Google Ads For Tradesmen UK: Budgets, Setup And The Mistakes That Waste Money (2026)

Ads are worth running when you need work now and cannot wait for rankings. New business, quiet season, a new service you want to test, or a town you have just expanded into.

They are also worth running permanently alongside SEO if your job values justify it. If an average job is worth £3,000, a £60 cost per booked job is nothing. If your average job is worth £90, the maths is much tighter.

Work out your average job value and your rough close rate before you spend a penny. Without those two numbers you cannot tell whether a campaign is working.

Budget depends on your trade and your area. A trade in a city faces higher costs per click than the same trade in a market town.

As a rough guide for a town-sized area, £600 to £1,000 a month is enough to test properly for an emergency trade. Less than £300 a month rarely produces enough data to learn anything, because you get a handful of clicks and no pattern to read.

Run it for at least eight weeks. Judging a campaign after ten days is judging noise.

Keep it simple. Most trade accounts are over-engineered.

One campaign per service that has genuinely different intent. Emergency callouts in one, installations in another. Someone searching "emergency plumber" and someone searching "new bathroom quote" are in completely different moods and should not share a budget.

Use phrase match and exact match for your money keywords. Broad match hands your budget to searches like "plumber salary" and "how to fix a tap" unless you are watching the search terms report every day.

Set your location targeting to the areas you actually serve, and set it to people in your area rather than people interested in it. That one setting alone stops a lot of wasted spend.

This is the single highest-value thing you can do in the first hour. Add these as negatives before you go live:

jobs, job vacancies, apprenticeship, apprentice, course, courses, training, qualification, salary, wages, how to, DIY, free, cheap, near me jobs, supplies, wholesale, parts

Then check your search terms report weekly for the first month and add anything else that turns up. Trade accounts routinely cut a third of their wasted spend with a decent negative list.

Three places, in order of how much damage they do.

The landing page. Sending ad traffic to your homepage is the most common mistake. Someone who searched "emergency electrician Gloucester" should land on a page about emergency electrical work in Gloucester, with your number at the top and a form that takes twenty seconds. Not your homepage with a slider and an about section. If your site is not set up for this, that is a website problem, not an ads problem.

Call tracking. If you cannot see which keyword produced which call, you are optimising blind. You end up cutting the campaigns that bring phone calls because form fills look cheaper on the report. Set up call tracking before you scale spend.

The phone. A lead you paid £15 for and did not answer is £15 you set fire to. More on what missed calls cost you.

Probably as well, not instead. LSAs charge per lead rather than per click and put you above everything else with a Google Guaranteed badge. For eligible trades they usually bring better quality leads with far less to manage. We covered them properly in the Local Services Ads guide.

The usual sensible order is LSAs first, then search ads underneath to catch what LSAs do not cover.

Ads buy you today. SEO buys you next year. If you run ads while ignoring your Google Business Profile and your website, you are renting leads forever at an increasing price.

The businesses that end up with cheap leads are the ones where the profile is strong, the reviews keep coming, the website converts and the ads sit on top of all of it. Pulling one lever on its own is why some trades double their spend and see almost nothing.

If you want your ads looked at before you spend more, send them over.