Google Ads for trades: paying for the right clicks.

Where trade budgets actually leak

The classic wasted dollar isn't fraud and isn't mystery — it's structure. A campaign left near its defaults will happily buy searches that merely resemble your work: the wrong trade ("electrician course"), the wrong customer ("DIY switchboard wiring"), the wrong suburb (clicks from areas you'd never drive to), and the jobs you'd decline anyway. Each of these is a leak with a named, closable cause, and closing them is most of what competent campaign management is. The spend that remains after the fences is smaller — and it's the only spend that was ever going to ring the phone.

Match types and negatives: the fence line

A keyword isn't a fence, it's a suggestion — match types decide how loosely Google interprets it, and loose interpretation is where budgets go to die. Tight match types cost you some volume and buy you intent. The other half of the fence is the negative keyword list: the standing record of everything you don't do — "course", "salary", "DIY", the trades adjacent to yours, the brands you don't service. It's built by reading the search terms report, line by line, on a schedule; every term that makes you wince becomes a negative. An account nobody reads the search terms report for isn't being managed, whatever the invoice says.

Built for calls, and tracking that proves them

Trade customers phone. A campaign graded on form fills alone will under-report reality and then get optimised in the wrong direction — so the call is the conversion: call tracking on the number the ad traffic sees, call extensions on the ads themselves, and conversions counted only when a call lasts long enough to have been a real conversation. From there, let the landing page do its half: the ad answered "who", the page answers "why you" and takes the enquiry — sending paid clicks to a slow homepage is paying twice to lose once.

Honest budget logic

We won't print typical costs-per-click here, because they vary by trade, suburb and season, and any number would be a lie by the time you read it. The logic, though, is durable: your click price is set by auction against your competitors; your enquiry cost is the click price divided by how well the fences and the landing page do their jobs; and whether an enquiry cost is acceptable is a question about your margins, not about advertising. Work that arithmetic with your own numbers — measured against the jobs ledger, not the platform's dashboard — and the "is it working?" argument settles itself.

When ads earn their keep — and when they stop

Ads are the right tool when you need work now, when you're entering a new area where nobody knows you, or when a seasonal window is open and the slower channels haven't caught up yet. They're rented visibility: the day the spend stops, the visibility stops. So the honest strategy for most trades is a crossing pattern — ads carry the load early while profile, reviews and site earn their standing, then the paid budget narrows to the jobs and suburbs where it still beats the free click. And if the diary is already full, the bravest optimisation is pausing the spend. A campaign that can't survive that question wasn't working; it was just billing.