-flight checklist

1. Decide what an enquiry is: a phone tap, a form, an email, a quote request. Agree it in writing with whoever runs the account.
2. Build the landing page for the one service you'll advertise first, with a tappable number and a short form.
3. Set up conversion tracking for both, then test it yourself.
4. Open the Ads account in your business's name, with your card on it.
5. Claim and fill in your Google Business Profile.
6. Pick a budget you can leave alone for eight to twelve weeks. Changing it every week resets what the campaign has learned.
7. Make sure someone answers the phone during the hours the ads run.
8. Put a monthly date in the diary for the search-terms review, even if the reviewer is you.

Where we fit

We run Google Ads for trades on the client's own account and card, for $500 a month on spend up to $2,000, with a $1,000 one-off set-up that covers the audit, conversion tracking for forms and calls, one campaign per service line and the first negative-keyword list. Every month you get a report with cost per enquiry by campaign, not a page of clicks. If you'd rather just find out whether your current account is wasting money, send us read-only access and we'll tell you.