How much should you spend on Google Ads as a tradesperson? (2026 UK guide)

If you search for a definitive answer to this question, you will find a lot of marketing agency content that tells you to “start with whatever you’re comfortable with” or quotes a round number with no context. That is not good enough. The right Google Ads budget for a UK tradesperson depends on your trade, your area, your average job value and what you are willing to pay to acquire a customer. This guide gives you real numbers, the reasoning behind them, and a framework for deciding what to spend — and when to stop.

There is no universal right answer

An emergency plumber in London operating at £150–£200 per call-out and a boiler installation specialist in a rural area charging £3,000 per job have almost nothing in common when it comes to Google Ads. Their keywords are different, their competition levels are different, their cost per click is different, and the amount they can afford to pay to acquire a customer is completely different.

What does matter universally is this: your Google Ads budget needs to be large enough to generate statistically useful data within a reasonable timeframe. Too small, and you are not running a campaign — you are dipping a toe in the water and drawing conclusions from a sample of three clicks.

The other variable no one talks about enough is margins. A roofer with 40% gross margin can sustain a higher customer acquisition cost than one running at 20%. Before you set a budget, know your average job value and your margin — those two numbers anchor every decision in this guide.

The minimum viable test budget: £300–£500 per month

Below £300 per month, most Google Ads campaigns in competitive trade keywords simply do not generate enough data to be useful. You might get 15–30 clicks over a month. If none of those convert to enquiries, you cannot tell whether it is because the keywords are wrong, the ad copy is poor, the landing page is weak, or you just had bad luck with a small sample. You end up unable to diagnose the problem.

At £300–£500 per month, you can typically generate 50–150 clicks in a month depending on your trade and location. That is enough to see patterns: which keywords drive enquiries, which ad variations get clicked, whether your phone is ringing at all. It is the minimum threshold for making informed decisions rather than guesses.

Think of the first £300–£500 per month as research, not advertising. You are paying to find out what works. Once you know that, you can scale with confidence.

Budget benchmarks by trade type

The figures below are based on typical UK market conditions in 2026. City-centre and London costs tend to be 30–60% higher than these ranges. Rural areas may be lower. These are starting points, not ceilings.

Emergency plumber and boiler repair: £400–£800/month

Emergency plumbing keywords (“emergency plumber near me,” “burst pipe,” “boiler breakdown”) carry some of the highest CPCs in the trades category — typically £4–£12 per click depending on location. The good news is that conversion intent is extremely high. Someone searching “no hot water emergency plumber” at 11pm is not browsing; they are ready to book. Conversion rates from click to call are often 8–15% for well-set-up campaigns, which is significantly above average. The high CPC is offset by fast, frequent conversions.

Boiler installation: £500–£1,200/month

Boiler replacement is a high-ticket, high-competition category. Keywords like “new boiler installation” and “boiler replacement cost” attract significant competition from national comparison sites, energy companies and large regional installers. CPCs of £8–£20 are common in cities. However, with an average job value of £2,500–£4,000 and reasonable margins, the economics support higher spend. The challenge is that the sales cycle is longer — customers often get two or three quotes before booking — so your attribution window needs to be at least 4–6 weeks.

Electrician (domestic): £300–£600/month

Domestic electrical work is competitive but not as extreme as emergency plumbing. CPCs typically run £3–£8. The challenge is that the range of jobs is broad — a “local electrician” search might be looking for a £60 socket replacement or a £4,000 rewire. Segmenting your campaigns by job type (rewiring, consumer unit replacement, fault finding) tends to produce better quality leads than broad match keywords.

EV charger installer: £200–£500/month

This is one of the best-value Google Ads categories for a trade business right now. Competition is lower than established trades, CPCs are often £2–£5, and the average job value (£700–£1,200 including installation) is solid. Consumer demand is growing steadily as EV adoption increases. If you are OZEV-approved and advertising EV charger installation, your cost per booked job should be materially lower than most other trade campaigns.

Roofer: £400–£1,000/month

Roofing ads have two characteristics that make budgeting more complex. First, they are highly seasonal — demand peaks after storms and in spring/summer when homeowners notice winter damage. Second, competition is intense in most areas, with CPCs of £5–£15. Budget flexibility matters here: consider spending closer to £1,000 in busy months and scaling back in winter rather than running a flat spend all year. Job values are high (£1,500–£8,000 for larger roofing projects), which supports the spend.

Air conditioning installer: £200–£400/month (spring and summer)

AC installation follows a pronounced seasonal pattern. Search volume spikes sharply during warm weather and drops close to zero in winter. Running a flat annual budget makes little sense — concentrate spend between April and September. CPCs are typically £3–£8, and competition, while growing, is not yet at the level of plumbing or roofing. Consider pausing campaigns entirely between October and March and redirecting that budget to other channels.

Drainage contractor: £200–£500/month

Drainage has strong emergency intent — keywords like “blocked drain,” “drain unblocking,” and “CCTV drain survey” tend to convert well. CPCs are moderate (£2–£7) and competition is lower than emergency plumbing. Emergency drainage jobs are often repeat customers — once you unblock a drain for a property management company, you tend to be their first call. That long-term value makes a slightly higher acquisition cost justifiable.

How to calculate your maximum CPC

Working backwards from your job economics is the right way to set a budget — not guessing a number and hoping for the best. Here is the framework.

Start with your average job value. Say you are an electrician and your average booked job is worth £800. Decide the maximum you are willing to pay to acquire that job. A sensible target is 10–15% of job value, so £80–£120 per booked job.

