Search what Google Ads costs for a tradie and you'll get numbers like $15 to $40 a click. Agencies quote them too. Those numbers are real, but they're what a badly set up account pays. They're not a law of physics.
On the accounts I run, optimised for conversions, clicks come in between $2 and $5. Same city, same trades, same keywords. The difference is entirely in how the account is built.
Why the quoted numbers are so high
Those benchmark figures come from accounts doing one or more of these:
- Manual CPC bidding. You're guessing a bid and holding it. Google has no reason to show your ad to the cheap, high-intent searcher over the expensive tyre-kicker, so you pay the same for both.
- No conversion tracking. This is the big one. If Google can't see which clicks turned into calls, it can't bid down on the ones that don't. You're paying top dollar for traffic that was never going to ring you.
- Broad match with no negatives. You're bidding against the whole market on terms you'd never have chosen, and those auctions are the expensive ones.
- Bidding on emergency terms only. “Emergency plumber now” is a bidding war between everyone with a budget. There are twenty cheaper ways in that convert just as well.
- A bad landing page. Quality Score is real. A page that loads slowly and doesn't match the search costs you more per click for the same position. Google charges you a penalty for being irrelevant.
What actually brings it down
Once an account has conversion data and bids on it, the cost per click falls on its own, because Google stops buying clicks that don't convert.
- Track calls properly. Not just taps on the call button. A call conversion with a real duration threshold, so a four second misdial doesn't count as a lead. Everything else depends on this one.
- Hand the bidding over once it has data. Usually 15 to 30 conversions in, Maximise Conversions will beat your manual guesses and keep beating them.
- Negatives, weekly. Jobs, salary, course, apprenticeship, DIY, how to, free. That list grows forever and it's the cheapest hour of work in the account.
- Exact and phrase match on the money terms. Broad only where you're deliberately prospecting and reading the search terms report.
- Send each ad group to a page about that thing. Not the homepage. Relevance is a discount, not a nice-to-have.
- Run it when you answer the phone. Paying for 11pm clicks that ring out is donating.
What a booked job actually costs
Work it through with the real numbers instead of the scary ones.
At $2 to $5 a click, on a campaign that's tuned and pointed at a page that matches the search, cost per call lands around $10 to $15. That's the number off my own accounts, not a teaser rate.
If you book half the people who ring, a booked job costs you somewhere between $20 and $30 in ad spend. On a $900 job that is not a close call.
Run the same funnel at $20 a click and you're at $200 to $300 a booked job for identical work. That's the entire difference between ads being obviously worth it and ads being the thing you tried once and hated.
So the question isn't whether you can afford Google Ads. It's whether the account is set up so you're in the cheap version or the expensive one.
What that means for your budget
At $2 to $5 a click, $1,000 a month buys 200 to 500 clicks. That's enough traffic to gather real conversion data inside a month and let the bidding start working.
At $20 a click it buys 50, which is why the usual advice is that you need a big budget to start. You don't need a big budget. You need an account that isn't wasting it.
Narrow still beats wide. A handful of suburbs and a tight keyword set will outperform a whole city on the same money, every time.
The first month looks worse, and that's normal
A new account has no conversion history, so week one genuinely does cost more per click. That's the learning period and you can't skip it. What matters is whether someone is cutting the waste out while it learns, or just letting it run and forwarding you the invoice.
If your cost per click hasn't moved after two months, nobody is managing the account.
When ads are still the wrong move
Ads amplify what you already have. If your Google profile sits on six reviews and a 3.8, paid traffic will go and look at that before calling, and you'll have paid for the privilege of showing them it.
I've told people to hold off on ads and spend three months on reviews and their profile first, more than once. It costs me the bigger sale and it's still the right call. Fix the thing people check before they ring you, then pay to send more of them to it.
Want it run for you? Our Google Ads management is built around tracked calls, not clicks.