What to budget
as a tradie.

The cheapest wins for a tradie aren't ads. A complete Google Business Profile, a steady flow of reviews (which Google says can help your local ranking) and a phone that gets answered often bring more work than a new campaign. They cost an hour a week, not a monthly fee.

Once those are working, ads multiply them. Before then, ads mostly pay to send people to a profile with eight reviews and a phone that rings out.

Put in the extra jobs you want each month, what an average job makes you, and how many enquiries you win. Use real numbers from the last few months if you have them.

For most trades, search ads on the jobs you want come first, because the person is already looking. The Google Ads for tradies page covers how to set them up. Quote sites can fill gaps, but you're competing on price with everyone else who bought the same lead.

Facebook and Instagram suit planned work, like renovations, landscaping and solar, more than emergencies. And a simple website with a page per service usually pays for itself over time, through search.

Google Ads budgets are set per day, as an average. Google can spend up to twice the daily amount on a busy day, capped at 30.4 times it over a month. So $40 a day works out at roughly $1,216 a month, not more.

Give any new budget a full month before judging it, then compare the real cost per job against the break-even number from the calculator. Step up while it holds. Keep it steady through quiet and busy months if you can: switching ads on and off makes results harder to read, and automated bidding has to settle again each time.

The break-even number is only useful if you can see your real cost per job. Most trade work starts with a phone call, so count calls. Google Ads can count a call from an ad as a conversion once it lasts at least as long as a minimum you set, using a Google forwarding number. Set the minimum at a minute or so and the wrong numbers and hang-ups drop out.

The free channel keeps score too. Your Business Profile's performance report shows calls, direction requests, website clicks and the searches people used to find you. Look at it once a month next to your job book. If profile calls are climbing while ad calls sit flat, that tells you where the next dollar, or the next hour, should go.

Then the sum is plain: a month's ad spend divided by the jobs won from ad calls and forms. If that's comfortably under your profit per job, there's room to step up. If it's over, fix the answering and the quoting before you touch the budget.