What’s a Low Google Ads Daily Budget for a Contractor PPC Campaign?
You want to spend the right amount of money on Google Ads for your contractor, tradesperson or home improvement business.
Spend too little and you’ll never generate the leads you need to turn a profit; spend too much and you’ll waste thousands of dollars. But, you weren’t born yesterday and you know everything in the world has a price.
So, what’s a low Google Ads daily budget for contractors, tradies and home improvement businesses? In short, anything below $1,000 a month won’t give you the runway you need to target the right keywords and compete with other businesses in your local area.
Google Ads offer paid placement at the top of Google to make it easy for your customers to find you.
If you don’t want to wait for SEO results, Google Ads can create quick, highly targeted leads.
Google Ads offer an impressive $2 return for every $1 spent, and with proven ROI on offer it’s natural to wonder how much you should budget for your own Google Ads campaign.
As a flexible advertising strategy, you’re in control of how much you spend each month on ad clicks. This flexibility is exciting because it means you can keep your costs from ballooning, but it’s also challenging – you don’t want to set a budget so low that it dries up before you earn enough leads to cover your costs.
At the end of the day, whatever you pay for contractor Google Ads should be coming back (and then some) in the form of new business. It’s your return on investment (ROI) that matters more than how much you spend on your Google Ads budget.
In this article we’ll explain the variables that impact your ideal ad spend, share the dollar amount you’ll need to hit as a minimum, and offer a few simple tips to stretch your Google Ads budget further.
“How much should I invest in my Google Ads daily budget?”
To give you an idea of daily costs, let’s quickly recap how contractor Google Ads work.
Google Ads is based on an auction system. You bid on keywords related to your contractor, trade or home improvement business so that when people use those keywords online, your ad appears. This helps weed out unqualified leads who aren’t looking for your products and services.
You can set your maximum bid for every keyword you want to target, so you’re always in control of your spend.
But this is where the majority of contractors, trade and home improvement business owners make a crucial mistake…
It’s true you’re in control of your spend, which leads plenty of tradespeople to set the limit at $5 or $10 a day. Their logic is that they’ll be able to make$250, $500 or $1000 from every new client, and by spending a couple of bucks a day their profit margin will be monstrous.
The problem is, you’re not going to get those new clients with $5 or $10 ad spend each day.
The reason this approach fails comes down to a numbers game.
The average click-per-cost (CPC) for Google Ads is between $1 to $2. If your daily limit is $5 that’s going to give you around 2 or 3 clicks before your budget is exhausted and your ad is hidden until the next day.
That’s just 2 to 3 people ending up on your landing page or website every day. Those aren’t even leads – they’re just site visitors. If those people aren’t ready to hire your contractor, trade or home improvement services yet, you’ve wasted your ad spend without anything to show for it.
It’s worth pointing out the amount you’re charged for a click on your Google ads will vary based on your industry, target keywords, ad rank and Quality Score, but the fact remains that a tiny daily budget sounds great in theory – but when it fails to earn any new customers it’s just throwing money down the drain.
Curious about your Quality Score? Learn how to use your Quality Score to slash the price of every Google Ad you launch
What’s the easiest way to set my Google Ads daily budget?
The easiest way to set your recommended Google Ads daily budget is to measure your monthly spend. You’ll often be working with a daily ad spend, but multiplying this by 30 is a simple way to average out your monthly costs and factor those into your business expenses.
At the same time, an ideal daily spend for you will look different to a tradie working in another industry.
Google Ads is an auction system where you go up against your competitor’s ad spend, so the price of clicks for a plumber in Melbourne is going to look very different to the price of clicks for a concreter in Mackay (because there’s more plumbers in Melbourne to go up against and fewer concreters in Mackay). What you pay will depend on what your competition is bidding for the same keywords, locations and audiences you are.
If you’re the only rubbish removalist in your suburb it’s likely you’ll have less competition than an emergency plumber in the middle of Sydney.
Your daily cost will also depend on how many leads you’re hoping to generate. Google Ads is a numbers game, so the more clicks you get, the more chances you have to attract new leads. If you want to generate 5 new leads per week you’ll be able to spend less than a tradie hoping to generate 20 new leads per week.
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“How much should I budget to get new Google Ads leads?”
Generally speaking, a minimum of $1,000 a month on tradie Google Ads would be considered a low budget campaign.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never generate a lead through your paid ads campaign at that budget, but it may mean you have to get extra creative to stretch your money further. For example:
- Targeting long tail keywords
- Improving your Quality Score
- Optimising your landing pages
- Focusing on your most profitable demographic or keywords
- Using negative keywords to avoid wasted ad spend
At Tradie Digital we’ve spent 10 years helping local tradies get more work, so we know what a difference your industry and location makes. We use Google Ad strategies like the ones above to stretch your budget further, and get you more work.
That said, as a rule of thumb, anything north of $1k will give you more options to target more customers, and that’s going to help you generate more leads.
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