Now work through the conversion chain. If your website converts 5% of visitors into enquiries, you need 20 clicks per enquiry. If you convert 30% of enquiries into booked jobs, you need roughly 3.3 enquiries per booked job, meaning about 67 clicks per booked job. At a target cost per booked job of £100, your maximum cost per click is £100 ÷ 67 = £1.49.

If the market CPC for your target keywords is £6, that maths does not work — unless you improve your conversion rate, raise your price, or accept a higher acquisition cost. This exercise reveals whether Google Ads is viable at current market rates before you spend a penny.

To improve the conversion chain: tighten your keyword targeting (exact match and phrase match convert better than broad match), use call extensions so mobile users can call directly without visiting your site, and make sure your landing page clearly states your service area and has a prominent phone number above the fold.

Local Services Ads vs standard Google Search Ads

Before committing your entire budget to standard Search Ads, consider Google’s Local Services Ads (LSAs), sometimes called Google Guaranteed. LSAs appear at the very top of search results, above standard ads, and — crucially — you pay per lead, not per click.

For most trade categories in the UK, LSAs are available and Google-Guaranteed status requires a background check and verification of trade licences (Gas Safe registration for heating engineers, for example). The process takes 2–4 weeks to set up.

The pay-per-lead model changes the economics significantly. You do not pay for someone who clicks your ad and then leaves immediately. You pay when a customer contacts you through the listing. LSA leads in the trades typically cost £15–£50 per lead depending on trade and area. If your conversion rate from lead to booked job is 40–60%, that represents a cost per booked job of £25–£125 — often competitive with or better than standard Search Ads.

The practical recommendation for most trade businesses: run LSAs as your primary Google channel if you can qualify, and use standard Search Ads to supplement volume for specific high-value job types. Test both for 4 weeks with similar budgets and compare cost per booked job.

How to tell if your budget is working

Clicks and impressions are vanity metrics. The only numbers that matter for a trade business are leads and booked jobs. Here is what to track from week one.

Track call source every single time

Ask every incoming enquiry: “How did you hear about us?” Record the answer against every job you quote. This sounds obvious. Most trade businesses do not do it consistently, which means they cannot connect their Google Ads spend to actual jobs booked. Do it every time, without exception.

If you are running both LSAs and standard Search Ads, distinguish between them. “Google” is not specific enough. Customers who came through LSAs will often say they saw the “Google Guaranteed” badge or they “found you on Google” and the listing had a tick. Standard ad leads are more likely to say they clicked an ad at the top of the page.

Track quote conversion

Not all leads that enquire become quotes, and not all quotes become jobs. Record both stages. If Google Ads is generating enquiries but very few convert to booked jobs, the problem might not be the ads — it might be your quoting process, response speed, or pricing. Knowing your lead-to-quote and quote-to-booked conversion rates by source tells you exactly where the leak is.

Calculate ROAS after four weeks

After your first full month, calculate your return on ad spend (ROAS). Add up the total value of all jobs booked from Google Ads leads and divide by your Google Ads spend. A ROAS of 4x means you generated £4 of job value for every £1 spent. For most trade businesses, 3x ROAS is acceptable as a minimum, 5x is solid, and above 8x is a strong signal to increase budget.

Be careful with job value versus profit. A £3,000 boiler installation with £2,000 of materials is a £1,000 gross profit job, not a £3,000 profit job. Use gross profit when calculating ROAS if your margins vary significantly by job type.

When to scale your budget

The signal to scale is clear: if your cost per booked job is below 15% of your average job value and you have capacity to take on more work, increase your budget. The relationship between spend and volume is not perfectly linear — doubling your budget does not always double your jobs — but in most trade markets there is meaningful headroom before you exhaust your local search volume.

Scale incrementally rather than all at once. Increase by 30–50% and allow 2–3 weeks for the new budget to stabilise before assessing again. Google’s smart bidding algorithms take time to adjust to higher budgets, and dramatic increases can temporarily reduce efficiency.

The other scaling lever is geographic expansion. If your current postcode targeting is working well, test adding adjacent areas. Run them as separate campaigns so you can track performance by area and identify where the strongest return is.

When to pause a campaign

The rule of thumb: if a specific campaign or keyword group has been running for four full weeks with reasonable traffic (at least 50 clicks) and has produced zero booked jobs, pause it and try a different approach. Do not reduce budget and keep running — that just extends the period of bad data collection.

When you pause a failing campaign, diagnose before relaunching. Common reasons a trade Google Ads campaign fails to generate booked jobs include: keywords that attract the wrong intent (informational searches rather than local service searches), a landing page that does not load quickly on mobile, no prominent phone number, targeting too broad a geographic area, or bidding on branded terms for competitors where the visitor has no intention of switching.

A campaign generating lots of clicks but no calls usually points to a landing page or targeting problem. A campaign generating calls but no booked jobs usually points to pricing, response time, or how you handle the initial conversation. These are very different problems requiring very different fixes.

Making attribution automatic with Trade2Base

The single biggest obstacle to good Google Ads decisions is not knowing which jobs came from which channel. Most trade businesses run their jobs through job management software that has no connection to their marketing spend data, which means the analysis — if it happens at all — requires manual spreadsheet work at the end of each month.

Trade2Base is built to close this gap. When you log a job, you record its lead source in the same workflow. Trade2Base combines that source data with the monthly spend you enter for each campaign and produces a cost-per-lead and cost-per-booked-job report automatically. After 4 weeks of consistent use, you have a clear, numbers-backed view of exactly what your Google Ads budget is returning — and the data you need to decide whether to scale, adjust or pause.

The businesses that get the most from Google Ads are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who track attribution consistently enough to know what is working and make fast, evidence-based decisions about where to put their money next month.