A landscaper down in Bentleigh emailed me back in autumn, keen to throw three grand a month at Google Ads before the spring rush hit. Fair enough, plenty of tradies do. But my first question back had nothing to do with budget: what actually happens right now when someone fills in your quote form at 7pm on a Tuesday?
He didn’t have an answer. And that, more than the ad copy or the bidding or any of the stuff people obsess over, is the thing that decides whether paid search is worth a cent for a trade business. I run the paid media side of things at Growth Factory, so I’ve watched a lot of tradie budgets go up in smoke over the years, & almost none of it was because the ads themselves were bad.
So here’s the honest version. When Google Ads earn their keep for a Melbourne plumber, electrician or builder, when they don’t, and roughly what you should expect to pay for a lead.
When Google Ads actually make sense for a trade
Paid search works best when three things line up: real demand, real margin, and a job you can respond to fast. Emergency and high-intent work is the sweet spot. Blocked drains, no hot water, dead switchboard, a leak coming through the ceiling. Someone types “emergency plumber Frankston” at 9pm and they are not comparison shopping. They want a phone answered.
Where it gets shakier is low-margin, high-competition work where everyone and their dog is bidding. If your average job is a $180 service call and you’re paying $30-plus a click in a suburb thick with competitors, the sums get ugly quickly. I’ll come back to that maths, because it settles the whole argument.
The other thing that has to be true: you need to actually want the phone to ring. Sounds obvious. But I’ve had blokes running ads while already booked six weeks out, then getting cranky the leads are “rubbish”. They weren’t rubbish. You just had no capacity to serve them.
Search intent beats everything
The real edge of Google Ads over something like a Meta campaign is intent. On Facebook you’re interrupting someone mid-scroll. On Google they’ve already told you exactly what they need. For trades that gap is enormous, which is why for most of the tradies we work with, search is where the money goes first & social comes later, if at all.
What a Melbourne tradie should expect to pay per lead
Here’s where I have to be careful, because anyone quoting you an exact cost-per-lead is guessing. It swings on trade, suburb, season and how good your setup is. As a rough guide, in Melbourne, cost-per-click on competitive trade terms often sits somewhere in the $8 to $30-plus range, and the hottest emergency keywords push well past that.
Turn a click into an actual enquiry and you’re usually looking at a cost-per-lead somewhere around the $40 to $120 mark for a lot of trades, sometimes higher for the really contested stuff like emergency electrical or hot water. Treat that as a ballpark, not a promise. Your own numbers will tell the real story within a few weeks of running, and they’re the only numbers that matter.
Our own guide to Google Ads breaks down how the auction sets those prices, and if you want the raw mechanics of match types and Quality Score, Google Ads Help is the primary source rather than whatever a random blog reckons.
The maths of one job versus your ad spend
This is the bit that sorts it out. Forget cost-per-click for a second, forget clever tactics. Work out what one won job is worth to you.
Say you’re a builder and a bathroom reno nets you $4,000 profit. If it costs $600 in ad spend to win that job, you’d take that deal all day and twice on Sunday. Now flip it: you’re doing $150 tap-washer call-outs, ad spend to land one is $130, and you’ve made twenty bucks before you’ve even driven to Hoddle Street in peak hour. Same platform, completely different verdict.
I grew up in the outer east, I’ve sat dead still on the Monash at 5pm, so I know a job across town isn’t free even when the ad that won it was cheap. The rule I give people is blunt. If one won job comfortably pays for the ads that generated several enquiries and then some, you’re in business. If it doesn’t, the answer isn’t “spend more”, its “fix the funnel, or don’t run ads at all”. I’d genuinely rather tell a tradie to keep their money than pocket a management fee for a campaign that was never going to clear.
Local Services Ads and the Google Guaranteed badge
Separate to normal search ads, there’s Local Services Ads, the ones sitting right at the top with the green Google Guaranteed tick. These run on pay-per-lead rather than pay-per-click, so you’re charged when someone actually contacts you, not for a click that bounces straight off.
For a lot of Melbourne trades these are worth a look before standard search, partly because that badge does genuine work on trust, and partly because you only pay for real enquiries. You do have to pass a background & licence check to get verified, which weeds out some competitors. No bad thing.
The catch: you get less control over exactly which searches trigger you, and dud leads still happen. Google lets you dispute the obviously irrelevant ones, but you’ll spend time doing it. For most tradies I’d still run Local Services Ads and standard search side by side for a couple of months, then keep whichever delivers cheaper jobs.
Where tradies burn money, and it’s rarely the ad
The single biggest way trade budgets get wasted isn’t bad keywords. It’s what happens after the click. You can have a flawless ad and still torch the whole budget if the click lands on your homepage instead of a page about the exact job they searched. Someone chasing “switchboard upgrade” should land on a page about switchboard upgrades, not a generic “welcome to our family business” splash.
Or the phone rings out and the quote form drops into an inbox nobody opens until Thursday. Studies aside, from what we see across our accounts, the tradie who calls back within the hour wins the job far more often than the one who calls back next day and finds it’s already booked with someone quicker off the mark.
Then there’s the quiet killer: no call tracking, so you’ve got no idea which ads made the phone ring, which means you’re optimising blind. If you’re going to run paid at all, the tracking gets sorted first. This is exactly the follow-up you can systematise, and we’ve written separately about automating a trade business so the 7pm enquiry doesn’t sit there going cold overnight.
If you’d rather someone else ran the campaigns and watched the numbers for you, that’s what our Google Ads management service exists for. But honestly, I’d rather you fixed the free stuff first. Which brings me to the unpopular bit.
Fix your Google Business Profile before you spend a dollar
Look, this is where I lose the room with a few people. Most Melbourne tradies should not touch paid ads until their Google Business Profile is properly sorted. That’s the free listing with the map pin and the reviews, and it’s the highest-return work most trades can do.
When someone searches “electrician near me”, that local map pack sits above or right beside the paid ads, and it costs nothing to appear there. If your profile is half-filled, has four reviews and one photo from 2019, you’re literally paying Google to send clicks to a business that looks less trustworthy than the bloke ranking for free underneath you. Sort the reviews, the categories, the service areas and the photos first. We’ve put the full method in our piece on local search and dominating the map pack.
Once that’s humming, paid ads amplify a business that already converts. Run them the other way around and you’re just paying to expose a leaky bucket faster.
So, are Google Ads worth it?
For a Melbourne plumber, electrician or builder chasing high-intent, decent-margin work, with a fast quote response and a sorted Business Profile behind them: yes, often very much so. For a tradie already booked out, doing thin-margin call-outs, or letting enquiries sit overnight: you’ll set fire to your money and then blame the ads.
The platform is rarely the problem. Before you spend, get your numbers straight on what one job is worth, get your call-back time under an hour, and check the free listing is pulling its weight. The government’s own business.gov.au has solid, non-salesy material on marketing and cash flow if you want a second opinion that isn’t trying to sell you anything.
If you want us to look at your setup and tell you honestly whether paid is even worth it for your trade, that’s a free chat away. Some days the most useful thing we do is talk a tradie out of spending.
— Dane Corcoran, Paid Media Lead at Growth Factory