Google Ads management
Be the firm they call at the moment they search
Someone types “emergency roof repair near me” at 7am. Within the hour they will have called two companies and booked one. Google Ads is the only channel where you can decide to be one of those two and be live by tomorrow.
In short
Google Ads management for UK trade and service businesses: the account built in your own ownership, search terms read by hand every week, negatives added, and bids moved towards what produced enquiries rather than clicks. Ad spend goes directly to Google on your own card and is never marked up or charged as a percentage.
What most trade Google Ads accounts get wrong
We have taken over a lot of accounts. The same four faults appear almost every time, and every one of them is expensive.
1. Broad match with no negative keywords
The account bids on “scaffolding” and Google helpfully serves the ad to people searching for scaffolding jobs, scaffolding courses, scaffolding for sale, and CISRS card renewals. We have seen accounts where more than 40% of spend went to searches that could never have become a customer. The fix is unglamorous: read the search terms report every week and add negatives until it stops.
2. No conversion tracking, or tracking that counts the wrong thing
An account with no call tracking cannot tell you which keyword produced a job, so every optimisation decision after that is guesswork dressed as analysis. Worse is tracking that counts page views of the contact page as conversions — which makes the report look wonderful and means nothing.
3. Sending every click to the homepage
A person searching “flat roof repair Winchester” who lands on a generic homepage has to find the flat roofing information themselves. Most do not. They go back to the results and click the next ad, and you have paid for the privilege.
4. Geography set to “interest” rather than presence
Google's default location setting includes people merely interested in your area. For a local trade firm that quietly means paying for clicks from the other end of the country. One checkbox.
What we do instead
- Search-term discipline. Weekly review, negatives added every week, permanently.
- Call tracking first. Conversion actions in place before a penny is spent, with calls over 30 seconds counted as leads.
- Intent segmentation. Emergency work, planned work and commercial enquiries in separate campaigns with separate budgets and bids.
- Tight geography. Presence-only targeting, radius set by where a job is actually profitable once travel is priced.
- Ad copy that pre-qualifies. Stating minimum job sizes or coverage in the ad costs you clicks and saves you money.
- Landing pages that match. The page answers the search, not your company history.
Real account numbers
£10.79
cost per conversion at a 12.76% click-through rate.
354
tracked conversions in 30 days at 21.08% conversion rate.
How the first ninety days run
| Phase | What happens | What you should expect |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1–7 | Account audit, keyword and competitor research, conversion tracking and call tracking installed, campaign structure built. | No spend yet. If you have an existing account we tell you what is wrong with it in plain English. |
| Days 8–30 | Launch deliberately narrow: exact and phrase match on proven intent, tight radius, hard negative list. Daily search-term monitoring for the first fortnight. | First enquiries usually inside week one. Cost per enquiry will be volatile — this is normal and not yet a signal. |
| Days 31–60 | Cut what does not convert. Shift budget toward the keywords and areas producing quoted work. Test ad copy against the enquiries you actually want. | Cost per enquiry starts to settle. You should be able to name the three keywords doing the heavy lifting. |
| Days 61–90 | Widen carefully — more radius, more keywords, more budget, one variable at a time. | Predictable enquiry volume at a known cost. This is the point where you can plan around it. |
An honest caveat. Some businesses should not run Google Ads. If almost nobody searches for what you do, or your average job is worth £120 and your close rate is one in six, the arithmetic will not work and we will tell you on the first call rather than three months in.
What is included
Build
- Account built in your name
- Keyword and competitor research
- Campaign and ad group structure
- Conversion and call tracking
- Landing page recommendations
Run
- Weekly search-term review
- Negative keyword management
- Bid and budget adjustments
- Ad copy testing
- Seasonal and weather-driven changes
Report
- Monthly plain-English report
- Enquiries and cost per enquiry
- Which keywords produced them
- A call with Marcus
- Your own account access, always
Management is billed as a flat monthly fee. Ad spend is separate and paid on your own card directly to Google — we never mark it up and never take a percentage of it, because a percentage fee gives an agency a financial reason to spend more of your money.
Google Ads questions
How much should a trade business spend on Google Ads?
For a local trade firm covering one or two counties, £600–£1,500 a month of ad spend is the realistic working range. Below roughly £400 you cannot gather enough conversion data in a month to optimise on, so you spend three months learning very little. Above £2,000 in a single town you usually run out of genuinely high-intent searches and start paying for marginal ones.
How long before the phone rings?
Usually within the first week of the campaign going live. Search advertising is demand capture, not demand creation — the people are already looking. The first month is about finding which searches convert; months two and three are about cutting the ones that do not.
What is a good cost per lead for a trade business?
It depends entirely on job value. We have run accounts at £10.79 per conversion and others where £60 per enquiry was excellent because the average job cleared £9,000. The only useful test is cost per enquiry against your job value and close rate, which is a two-minute calculation on the phone.
Do you use Performance Max?
Sometimes, and cautiously. Performance Max hands targeting to Google's automation, which works well on large e-commerce accounts and often badly on small local service accounts where it will happily spend your budget on job-seekers and DIY searches. We usually start with a tight Search campaign, prove the economics, then test PMax with proper brand exclusions.
What happens to my account if we stop working together?
You keep it. The account is in your name, you have admin access throughout, and the conversion history — which is the genuinely valuable part — stays with you. We will not hold an account hostage.
Will you bid on my own business name?
Only if a competitor is doing it to you, which does happen. Brand clicks are cheap, so defending is inexpensive; but bidding on your own name when nobody is competing is usually just paying for traffic you would have received free.
Related
See it rather than take our word for it
A recorded walkthrough of real work, with the account open on screen. Nothing here is a mock-up.
Also worth reading
- Client reviewsIndependently published reviews of the advertising work.
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