Start from the job, not the platform
Before looking at Google at all, work out what you can afford to pay to win a job. That depends on the job’s value to you after costs, and on how many of your enquiries usually turn into work.
- What is a typical job worth? Use the profit on the job, not the invoice total.
- How much would you spend to win one? Many businesses already have a feel for this from what they pay for other marketing.
- How many enquiries become jobs? If you quote for four and win one, one in four of your enquiries becomes work.
Put together, these tell you what you can afford per enquiry. As an example, not a benchmark: if you would spend £300 to win a job and one enquiry in four becomes a job, you can afford up to £75 per enquiry. Anything that brings in good enquiries for less than that is worth paying for.
Work this out separately for each kind of job. An emergency repair and a full installation have very different values, and they should not share a target.
Then check what clicks cost in your area
Google’s Keyword Planner shows estimates of how often people search for a keyword each month and the average cost for an ad to show on it, and it can forecast clicks and conversions for a given spend. You need a Google Ads account with billing set up to use it.
Treat the figures as a guide. Real costs move with competition, the time of year, the quality of your ads and landing pages, and the weather. What they do give you is a sense of whether your affordable cost per enquiry is realistic: if clicks cost a few pounds and roughly one visitor in ten gets in touch, each enquiry costs ten times the click price.
Budget enough to learn something
A budget that buys a handful of clicks a week cannot be judged. Too few enquiries arrive to tell a good campaign from a bad one, and automated bidding has too little to learn from.
If your budget is tight, cover fewer services or a smaller area properly rather than everything thinly. It is better to own the searches for your most profitable job in the areas you most want than to appear occasionally for everything.
How Google spends a daily budget
In Google Ads you set an average daily budget, and Google is allowed to spend more on busy days and less on quiet ones. For most campaigns, it can spend up to twice the average daily budget on a single day, but no more than 30.4 times the daily budget in a month.
So the easiest way to set a daily budget is to start from the monthly figure you are comfortable with and divide it by 30.4. Do not panic if one day costs double: the monthly limit still holds.
Plan for the seasons
Most trades have predictable peaks. Storms bring roofing repairs, cold snaps bring boiler breakdowns, and heatwaves bring air conditioning enquiries. A flat budget all year can run out in the busiest weeks and waste money in the quiet ones.
Decide in advance how far you are willing to raise the budget when demand jumps, and how much you can actually take on. There is no point paying for enquiries you cannot reach.
Local Services Ads have their own budget
If you also run Local Services Ads, they have a separate budget and charge per lead rather than per click. That budget is weekly at the moment, but changes to a daily average when UK accounts move into Google Ads in 2027. What changes in the move.
What a bigger budget cannot fix
More budget makes a good account bring in more work, and a poor account waste money faster. Before increasing spend, check the basics: that your conversion tracking counts real enquiries, that your negative keywords block the searches you do not want, and that someone answers the phone when the ads are running.
We suggest a starting budget as part of every campaign review, based on your job values and what we can see for your trade and area.
Sources
- About average daily budgets, Google Ads Help, checked 26 October 2026.
- Use Keyword Planner, Google Ads Help, checked 26 October 2026.