Trades & home services
The phone rings, or it didn't work.
Paid ads for plumbers, sparkies, builders and home-service crews. I build accounts around tracked calls and booked jobs — because a click that never rings your phone is just an expense with better reporting.
The diagnosis
Six places a trade account quietly leaks money.
Every one of them traces back to the same root: an account built by someone who has never had to quote a job. None of them need a bigger budget to fix.
Emergency and planned work share a budget
“No hot water” converts in four minutes. “Bathroom renovation” takes three weeks and three quotes. Put them in one campaign under one bid strategy and the emergency terms set the pace — which makes every high-value planned job look like a failure.
The calls aren't counted
Most trade jobs start as a phone call, and a form-only conversion setup never sees one of them. Without dynamic number insertion and a minimum call length, the algorithm optimises toward the smallest slice of your real leads.
Calls that ring out
A decent share of home-service demand lands after hours or while you're under a house. Ad scheduling should match the hours someone can actually answer, because paying for a click nobody picks up is pure waste.
Service-area sprawl
Location targeting left on “presence or interest” serves people researching your suburb from three states away. You end up quoting jobs you'd never drive to.
Search terms nobody negatives out
“How to”, “DIY”, “apprenticeship”, “TAFE course”, “hourly rate”, plus wholesaler and supplier searches. Every one of them is someone who will never book you, and every one of them is billable.
Performance Max taking Search's credit
Run without brand exclusions, PMax hoovers up people who were already searching your business name and reports them as new demand. The account looks healthy while the campaign doing the real work looks weak.
What's actually available here
There is no Google Guaranteed badge in Australia.
Worth knowing before someone sells you one.
Local Services Ads — the pay-per-lead format that sits above the normal search results carrying the green Google Guaranteed tick — run in a limited set of countries, and Australia is not one of them. Rather than reprint a list that goes stale the moment Google adds a market, here is the source: Google's Getting started with Local Services Ads ↗ carries a country selector, and the Local Services platform policies ↗ list the markets with provider terms. If Australia ever appears on either, this section is wrong and I want to know.
That matters because several Australian marketing companies advertise Google Guaranteed setup to tradies anyway. There is no local category to apply under and no workaround, so anything you pay for it buys you nothing.
What replaces it is unglamorous and it works: Search ads for the demand that's already looking, a Google Business Profile doing the trust job the badge would have done, and call tracking so you can see which of the two is producing jobs. That's the whole local system here. There's no shortcut to buy.
What counts as a lead
A click is not a job.
If the account can't tell the difference between someone who called and someone who bounced, it will keep buying both. Here's what I set up as a conversion before touching a bid.
How I set up tracking →- ✓A phone call that lasts longer than 60 seconds — short enough to catch a real enquiry, long enough to filter wrong numbers
- ✓A form or quote request that reaches your inbox
- ✓A job that actually lands in the diary
- ✓Where possible, the quoted value and whether you won it — fed back so bidding chases jobs, not noise
The demand curve
Your work is seasonal. Your budget probably isn't.
December – February
Perth's heat does the selling. Air conditioning breakdowns and installs, reticulation and irrigation, pool equipment, refrigeration. Demand spikes fast and buyers have no patience — whoever answers first usually wins the job.
The wet winter months
Storm damage, roofing and gutters, blocked drains, leaks, hot water systems giving up in the cold. Different keywords, different urgency, and often a different average job value to the summer work.
A flat monthly budget across that curve does two bad things at once: it caps you exactly when the demand you've been waiting all year for arrives, and it keeps spending through the quiet stretch when the same money buys nothing. Budget should move with the season — and the seasons are different for a roofer and a landscaper.
Running a trade business in Perth? →Trades — FAQ
Straight answers, no jargon.
Trades & home services
Let's get your phone ringing properly.
Tell me what a booked job is worth to you and I'll tell you whether paid ads stack up. I reply within one business day.
If you'd rather talk it through, book a free clarity call →