Google Ads for tradies: what we have learned running local accounts

Google Ads can work for a tradie, but only if the website turns a click into a call and the tracking tells you the truth about which clicks did. Most of what goes wrong is not the keywords. It is the counting, the schedule and the searches you pay for by accident. This post covers four lessons from local service accounts we manage. We make no promises about leads or revenue, and the numbers below come from single accounts, so treat them as examples.

How does Google Ads work for a tradie?

You bid on searches such as "blocked drain" or "switchboard upgrade", and Google shows your ad to people near you who type something close to it. You pay when someone clicks. The ad lands on a page on your site, and the page has to do the rest: a tappable number, a short form, proof of real work.

If the page is weak, the ad only speeds up how fast you lose customers. We cover the page side in plumber and electrician website design and tradie websites that get the call.

A first campaign is best kept narrow. We set up one for a regional builder with two Search campaigns, a small daily budget for each, targeting limited to the councils and postcodes the builder works in, and one ad group and landing page per service. The detail, including what broke on launch day, is in how we structured a first Google Ads campaign for a builder. One setting worth copying: target people physically in your area, not people who show interest in it.

Lesson 1: conversion tracking decides everything

Google Ads, and its automatic bidding, trust the conversion column. If the column is wrong, every decision made from it is wrong.

An appliance repair business we manage showed 284 conversions over 30 days. The real enquiries were about 30: 8 form submissions, 20 phone number clicks on the website and 2 calls from ads. The rest came from actions Google creates or hosts itself, mainly taps on the call button inside the ad (105) and map activity such as directions and engagements (117 between them). They were counted by default, so cost per lead looked far better than it was.

The fix was to move the real phone click into a lead goal and turn off the default contact goal. It deleted nothing. The lesson is to open Goals, then Summary, and check every action: its source, whether it is primary and which campaigns use it. We wrote it up in Google Ads conversions inflated.

Tracking can also fail the other way. On another client site, a security setting blocked Google's tags for about three months and the numbers simply stopped. See Google Ads tracking that looked fine and recorded nothing.

Lesson 2: phone clicks are not all calls

For tradies, the phone is the main conversion, so it matters what counts as one. On the appliance repair account, the old rule counted any event with "phone" in its label. Over a fortnight in September, the site recorded 130 phone events. 108 were real taps on a phone number link. 22 were people clicking into the phone box of the contact form, which is not a call.

The fix was a single listener that records a phone click only on links that start with tel:. Keep taps and calls from the ad as separate actions, test on a real phone, and compare the totals with your own call log. A gap of several times means the counting is broken. Details in phone click tracking that counts the wrong clicks.

Lesson 3: set the schedule, then check it

Many tradies do not want ads running when nobody can take the call. One client runs ads Monday to Friday only, by choice. Even so, Google reported small amounts of weekend spend, A$27 on one Saturday and A$27 on the following Sunday. That meant the schedule was not excluding those days on at least one setting, and it was worth checking in the Ads interface rather than assuming.

Two other things drifted on the same account. A budget increase approved for one day was still in place two days later, because the revert was written down and not scheduled. And the daily budget is an average: Google can spend up to twice it on a given day. We now schedule every revert at the moment a change is agreed and compare live settings to agreed ones each day.

A quiet weekend is also not a performance problem if the schedule is deliberate. Judge the account on the days it runs. More in Google Ads schedules and budgets.

Lesson 4: negative keywords need to know your business

A search terms report shows what people actually typed. On a five day report for the same account, about A$55 of clicks went to searches for work the business does not do, which was 31 percent of the spend Google named. Examples were car electrician searches, buying a new dryer and DIY fixes. Almost all of it came through broad and phrase match, not exact.

Negatives are not a generic list, though. The same report included searches that looked wasteful and were not: parts, brand names and short price questions. That business sells spare parts, so excluding them would have blocked customers. A tradie should list what they sell, including the awkward cases, before anyone adds a negative. A few category words at campaign level, such as "how to" or the wrong trade, usually do more than hundreds of exact fragments. See reading a search terms report.

What does Google Ads management cost?

Ad spend is yours and is paid to Google. On our plan you create your own Google Ads account, set your own payment method and accept our manager link. We never hold your card. Management is $549 a month, GST inclusive, month to month, on top of the $298 a month website plan. It covers campaign build, tracking, weekly care and a monthly report. For market ranges, see Google Ads management cost in Australia.

Read the Ads service page and the pricing page, or return to the guide to a website for tradies. To begin, get started.