Paid Search
Google Ads Budget for Contractors: What $1,500 a Month Buys
A Google Ads budget for contractors only makes sense line by line: what $1,500 buys in clicks, how many of those clicks become calls, and what each booked job ends up costing. Nobody knows your cost per click until the account has run for a while, so here is how to read the month when it has.
Take $1,500 a month as the ad budget. That money goes to Google from your own account, and it is separate from any management fee. Ours is published: $1,600 a month for Managed Search + Paid. What follows is how we read a contractor’s month, and how you can read your own.
A $1,500 month, line by line: clicks, calls, cost per call
Every line below is a number your account and your call tracking already show you. Fill in your own month:
| Line | Where it comes from | How to work it out |
|---|---|---|
| Ad budget | Paid to Google from your account | $1,500 |
| Clicks | The campaign report in the account | $1,500 divided by your average cost per click |
| Calls | Call reporting and tracked numbers, counting only calls of 60 seconds or more | Calls from the ads, the site and the profile, by source |
| Cost per call | Worked out | $1,500 divided by calls |
| Booked jobs | Your notes on each call | Calls marked as a booked estimate or a booked job |
| Cost per booked job | Worked out | $1,500 divided by booked jobs |
We don’t publish a typical cost per click or cost per lead for roofing or any other trade, because it moves with the town, the season and how well the account is built. A month of your own account tells you more than an average from somebody else’s market.
The line that decides everything is the last one. Hold the cost per booked job against what a booked job is worth to you in gross profit. Our post on why cost per call is the only PPC metric that matters works through that arithmetic.
Why the first $500 should go to one service area, not five
Spread $1,500 across five towns and three services and every piece gets too little to learn from. The account can’t tell which town or which job produced the calls, and automated bidding never sees enough of them to do its work.
Start narrow:
- Put the first $500 into one service, in the area where you most want work and can reach quickly.
- Send that money to the page for that service, with the phone number at the top, not to the home page.
- Run it during the hours somebody answers the phone.
- Add the next service or town only once the first one shows a cost per booked job you can live with.
The rest of the $1,500 can stay in the same service while it proves itself, or go to a second one with its own campaign. Our post on the smallest Google Ads account that works covers the structure.
Negative keywords that save a contractor the most money
In a contractor’s account, the same few kinds of search take the most money for the least return. These go on the negative list before anything else:
- Work in the trade: hiring, jobs, salary, apprenticeship. Job seekers click a lot and never book an estimate.
- Doing it yourself: how to, DIY, tutorial. A homeowner watching a video on patching a roof isn’t calling you this week.
- Materials: supply, wholesale, price per square. Those searchers want to buy shingles, not hire a crew.
- Places outside your drive. Location targeting leaks near a state line, and much of the Ohio Valley sits on one.
- Jobs you don’t take. A roofer who doesn’t do gutters blocks gutters on the roofing campaign.
Read the search terms report every week for the first couple of months, then monthly. Our post on negative keywords covers match types and where each list goes.
When to raise the budget and when to stop
Raise the budget when all of these are true:
- The cost per booked job sits comfortably under what a booked job is worth.
- The account shows you are losing searches because the budget runs out.
- Somebody answers the calls you already get.
Hold or stop when any of these is true:
- Calls go unanswered. Pull the missed-call report before spending a dollar more, because buying calls nobody answers is the most expensive mistake an ad account can make.
- The calls are for work you don’t do, even after a month of negatives.
- Clicks arrive and nobody calls. That is usually the landing page, not the budget.
- A slow month looks bad next to a busy one. Compare against the same month last year before you cut, because for most trades cost per call moves with the season.
Ads stop the day the budget stops. If you want calls that don’t depend on spend, the organic work underneath is covered in our post on what $800 a month of SEO buys.
What the same $1,500 buys on Local Services Ads instead
Local Services Ads charge per lead rather than per click, so the same $1,500 buys leads, not visits. You don’t pay when somebody looks and leaves, which moves a share of the risk off you. Your trade has to be eligible, Google checks your license, insurance and background first, and your position depends on reviews and how quickly you answer.
The trade-off is control. You can’t choose keywords, write the ad or pick the landing page, and somebody has to dispute wrong-number leads every week, or you pay for them. Our comparison of Local Services Ads vs Google Ads covers the screening and the order we usually start in. Both run inside the $1,600 tier, and our page on search marketing for contractors covers how we set them up.