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 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 costs a one-off £600 and £20 a month. 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 cleanly. This post runs the maths on all three, with the receipt laid out, so you can see which one earns its keep and which one just keeps taking.
No spin. Signwriting and ads both have their place, and I will say exactly where. But on cost per job over a couple of years, one of the three pulls clearly ahead, and it is worth seeing why in figures rather than opinions.
On cost per job, a website usually wins. Van signwriting is cheap (£150 to £1,200 once) but unmeasurable. Local ads are the priciest per job (£15 to £60+ each) because you pay for every click and stop appearing when you stop paying. A website costs a one-off £600 plus £20 a month, and its cost per job falls every year it keeps ranking, from roughly £28 a job in year one to single pounds after. It is the only one of the three that becomes an owned asset.
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 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 costs a one-off £600 to build plus £20 a month, and because extra enquiries cost almost nothing once it ranks, its cost per job falls every year: roughly £28 a job in year one at one enquiry a week, dropping to single pounds a job by year two and beyond.
Here is where the maths gets interesting, because a website behaves unlike the other two. The cost is fixed and small, and once the site ranks, each additional job it brings in is nearly free. So unlike ads, where every job costs the same forever, a website gets cheaper per job the longer it works. Laid out like a receipt, it looks like this.
| Website cost per job | Year 1 | Year 2 |
|---|---|---|
| One-off build | £600 | £0 |
| Care plan (£20 × 12) | £240 | £240 |
| Total for the year | £840 | £240 |
| Jobs won (1 enquiry/week → ~30) | ~30 | ~30 |
| Cost per job | ~£28 | ~£8 |
Illustrative maths using the Sitework price (one-off £600 + £20/mo) and a conservative one-enquiry-a-week that converts to roughly 30 jobs a year. Your conversion and job value will differ; the point is the direction, the cost per job falls every year the site keeps working.
Year two is where it pulls away
The build is paid once. In year two the site costs £240 for the whole year and keeps ranking, so the same volume of work drops to about £8 a job, then keeps falling. No other channel does this. Ads are still £40 a job in year five; the website is pennies. This compounding is the real argument, and it is spelled out further in what a trade website is actually worth.
The £20 a month is the cheap part
People fixate on the £600, but the ongoing £20 a month is the number that matters, because it is what keeps the asset earning. It covers hosting, security, backups and unlimited small edits, and it is less than most trades spend on a single lead from a platform. How that monthly plan works is covered in monthly website plans for tradesmen.
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) | £600 once, then £20/mo | ~£28 → single pounds | Own |
See your own numbers first
You do not have to trust a generic table. I build a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything, so you can see the asset you would be buying. Like it? It is a one-off £600 to build (£300 to start, £300 on launch), then £20 a month, done-for-you, live in about a week, with no per-lead fees. The full return picture is in what a tradesman website costs, or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.