What does a tradie’s Google Ads account need that others do not?

Most Google Ads advice is written for businesses that sell online: a product, a checkout and a customer who could live anywhere. A trade business has none of that. The customer usually rings rather than buys, the work happens at their address, some of it is needed tonight and some of it can wait a month, and one account can carry a blocked drain callout and a full bathroom replumb side by side.

Those differences change how your account should be built. Left on the defaults Google suggests for everyone, a tradie's account tends to pay for calls nobody answers, clicks from suburbs the business doesn't service, and searches from people who want to learn the trade rather than hire one. These are the settings we change first as a Google Ads agency in Australia that runs accounts for plumbers, electricians and other trade businesses.

How a trade business's Google Ads account differs from an online store's

Every section below comes from one of those rows. None of it is exotic, but most of it runs against the defaults you're given with a new account.

How to track phone calls as conversions for a trade business

If the phone is where your work comes from, your account has to be able to see the phone. If your account only counts form submissions, it's optimising toward the minority of customers who prefer to type, and automated bidding will steer your budget toward whatever produces forms.

1. Turn on call reporting for your call assets. Google's call reporting uses a Google forwarding number, so the account can record calls made straight from the ad, including how long they lasted and whether they connected.
2. Track calls from the website as well. Google's website call tracking swaps the number on your site for a forwarding number when the visitor arrived from an ad, so a call made after reading the page is still credited to the campaign.
3. Set a minimum call length. Google counts a call as a conversion when it lasts at least as long as the length you choose. Its own help example describes a business that found calls over two minutes tended to lead to sales, and counted only those. Look at your own call durations before you pick a number.
4. Demote the tap on a phone number. A tap shows intent, not a conversation. Record it, but don't make it the primary conversion the bidding chases.
5. Record what happened next. Mark calls and forms as booked, quoted or dead, so you can later tell the account which enquiries turned into work.

How to set Google Ads location targeting for a trade service area

A trade business can only earn from people it can reach in a van. For a trade account, location targeting is less a reach setting than a cost control.

• Target the area you actually service. Suburbs, postcodes or a radius around the depot, drawn around where you're prepared to drive at the rates you charge, not where you'd go for a big enough job.
• Reach people in the area, not people interested in it. Google recommends its broader "Presence or interest" option in many cases, but also says it is important to know when targeting by presence makes sense. For a business that has to turn up at the address, it usually does. Someone interstate researching a suburb they might move to isn't a callout.
• Exclude what's close on a map but not on the road. River crossings, tolls and peak hour traffic make some nearby suburbs uneconomic. Exclude them rather than hoping the bidding works it out.
• Adjust bids where the economics differ. Suburbs near the depot, or where you win more of the work you quote, can carry a higher bid than the edges of your area.
• Name the area in your ads. A searcher three suburbs outside your area should be able to tell from the ad that you're not for them, before they click.

Location assets are worth adding as well. They connect your account to your Google Business Profile, so your ads can show your business address, which helps a local searcher trust that you're genuinely nearby.

Why emergency work and planned jobs belong in separate campaigns

A search for a blocked drain at nine at night and a search for a hot water system replacement quote on a Sunday afternoon come from different customers. One needs someone now and will call the first business that answers. The other is comparing quotes and will read before contacting anyone. Putting both in one campaign forces one budget, one schedule and one landing page onto two opposite behaviours.

Ad scheduling is what makes the split work. Google lets you choose the days and hours an ad can show and adjust bids by time, and call assets can be set to appear only when the business can take calls. An emergency ad that runs while nobody answers the phone buys some of the most expensive clicks in your account, sends them to voicemail, and the caller simply rings the next business.

The negative keywords every trade Google Ads account needs from the start

Trade searches attract a particular kind of wasted click, because the same words are used by people looking to hire, people looking to learn and people looking for work. Google's search terms report shows what people actually searched before clicking, and it's where these turn up. The same themes appear in almost every trade account we audit:

• Jobs and training: jobs, salary, wages, apprenticeship, course, TAFE, licence.
• DIY: how to, DIY, tutorial, video, parts, kit.
• Free and bargain hunting: free, second hand, and cheapest if you don't compete on price.
• Suppliers and wholesale: wholesale, supplier, trade price, bulk.
• Places you don't service: suburbs, towns and regions outside the area you set.
• Work you don't do: for a plumber that might be gas fitting if you're not licensed for it; for an electrician, solar if you don't install it.

Google notes that negative keywords do not match close variants such as plurals and misspellings, so each variation needs adding separately. Build your list before launch, then keep reviewing the search terms report on a rhythm that suits your spend, because new irrelevant searches keep appearing for as long as your campaign runs.

Why every trade service needs its own ad group and landing page

A trade business rarely sells just one thing. A plumber's account might cover blocked drains, hot water, leak detection, gas and bathroom renovations, each searched in different words by people in a different state of mind. Sending all of them to the homepage is the most common structural fault we find.

Give each service people search for its own ad group, ads written in the words the searcher used, and a landing page about that service alone. Google calculates Quality Score from three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. A tight match between the search, the ad and the page is what improves all three at once.

It also makes your account readable. When each service has its own ad group, you'll see which kinds of work your budget is actually buying, and you can move money toward the jobs you most want. That structure is the core of how we manage Google Ads for trade businesses: one service per ad group, one page per service, and calls counted from both the ad and the site.

How to judge a trade Google Ads account when every job is worth something different

An online store can read its return straight off the dashboard. A trade business can't, because the account sees a call rather than a job, and the same call could be a small repair or a large project. Judging your account on cost per lead alone treats every enquiry as equal when the work behind them isn't.

1. Work out the ceiling. What a lead can afford to cost depends on your margin and how many enquiries you win, which is the calculation behind what a trade lead can afford to cost.
2. Record the outcome of every enquiry: booked, quoted, lost, or not a real lead at all.
3. Feed the outcomes back. Google's offline conversion imports exist to measure what happens after an ad produces a click or a call, such as a job agreed over the phone, so the bidding can move toward the enquiries that become paid work.
4. Judge by booked work against spend, over a period long enough to include the quiet weeks as well as the busy ones.

The results worth trusting are the ones measured that way. In our trade and home service case studies, Dr Leak Plumbing recorded a 40% drop in cost per lead alongside a 105% increase in conversions, and Sydney Refrigeration Services recorded a 150% increase in conversions. Each account started from a different place, so read those as measured examples rather than a forecast.

How Google Ads and local SEO work together for a trade business

Google Ads buys the moment: the burst pipe tonight, the job you want this week, the new suburb you want to test before committing to it. Local search earns the steadier demand, through the map results and the organic listings that keep producing calls without a cost per click.

The two are strongest together. The search terms report shows which services and suburbs produce paying work, which is exactly what should decide the pages you build for organic search, and a well kept Business Profile makes the ads that appear beside it more credible. If you're weighing up the organic side, local SEO built around the suburbs a tradie covers works from the same information. Both sit inside the same account work we do as a digital marketing agency for trade businesses.

The Google Ads settings that matter most for a trade business

If you only change one thing this week, check what your account counts as a conversion. For most trade businesses the answer reveals whether the bidding has been working toward real calls at all.