If you are weighing up Google Ads for tradesmen, the honest answer is that they can work brilliantly and they can also quietly drain a few hundred pounds before you see a single booked job. Whether they pay back depends less on luck and more on what you pay per click, how tight your setup is, and how many of those clicks turn into real work. Let's go through the real numbers a UK tradesperson is looking at, the catches nobody warns you about, and how to judge whether the spend makes sense for your business.
What Google Ads for tradesmen really cost per click
The first thing to understand is that you are bidding against every other tradesperson chasing the same searches. That live auction sets your cost per click, and for most UK trades it lands somewhere in the £3 to £8 range for everyday search terms. Higher-value, higher-competition jobs push well above that, and a single bad keyword can sit right at the top end without you noticing.
Here is a rough picture of typical cost per click for trades in the UK, based on the kind of figures people across these niches report. Treat these as ballpark ranges, not guarantees — your actual cost varies by town, season and how competitive your area is. A roofer in a quiet rural patch pays less than one fighting for clicks across a city after a storm.
| Trade | Typical cost per click | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Plumber (emergency) | £6 – £15+ | Urgent, high-intent, fierce bidding |
| Electrician | £4 – £10 | Mix of small and big jobs |
| Builder / extensions | £3 – £8 | Fewer searches, big job value |
| Roofer | £5 – £12 | Weather-driven, urgent demand |
| Painter & decorator | £2 – £6 | Lower urgency, broader competition |
Now do the maths the way it actually plays out. Say your clicks cost £6. If one in ten people who click then send an enquiry, that is £60 per enquiry. If you win one job in every three enquiries, you have spent roughly £180 in ad clicks to land one job. Change those conversion rates even slightly and the figure swings hard: at one enquiry in twenty clicks, the same job costs you £360. For most trades the real cost of a booked job through Google Ads sits somewhere between £75 and £200 once the wasted clicks are counted in.
The hidden cost: you pay for clicks, not jobs
This is the catch that trips up most tradespeople. Google charges you every time someone clicks your advert, whether they are a serious customer or a time-waster. You are not paying for jobs, leads, or even phone calls. You are paying for clicks, full stop.
That matters because a big share of clicks never turn into anything useful:
- People comparing prices who will go with the cheapest quote regardless.
- Tyre-kickers and "just curious" browsers with no real job in mind.
- Folks outside your area who clicked before reading the small print.
- Other tradespeople sizing up the competition, plus the odd accidental tap on a phone screen.
- Jobs far too small to be worth your van leaving the drive.
Every one of those costs you the same £6 as a genuine customer. The platform has done its job the moment the click lands; what happens next is entirely your problem. That is the fundamental difference between paying for attention and paying for outcomes, and it is the reason two tradespeople can spend the same budget and get wildly different results.
Key takeaways
- Expect to pay roughly £3 to £8 per click for most UK trades, more for urgent jobs like emergency plumbing or roofing.
- Once wasted clicks are counted, the real cost of a booked job is often £75 to £200 in ad spend.
- You pay for every click, not for jobs won, so weak tracking and loose keywords burn money fast.
- Budget at least a few hundred pounds and several weeks before you can fairly judge whether it works.
- Pay-per-lead shifts that risk: you only pay for a pre-qualified enquiry, not the dead clicks.
Common mistakes that burn budget
Most of the horror stories ("I spent £400 and got nothing") come down to a handful of avoidable mistakes. If you do run Google Ads yourself, these are the ones to watch, because each one quietly inflates your cost per booked job.
No conversion tracking
If you cannot see which clicks led to phone calls or form enquiries, you are flying blind. You will keep paying for keywords that never produce work because you have no way of knowing they are duds. Setting up call and form tracking properly is fiddly, and plenty of tradespeople skip it and pay the price for months without realising which half of their budget is wasted.
Broad keywords that catch the wrong searches
Bid on a broad term like "boiler" and Google will happily show your advert to people searching "boiler manual", "boiler grant" or "boiler parts" — none of whom want to hire you. Without a tight keyword list and a long list of negative keywords to block the junk, you fund a steady stream of irrelevant clicks at full price.
Sending clicks to a weak page
A slow, generic homepage that does not clearly say what you do, where you work and how to get a quote will lose people who were ready to enquire. You paid for the click; a poor landing page wastes it. On a phone, a page that takes more than a few seconds to load loses a chunk of visitors before they ever see your number.
Bidding on jobs you do not want
If you only want full rewires or whole-house jobs, but your adverts pull in "change a socket" enquiries, you are paying premium click prices to attract the exact small jobs you are trying to avoid. The fix is disciplined keyword and negative-keyword work, which takes time most people on the tools simply do not have.
How much budget you need before it works
Google Ads is not a tap you turn on for one job. The system needs data before it performs, and so do you. Realistically you should plan for several hundred pounds of spend and a few weeks of running before the numbers mean anything at all.
Here is why. To know whether a keyword pays back, you need enough clicks through it to see a pattern, not two clicks and a hunch. At £6 a click, even modest testing chews through £50 a day quickly. There is also a genuine learning curve: writing adverts, structuring campaigns, reading the data and cutting what does not work is a skill, and the cost of learning it comes out of your ad budget. Many tradespeople hand this to an agency, which then adds a monthly management fee on top of the ad spend — so you are paying twice before a single job is booked, and the agency gets paid whether the campaign lands work or not.
None of this means Google Ads are a con. It means they reward patience, budget and attention, three things a busy tradesperson on the tools rarely has spare. If you can commit all three, the channel can be a strong earner. If you cannot, it is the wrong tool for you, and there is no shame in admitting that.
When Google Ads pay back, and when they don't
Whether the spend is worth it comes down to your average job value set against your real cost per booked job. The same maths applies whether you are running Google Ads for plumbers, electricians, builders or any other trade — only the numbers in the columns change. If you want this run for you, our leads for electricians service is one example of how it works trade by trade.
They tend to pay back when:
- Your average job is worth a few thousand pounds, so a £150 cost per job is a rounding error.
- You have the time (or a good agency) to manage and refine campaigns properly.
- You can answer the phone fast — speed to response decides who wins the job.
- You have a budget you can run consistently for months, not a one-off £200.
They tend to disappoint when:
- Your average job is small, so the cost per job eats most of the margin.
- You set it up once, never track results, and let it run on broad keywords.
- You cannot answer enquiries quickly and lose hot leads to faster rivals.
- You can only afford to dip in for a week or two, never long enough to learn.
Shifting the risk: pay per qualified lead, not per click
The fundamental problem with Google Ads is that the risk sits entirely on you. You pay for the click and hope a job comes out the other end. The clicks that go nowhere — the price-shoppers, the tyre-kickers, the wrong-area searches — are still on your bill at the end of the month.
There is a different way to buy the same demand without carrying that risk: pay only when a real, pre-qualified enquiry reaches you. Instead of funding every click and gambling on conversions, you pay a fixed fee per genuine job enquiry from your coverage area — and only that. The wasted clicks, the budget management and the learning curve become someone else's problem. The enquiry is screened by a person before it reaches you, and it is yours alone, not resold to three or four rivals who then race you to the bottom on price.
That is the model My2ndBrand is built on. Rather than spending £75 to £200 in clicks and hoping, you pay a known, fixed price per screened, exclusive enquiry, so you can work out your numbers before you commit a penny. If you would rather pay for jobs than for clicks, it is worth seeing how it works and deciding for yourself which kind of risk you would rather carry.
