Are Google Ads worth it for tradesmen? The real maths
A single click on "emergency plumber" in a busy UK town can cost you somewhere around £4 to £8, and you pay that whether the person rings you or bounces straight back to Google. That is the part most trades understand. The part almost nobody works out is what happens after the click, which is where the entire return is decided. A trade landing page that turns one visitor in twelve into an enquiry is doing respectably, which means eleven of every twelve clicks you bought leave with nothing. Buy a hundred clicks and you are paying for eighty-eight strangers to glance at your website. Whether Google Ads are worth it for a tradesman has almost nothing to do with the cost per click that everyone argues about, and almost everything to do with a number most trades have never calculated: what one booked job actually costs you. This post does that sum properly, shows the point where ads stop paying, and is honest about when they are the right call.
Google Ads are worth it for a tradesman only when the page behind them converts. On a £400 month at roughly £4.50 a click, a page converting 8% of visitors into enquiries with one in three won costs about £174 per booked job, which pays on a £450 average job. Drop that page to 3% and the same £400 buys under one job. Ads buy clicks. The website decides whether clicks become work.
What Google Ads actually cost a UK trade
Google Ads have no fixed price: you set a daily budget and pay per click, and every search runs a live auction, so a competitive local trade term in a busy town commonly lands somewhere around £3 to £8 a click while a quieter rural term can be under £1.
Google decides which ad shows, and what you pay, through an auction that runs on every single search. Your bid is only part of it. The relevance and quality of your ad and the page behind it are weighed too, which is why two trades bidding the same amount can pay very different prices for the same click (Google Ads Help, "How the Google Ads auction works"). Google scores that relevance as Quality Score, and a poor landing page experience pushes your costs up directly (Google Ads Help, "About Quality Score"). So a bad website is not just wasting clicks, it is making each one more expensive.
| What you are buying | What it means for a trade |
|---|---|
| Cost per click | Paid whether they ring you or leave in two seconds |
| Daily budget | Your ceiling, not your outcome. Spending it means nothing on its own |
| Quality Score | A slow or thin landing page raises what you pay per click |
| Position | Top of page costs most, and emergency searchers rarely scroll |
Anyone quoting you a national average cost per click for trades is guessing. Open Keyword Planner, type your trade and your town, and read your own figure. It takes ten minutes and it is the only number that applies to you.
The only number that matters: cost per booked job
Cost per click tells you nothing about whether Google Ads pay: the number that decides it is cost per booked job, which is your monthly budget divided by the jobs it actually produced after the click-through, enquiry and win rates have each taken their cut.
Here is the chain, written out like an invoice, because seeing every stage is what makes the problem obvious. I have used a £400 month, a £4.50 click and conversion rates that a decent, fast trade page genuinely achieves. Swap in your own numbers.
What a £400 month really buys
| Monthly ad budget | £400 |
| Average cost per click | £4.50 |
| Clicks bought | 89 |
| Page converts visitors to enquiries at | 8% |
| Enquiries | 7 |
| You win one enquiry in three | 33% |
| Jobs booked | 2.3 |
| Cost per booked job | £174 |
| At a £450 average job, revenue | £1,035 |
| Left after ad spend | £635 |
Illustrative worked example. The click cost and job value are yours to replace; the structure of the sum is what matters.
Two rates you have probably never measured
Most trades running ads can tell you their monthly spend and nothing else. The two numbers that decide whether that spend works, the page conversion rate and the enquiry win rate, usually go unmeasured entirely. Google's own conversion tracking will give you the first one free if you set it up, and the second one you already know roughly in your head from how many quotes turn into work.
Compare it to what you already pay for leads
£174 a job sounds like a lot until you set it against a lead platform charging per enquiry regardless of whether you win it, where four unconverted leads can cost the same with nothing to show. The full cost breakdown for a trade website puts the channels side by side properly.
Change one number and the whole thing collapses
The landing page conversion rate is the single lever that decides whether trade ads profit or lose: on the same £400 budget, a page converting at 8% produces a job for £174, while a page converting at 3% produces less than one job for the whole month at over £460 each.
Run the identical sum with one change, the page. Same budget, same £4.50 click, same win rate. The only difference is that the visitor lands on a tired site instead of a fast one.
| Same £400, same bid | Fast, clear page | Tired page |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks bought with £400 | 89 | 89 |
| Enquiry rate | 8% | 3% |
| Enquiries | 7 | 2.7 |
| Jobs won at one in three | 2.3 | 0.9 |
| Cost per booked job | £174 | £444 |
| Result on a £450 job | £635 clear | Roughly break-even at best |
Nothing about the advertising changed. The budget, the bid, the keyword and the town are identical. The difference between a profitable ad account and a pointless one was entirely the page, and this is the part Google will never tell you, because Google is paid either way.
How common is the tired page? Very
When I audited 100 real UK trade websites, 54 of them had no tap-to-call number visible on a phone without scrolling or hunting, and 44 took more than three seconds to become usable on mobile data. Those are the pages trade ad budgets are being poured into every day. The full breakdown of what failed and how often is in the 100-site audit. If your page is in that group, you are not buying leads, you are buying bounces.
When Google Ads genuinely earn their keep
Google Ads are the right call for a trade in four specific situations: emergency work where the customer buys in minutes, a brand new area with no rankings yet, a genuine quiet patch that needs filling this week, and high-value jobs where one win covers a month of spend several times over.
- Emergency and urgent work. No heat, burst pipe, dead consumer unit. The customer decides in minutes, so being at the top of the page the moment they search is worth real money.
- A new town or a new service. Rankings take months. Ads appear the afternoon you switch them on, which buys you visibility while the slower asset builds.
- Filling a gap fast. Two weeks empty in the diary is a problem ads can genuinely solve, and you can switch them off the day it fills.
- High-ticket work. On a £4,000 bathroom or a full rewire, £174 to book the job is trivial. The maths gets easier the bigger your average job.
Speed matters as much as spend here. Winning an emergency click and then taking two hours to ring back gives the job to whoever answered first, which is covered properly in why fast response wins emergency jobs.
When they quietly burn money
Google Ads lose money for a trade whenever the click cannot convert: no answer during the hours the ads run, an average job too small to clear the cost of winning it, or a landing page that hides the phone number.
- You are on the tools with the phone in the van and nobody catching calls.
- Your average job is £80 and one booked job costs £174 to win.
- Clicks land on a homepage rather than a page about the exact thing they searched for.
- You are bidding on broad terms like "plumber" and paying for people three counties away.
Ads versus a website: the honest answer
Ads are rented visibility that stops the day you stop paying, while a website that ranks and converts is an owned asset that keeps producing, which is why most established trades get more from fixing the page first and layering ads on top when they want work faster.
This is not an argument against Google Ads. It is an argument about order. Google's own guidance for getting found organically is free to follow and compounds over time (Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide), and the local groundwork that makes ads cheaper is the same groundwork that wins free traffic. There is a practical guide to that in how to get more local jobs as a tradesman.
The uncomfortable comparison for anyone about to start an ad account: £600 is roughly six weeks of a modest ad budget. Spent on clicks, it is gone in six weeks. Spent on a site built to load fast and make calling one tap, it keeps converting every visitor you ever send it, paid or free, for years.
That is what I build. A free mockup of your actual business first, before you pay anything, so you can see the page your ad money would be landing on. Like it? It is a one-off £600 to build (£300 to start, £300 when you approve it), then £20 a month for hosting, security and unlimited small edits, rolling and cancellable any time. See the numbers in what a tradesman website costs, or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.