Website vs van signwriting vs local ads: cost per job
Three ways a trade pays to get found, measured on the only metric that matters: what each one actually costs you per job won.
Every pound a UK trade spends to get found buys jobs at a different price, and most trades have never worked out what that price is. A full van wrap might cost £900 once and then nothing. Local ads might cost £120 a month forever. A website on my plan is £50 every four weeks with no build fee. Those numbers are not comparable as they stand, and comparing them wrong is how trades end up renting jobs at £40 a time when they could own the channel that brings them in. The fair way to compare marketing is not the sticker price, it is the cost per job won: total spend divided by the work it actually generates. Do that, and the three options separate, though not as cleanly as the sales pitch usually suggests.
No spin. Signwriting and ads both have their place, and I will say exactly where. I will also say where a website loses, because on a flat monthly fee there is a job count below which it is no cheaper than paid ads, and that number is worth knowing before you buy anything.
A website wins on cost per job once it is actually producing, and not before. Van signwriting is cheap in Britain (£150 to £1,200 once) but unmeasurable. Local ads cost £15 to £60 or more per job and stay there, because you pay per click and vanish when you stop paying. A website on a flat £50 every four weeks is £650 a year, so it is about £43 a job at fifteen jobs and about £13 a job at one a week. Below roughly one job a month it is no cheaper than ads. It is the only one of the three you can measure, and the only one you end up owning.
How to compare marketing fairly: cost per job
The only fair way to compare a website, a van wrap and local ads is cost per job won, which is total spend over a period divided by the jobs it generated, because a one-off cost, a monthly cost and a per-click cost look nothing alike until you reduce them all to the same per-job figure.
Trades compare marketing on the wrong number all the time. "The van wrap was £900, the ads are only £120 a month" tells you nothing about value, because it ignores how much work each one brings in. A £900 wrap that quietly seeds ten jobs a year is superb value. A £120-a-month ad spend that wins two jobs a month is expensive. Same pounds, opposite verdicts, and you only see it when you divide by jobs.
The formula, plainly
Cost per job = total spend over a period ÷ jobs won in that period. For a one-off cost like signwriting, spread it over the years the graphics last. For an ongoing cost like ads or hosting, use the actual monthly figure. The channel with the lowest cost per job, at the volume you can handle, is the one doing the most for your money, full stop.
Why "owned" beats "rented" before you even do the maths
There is a second axis that the per-job figure hides: whether you own the channel or rent it. A website and a van wrap are assets you own, they keep working after you have paid. Ads are rented, they stop the second the budget does. That difference compounds, and it is the heart of why the numbers below drift so far apart over time.
Van signwriting: cheap per year, unmeasurable per job
Van signwriting costs a one-off £150 to £400 for basic lettering or £600 to £1,200 for a full wrap, then nothing, which makes it cheap per year, but its cost per job is impossible to pin down because you never know which enquiries came from someone seeing the van.
Signwriting is the one every trade already understands. It works while you drive, while you park outside a job, while you sit in traffic. Once it is on, it costs nothing, and a tidy wrap doubles as a trust signal: a clean, branded van reads as a real business. On pure yearly cost it is the cheapest of the three by a mile.
The number nobody can give you
The problem is measurement. Nobody rings and says "I called because I saw your van on the A38". So while the cost is low, the cost per job is a guess. It could be brilliant or it could be near zero return, and you will never know which. That is fine for a passive, cheap channel, but it means signwriting cannot be the thing you rely on to fill a quiet month.
Reach is limited to who physically sees you
A van only reaches people on the roads you drive. It cannot answer the person three towns over searching "electrician near me" at nine at night. It builds recall in your immediate patch, which is valuable, but it is a local, passive top-up, not a way to be found by strangers with intent. Keep it, but do not expect it to do the finding.
Local ads: fast, predictable, and you rent every job
Local ads on Google or Facebook are the most expensive channel per job, typically £15 to £60 or more per job won, because you pay per click or per lead whether or not it converts, and your visibility disappears the moment you stop paying.
Ads have one real virtue: speed. Turn them on and you appear at the top today, no waiting to rank. For a brand new trade with an empty diary that can be worth it. But the pricing model is rented visibility. You pay for clicks, and on Google you are charged each time someone clicks your ad, converting or not (Google Ads Help, how you pay).
