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The four faults in almost every trade account
We take over a lot of accounts. The same four problems appear nearly every time, and together they typically waste between a third and a half of the budget.
Broad match with no negatives. The account bids on “electrician” and Google serves it to people searching for electrician jobs, electrician courses, and electrician salary. Nothing about those searches can become a customer.
Location targeting set to “presence or interest”. This is Google's default and it includes people merely interested in your area — which for a local trade firm quietly means paying for clicks from the other end of the country. Change it to “presence”. One setting, immediate saving.
No conversion tracking, or the wrong conversions. Without call tracking you cannot tell which keyword produced a job, so every subsequent decision is guesswork. Worse is counting contact-page views as conversions, which makes reports look excellent and means nothing.
Everything pointed at the homepage. A person searching “emergency electrician Fareham” who lands on a homepage listing twelve services has to find their answer themselves. Most go back and click the next ad, and you paid for it.
How to structure the account
Structure by intent and value, not by service list. For most trade businesses that means three or four campaigns:
- Emergency / urgent. Highest bids, ad scheduling extended to evenings and weekends if you genuinely answer, phone number in every extension.
- Planned domestic. Standard bids, landing pages carrying proof and price guidance, retargeting attached.
- Commercial. Wider geography, higher bid tolerance, credential-led landing page, weekday-weighted scheduling.
- Brand. Small budget defending your own company name if a competitor is bidding on it. Cheap, and worth checking.
Within each, keep ad groups tight — a small number of closely related keywords per group, so the ad can genuinely match the search. An ad group with forty loosely related keywords cannot have relevant ad copy for any of them, which raises cost per click and lowers conversion at the same time.
On match types: start with phrase and exact. Broad match with a strong conversion history and a mature negative list can work later. Broad match on a new trade account with no negatives is how budgets disappear in a fortnight.
The negative keyword list
Every trade shares a universal waste list, then adds its own. Put these in before launch, not after:
| Category | Terms to exclude |
|---|---|
| Employment | jobs, vacancies, careers, hiring, salary, wage, apprenticeship, labourer, recruitment, CV |
| Training | course, training, qualification, NVQ, City and Guilds, CSCS, CISRS, card, ticket, college, how to become |
| DIY | DIY, yourself, how to, tutorial, YouTube, step by step, guide |
| Retail | for sale, buy, second hand, eBay, Screwfix, Toolstation, wholesale, supplier |
| Free | free, cheap, cheapest, grant, funded, council pays |
| Wrong audience | near me [other county], the town names you do not serve |
Then read the search terms report every single week and add whatever new nonsense has appeared. This never finishes, and it is where most of the money is saved.
Tracking, before you spend anything
Do not launch until these are working:
- Call tracking with a duration threshold — typically 30 or 60 seconds, so wrong numbers do not count as leads.
- Form submission tracking firing on the thank-you page, not on button click.
- Click-to-call tracking on mobile, which is where most trade enquiries begin.
- WhatsApp click tracking if you use it — many trade customers prefer it and it is invisible without this.
Then, once a month, reconcile against reality: how many of the tracked conversions became quotes, and how many quotes became jobs? An account optimised purely on tracked conversions will happily drive volume of the cheapest, worst enquiries. Only the reconciliation catches that.
Ad copy that pre-qualifies
The instinct is to write ads that maximise clicks. For a trade business that is usually wrong, because you pay for every click and only some can become a job.
Deliberately filtering costs you clicks and saves money:
- State your area explicitly — “Covering Southampton, Eastleigh & Winchester”.
- State a minimum job size where one exists — “Projects from £2,000”.
- Give a price indication where you can — “Flat roofs from £95/m²”.
- Say what you do not do, if it is a frequent time-waster.
Then use the extensions properly: call extension always, location extension if you have a verified Business Profile, sitelinks to your genuinely useful pages, and structured snippets listing your actual services. Extensions are free space on the results page — leaving them empty is giving competitors a larger ad than yours.
The weekly routine
Twenty minutes, every week, does more than any monthly deep dive:
- Read the search terms report. Add negatives. Add any good new keyword you find.
- Check spend against budget, and check no single keyword is eating disproportionately.
- Listen to two call recordings. Are these the enquiries you want?
- Check cost per conversion against last week, and against your job value.
- Change one thing, not five. Otherwise you cannot tell what worked.
The honest caveat. Some trade businesses should not run Google Ads at all. If nobody searches for what you do, or your average job is £120 and you close one in six, the arithmetic will not work no matter how well the account is built. Better to know that on day one than in month four.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
How much should I start with?
£600–£1,500 a month of ad spend for a local trade firm. Below about £400 you cannot gather enough conversion data in a month to optimise on, so you spend three months learning very little.
Should I use Performance Max?
Cautiously and later. PMax hands targeting to Google's automation, which suits large e-commerce accounts and often does poorly on small local service accounts, where it will happily spend budget on job-seekers. Prove the economics on a tight Search campaign first.
Can I run it myself?
Yes, genuinely — the mechanics are learnable and this page covers most of what matters. The reason people outsource it is the weekly discipline, which is dull and is exactly where the returns come from.