How Much Should a Tradesperson Spend on Google Ads? Honest Numbers

“How much should I spend?” is the first question every tradesperson asks about Google Ads, and almost every answer they get is useless — either a salesman’s “as much as possible” or a forum’s “depends, mate”. Both are technically true and practically worthless. So here are the actual numbers, and the five-minute calculation that turns them into your number.

Start from the click, not the budget

Google Ads is an auction, so the only number that matters at the start is what a click costs in your trade and your town. Rough ranges we see across UK local campaigns:

• Emergency work (emergency plumber, locksmith, drain unblocking): £5–15 per click. High intent, high competition.
• Planned jobs (boiler installation, rewiring, roof replacement): £3–8 per click.
• Lower-urgency trades (decorating, landscaping, paving): £1–4 per click.
• Add 30–50% in big competitive cities; knock a third off in smaller towns.

Not every click becomes an enquiry. A decent local campaign converts 10–25% of clicks into a call or form fill — so your cost per enquiry usually lands somewhere between £15 and £40. That’s the number everything else hangs off.

The five-minute calculation

Three questions, in order:

1. What’s a job worth to you? Not turnover — what you keep. A £2,800 boiler install with £1,000 in your pocket counts as £1,000.
2. How many enquiries do you win? Most trades with decent reviews close 30–50% of genuine enquiries. Be honest, not optimistic.
3. So what can you afford per enquiry? If you keep £1,000 per job and win 1 in 3 enquiries, an enquiry is worth about £333 to you. Paying £25 for it is obvious. If you keep £80 per job, that same £25 enquiry needs a 1-in-3 close rate just to break even — ads are probably not your channel yet.

This is why “how much should I spend” has no universal answer: a heating engineer and a grass-cutting round have completely different maths at the same budget.

So what’s the right monthly number?

For most trades, £300–500/month is the honest starting budget. Here’s the reasoning rather than just the number: at £20–30 per enquiry, £400 buys you roughly 15–20 enquiries a month — about one a working day. That’s enough to prove whether the maths works within 30 days, and few enough that you can actually answer them all properly.

Below £200/month, two things go wrong:

• You get a handful of enquiries, and luck dominates — three bad ones in a row tells you nothing.
• Google’s system never gets enough data to optimise, so you stay expensive forever.

Above £1,000/month only makes sense once you’ve proven the numbers at a smaller spend and you have the capacity to do the extra work. Buying enquiries you can’t answer is the most expensive mistake in local advertising.

Three budget rules that save trades real money

1. Never pay for clicks outside your patch

A tight radius isn’t a setting, it’s a profit margin. A click from someone forty minutes away costs the same as one from the next street and is worth a fraction as much.

2. Spend when you can answer

If you can’t pick up between 8am and 6pm, either fix that first (a missed-call text-back covers you for less than the cost of one lost job) or run ads only in the hours you can. Paying £25 for a call that rings out is burning money with extra steps.

3. Judge on 30 days, not 3

Week one of any campaign is noise. The honest review point is 30 days: total spend, total enquiries, jobs won. If the maths doesn’t work at day 30 with everything set up properly, change the offer or stop — don’t “give it another month” on hope.

The takeaway

Work out what an enquiry is worth to you, check it against £15–40, and if there’s comfortable daylight between the two, start at £300–500/month and review at 30 days. If there isn’t daylight, don’t run ads — fix your job value, your close rate, or your reviews first. Anyone who tells you to spend before doing this arithmetic is selling something.