Why the cost per job climbs
Clicks for UK trade terms are not cheap, and most clicks do not become jobs. If a click costs a few pounds and one in eight becomes a job, you have spent well over £20 in clicks for that one job before you have lifted a spanner. That is why a realistic cost per job on local ads lands at £15 to £60 or more, and it does not fall over time the way a website's does.
The tap that turns off
The deeper issue is that you build nothing. Stop the budget and you vanish. Two years of ad spend leaves you with exactly what you started with: no asset, no ranking, no site people can find on their own. Ads are a tap you turn on for a slow patch, not a foundation, and treating them as a foundation is how trades end up trapped paying rent on their own visibility.
A website: the cost-per-job receipt
A website on my plan costs £50 every four weeks with no build fee, which is thirteen payments a year rather than twelve, so £650 a year flat, and its cost per job is set entirely by how much work it brings in: about £43 a job at fifteen jobs a year, about £22 at thirty, and about £13 at one a week.
Here is where the maths gets interesting, because a website behaves unlike the other two, though not in the way it is usually sold. The fee does not fall over time. What falls is the cost per job, and only because each extra enquiry a ranking site brings in is very nearly free. So the lever is not patience, it is volume. Laid out like a receipt against the same £650, it looks like this.
| Jobs the site brings in, per year | What the site costs | Cost per job | Against ads at £15 to £60 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 (about one a month) | £650 | ~£43 | No better than ads |
| 30 (about one a fortnight, plus) | £650 | ~£22 | Beats mid-priced ads |
| 52 (one a week) | £650 | ~£13 | Beats ads outright |
| 100 | £650 | ~£7 | Nothing else comes close |
The £650 is the current Sitework price, £50 every four weeks with no build fee, and four weeks means thirteen payments a year rather than twelve. The job counts are illustrative; your conversion rate and job value will differ. The point is that the fee is flat, so the only thing that moves cost per job is how much work the site actually wins.
The break-even: how many jobs before the site beats ads
This is the number I would want if I were buying, and it is simple arithmetic rather than a sales claim. Divide £650 by whatever a job currently costs you on ads, and you get the jobs a year the site has to win to match it. Everything above that line is the site pulling ahead.
| If ads cost you this per job | The site has to win this many jobs a year to match | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| £15 | 44 | Nearly one a week |
| £25 | 26 | One a fortnight |
| £40 | 17 | Three a quarter |
| £60 | 11 | About one a month |
£650 divided by your ads cost per job. If your ads are cheap and efficient, the site has to work hard to beat them. If your ads are costing you £40 or £60 a job, which is common on competitive UK trade terms, the site only has to bring in a job a month.
What the fee actually covers, and what happens at twelve months
There is no build fee and no deposit, so nothing is due on the day you say yes. The £50 covers the site, hosting, the domain, SSL, backups, security and unlimited small text and photo changes. It is three months minimum and then rolling, the first month is refunded on any plan if you do not like the finished site, and after twelve months the website is yours to keep, domain and files transferred, with no exit fee. That last line is the part that matters for this comparison, because it is the difference between a channel you are renting and one you end up holding, and it is the answer to the ugliest version of this problem, which is what happens if your web designer stops trading. The wider return picture is in what a trade website is actually worth.
The verdict: lead with the asset, support with the rest
On cost per job a website wins over any meaningful timeframe, so the sensible play is a website as the owned foundation, van signwriting for cheap passive awareness, and local ads only as a short-term top-up when you need work fast, rather than picking just one.
This was never really a case of one beating the others outright, because they do different jobs. But if you are deciding where the next few hundred pounds goes, the order is clear: build the asset first, because it is the one that gets cheaper and keeps working, then let the others support it.
| Channel | Cost shape | Cost per job over time | Own or rent? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Van signwriting | One-off £150 to £1,200 | Unmeasurable | Own |
| Local ads | £70 to £150/mo, ongoing | £15 to £60+, flat forever | Rent |
| Website (Sitework) | £50 every 4 weeks, no build fee | ~£43 → ~£7, by volume | Own, at 12 months |
See your own numbers first
You do not have to trust a generic table, and you should run your own numbers before anyone gets paid. Work out what a job is worth to you, then check it against the kind of work a website actually wins, because the job count in the table above is worth a great deal more to a trade quoting £4,000 bathrooms than to one quoting £90 callouts. I build a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything, so you can see what you would be buying. Like it? There is no build fee, it is £50 every four weeks, done-for-you, live in about a week, with no per-lead fees. The full cost breakdown is in what a tradesman website costs, or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.