hipages vs Google Ads vs your own website for tradies

A lead marketplace, Google Ads and your own website all produce enquiries, but they charge in different ways, give you different amounts of control, and work on different timescales. A marketplace such as hipages sells you leads, Google Ads sells you clicks to your own site, and a website with a Google Business Profile brings enquiries you do not pay for per lead but wait for. This page sets out the differences and a way to compare them on cost per job. It is as at November 2026.

How do hipages, Google Ads and your own website differ?

We do not quote marketplace prices because their price lists were not public when we checked, and the figures published by other agencies come from companies that sell competing services. Ask for the price for your trade and suburb in writing, and ask how many tradies receive each lead.

How do I compare them on cost per job?

Compare channels on what you pay for each job won, not on what you pay for each lead. A cheap lead that rarely turns into work can cost more per job than an expensive one.

1. Pick a period of at least 28 days for each channel.
2. Add up what you spent: subscription and lead fees, ad spend, or the share of the website plan you assign to it.
3. Count the paid jobs that came from that channel. Ask each customer how they found you if you do not have tracking.
4. Divide spend by jobs. Do it again each month, because the trend tells you more than one month.

The most you can afford per job is the gross profit on an average job after materials and labour. For a Google Ads version of this working, see what a lead costs on Google Ads for Australian trades.

Which one fits which trade?

How customers contact you changes the answer. We measured phone taps and form sends on five sites we run from 14 October to 4 November 2026 (22 days), counting sessions with at least one of each.

Trades that get phoned, such as repair and emergency work, depend on the call button working on a phone and on tracking taps. Trades that quote larger jobs, such as builders, get forms. A marketplace that delivers a form lead and an ad that delivers a call are not measured the same way, which is one more reason to track your own numbers. Method and caveats are in which leads came from your website, Google Ads and Google Business Profile.

What we've seen across our client sites

We run Google Ads and websites for service businesses, and we do not run marketplace profiles, so we cannot give you a marketplace result. What we can say comes from the other two channels.

• Counting is where it goes wrong. On one ads account the Conversions column showed about ten times the real leads for a month. A cost per job built on that column would have been wrong by a factor of nearly ten. See why Google Ads reports about ten times your real leads.
• A bigger budget did not buy cheaper leads. After a budget increase on one account, cost per lead rose, because ad position and not budget became the limit.
• Your own website brings leads without per-lead charges, but it is slow. Visits from Google organic search turned into a phone tap or form send 8.5 times in 100 visits across five of our sites in the 22 days above.

Should I use all three?

Most trades do better with a mix than with one channel. A marketplace or Ads can fill the diary while the website and Google Business Profile grow. A website and profile make the paid channels cheaper to run, because a visitor who clicks an ad lands on a page that explains the work and shows the phone number. Whichever mix you choose, give each source its own tracking so that you can cut the one that does not pay.

If you want this set up for you, every Pagecog plan includes a website, a dashboard and a weekly report on lead sources, from $298 a month. The Ads management add-on is $549 a month and the SEO add-on is $549 a month, both month to month. See pricing, the Google Ads service and the SEO service, or get started.