Plug the leaks before you pay for ads

Ads pay when your business answers the enquiries it already gets. Until it does, hold off. That means the phone gets picked up and a form enquiry has a reply by the same evening. Quotes get chased. The page behind the ad opens on a phone, and the newest review on your Google profile is from the last few months. Miss one of those and part of what you pay Google buys enquiries nobody deals with. Ads don't pay with a full diary either. If you are booked for months, you are buying work you will have to turn away.

You can test all five yourself this week, and the checks are set out below. After them comes the cost. I explain how Google's daily budget and auction work, from Google's own help pages, and then work back from what a job can carry to what a click is worth. That example is in pounds and I made up its numbers.

The leaking bucket

Think of the business as a bucket. Every enquiry is water, and ads are a hose. When the bucket feels light, most owners reach for the hose. If the bucket has holes, a bigger hose puts more water on the ground.

A hole is any place an enquiry stops. A call rings out at lunch. A form lands in an inbox nobody opens until Sunday evening. A quote goes out and nobody chases it. The landing page will not open on a phone. An ad click that reaches voicemail costs the same as one that reaches a person.

Five checks before you pay for ads

Each check comes with a test you can run yourself.

Does every call get answered? Ring the office at lunchtime from a number it doesn't know. Then count the missed calls in the call log for a week. The one-week count shows how.

Does a web enquiry get a reply the same evening? Send yourself one through the contact form on a Saturday evening and see when the reply comes.

Does every quote get chased? Take last month's quotes and mark the ones where anybody got back in touch after it went out, you or the customer. There is a plan for this in how to follow up on a quote.

Does the page behind the ad open on a phone? Test it on mobile data, away from the office wifi. The steps are in how to test your website speed. The page should also ask the visitor for one thing, a call or an enquiry.

Are there reviews from the last few months, and does someone reply to them? Look at the date of the newest one on your Google profile. Anyone who searches for your firm by name sees it too.

Five yeses and the bucket holds. If there is a no, fix that hole first.

What Google Ads cost a small business

Google bills you by the click. What you need to know is the ad spend behind each job you win, and you have to work that out yourself. Start with the part you control.

You set the ceiling

You choose a daily budget for each campaign. Google's page about average daily budgets says a campaign can spend more than your figure on some days, up to twice the average daily budget for most campaigns. Over a month, again for most campaigns, it stays within 30.4 times the daily budget. So the budget tells you the most a month can cost. It does not tell you how many clicks that buys.

The auction sets the price of a click

There is no price list for a click. Google's help page on how the Google Ads auction works says the auction "takes place every time someone searches on Google". You enter a bid, which Google describes as "the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad". Google also scores the quality of the ad and the landing page, and says: "even if your competition has higher bids, you can still win a higher position at a lower price by using highly relevant keywords, ads and assets." The check on the page behind your ad counts here as well, because that page is part of what Google scores.

The amount you are charged is the actual cost per click. Google says it is often less than your maximum bid, because "you only pay what's minimally required to clear the Ad Rank thresholds and beat the Ad Rank of the competitor immediately below you". Who that competitor is changes from search to search. A roofer in one town and an electrician in the next are in different auctions, so an average cost per click for trades would describe neither of them. This article doesn't give one.

Working back from the job, with made-up numbers

I made up every number in this example to show the method. None of them is a benchmark, and none tells you what a click costs in your trade.

An electrical firm decides it can spend £180 on ads to win one job. Say one enquiry in four becomes a job when every enquiry is answered. The firm can then pay £45 for an enquiry. Say one click in ten turns into an enquiry. A click is then worth £4.50 to this firm, and that is its maximum bid.

Next comes the budget. The firm wants 120 clicks a month. Say every click costs the full £4.50, though Google says the actual price is often lower. That comes to £540. A daily budget of £18 covers it. Google's rule puts the most the month can cost at £547.20, which is 30.4 times £18, and the most a single day can cost at £36.

Here is that month side by side. In the first column every enquiry is answered. In the second, 4 of the 12 reach voicemail or sit unread in the inbox.

Google's bill is the same in both columns. The firm set out to pay £180 a job and pays £270, with the same bid and the same budget.

Every number above is a guess until the campaign has run for a month, mine included. At that point, redo the sum with your own clicks, enquiries and jobs, and add any agency management fee to the ad spend. Then set the result against what the job pays and the margin in it. £270 of ads can make sense on a full rewire and never on a swapped socket.

Paying by the lead instead of the click

Google has a second format, Local Services Ads, where in its own words you "only pay for valid leads (such as phone calls and messages) rather than ad clicks". Google is moving that format into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign with pay-per-lead goals. The timeline on its help page starts in August 2026 with selected advertisers in the United States and puts accounts outside the US in 2027. Paying by the lead changes what Google counts. It does not answer your phone, and a lead you paid for and never answered wins no job.

The Google help pages linked in this section are as I read them on 14 October 2026. Google edits them without notice, so open them again before you set a budget.

Two American figures you will see quoted

Articles on this subject lean on two numbers. Neither comes from tradespeople in the UK or Ireland, so here is where each one is from.

The first is that small businesses miss 62 per cent of their calls. It comes from 411 Locals, an American SEO firm, which says it monitored the phone calls of 85 small businesses in 58 industries for 30 days and published the result in January 2016. The 62 per cent is the share of calls that did not reach a person, so it counts calls that went to voicemail as well. The sample is small, and the figure often turns up with a later year attached.

The second is about web enquiries. Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington sent a test enquiry to 2,241 US companies and wrote it up in the Harvard Business Review of March 2011. 23 per cent of the companies never replied. Among those that replied within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.

Both are old and both are American. The first and second checks above measure the same two things in your own firm, and those are the numbers to act on.

Where ads sit in our own system

We install the Aristotle System, seven AI employees for trade businesses, and the install order follows the argument of this article. The website comes first and paid ads come seventh. Between them sit reactivation, reviews, follow-up, the receptionist and the sales coach.

The ads employee is the only one of the seven that brings new customers in from outside. It goes live once the first six are running and the diary has room. It runs the ads and replies to every enquiry they bring within minutes, at any hour. You set the ad budget, and we bill it at cost with no markup.

The paid ads employee has its own page, and how it works goes through all seven in order. The calculator does the sum on your own numbers. The monthly retainers are on the pricing page.

Before any of that, run the second check. Send your own website an enquiry this Saturday evening and see when the reply comes.