How to qualify tradie leads from ads (stop wasting time on price-shoppers)

Every tradie who's ever run ads has had this experience: the leads pour in, you spend two hours on the phone, you quote three jobs, you book none. The agency reports 'great month, 18 enquiries!' but your week was wasted. The problem isn't the campaign. It's that nobody set the filter.

Why qualification matters more than volume

A booked job is worth $400–$60,000 depending on your trade. A wasted hour on the phone is worth $80–$200 in your time. If half your leads are wrong-fit, the campaign that 'looks profitable' on paper is actually losing you opportunity cost, you could have been on the tools.

Properly qualified leads come in at 1.5–2x the cost of unqualified ones, but close at 3–5x the rate. The maths almost always favours qualification.

Three places you can filter

01. The ad copy. 02. The landing page (or lead form). 03. The first 30 seconds of the phone call.

01. Filter in the ad copy

Bad ad copy: 'Affordable plumber, free quote, available 24/7.' That ad will pull every price-shopper in WA.

Good ad copy: 'Licensed Perth plumber. $99 call-out, fixed-price quotes after diagnosis. Mon–Fri only.' That filters out the people who wanted free, who wanted weekend work, who wanted to negotiate. The clicks you get are warmer.

02. Filter on the landing page or lead form

Add qualifier fields. The classics:

• Suburb (drop-down), exclude or flag anything outside your service area
• Approx budget range, '<$500 / $500–$2k / $2k–$10k / $10k+' for builders/renovators is a single most-impactful field
• Timing, 'urgent / next 2 weeks / planning ahead' separates jobs from research
• How they heard about you, useful for tracking which channel is sending the warm leads

Yes, fewer people complete the form. That's the point. The ones who do are 3–5x warmer. Want a hand setting this up properly? See landing pages.

03. Filter in the first 30 seconds of the call

Have a 4-question script you run on every inbound call before quoting:

1. 01What's the address? (Confirms service area in 5 seconds)
2. 02What's the issue? (You can usually tell within 30 seconds whether this is your kind of job)
3. 03When are you looking to get it sorted? (Filters research from urgency)
4. 04Have you had quotes from anyone else? (Filters the 'ringing for the third opinion' callers, not bad, but lower close rate, so you price differently)

Train whoever answers the phone to run this every time, even if it feels rude. The right kind of homeowner appreciates the directness.

What 'qualified' actually means

It's worth defining for your business. For most Perth tradies, a qualified lead is: in your service area + the job is in scope + budget is realistic + timing is within 30 days. Anything else is a tyre-kicker, a researcher, or a wrong-fit job.

Tag every lead in your tracking as qualified or not. After 60 days you'll see exactly which keywords, ads and campaigns produce qualified leads vs junk. Then you double down on the qualified-source channels and kill the junk-source ones. See how I measure success for the full version.

The flip side, over-filtering

It is possible to filter too hard. If your form has 12 fields and your call script feels like an interrogation, you'll lose qualified leads who get put off by the friction. The sweet spot is enough qualification to filter the obvious junk, not so much that you scare off the warm prospects.

Test it. Run two weeks with light qualification, two weeks with strict. Compare booked-job rate, not lead count. The right number sits where booked jobs per dollar of spend is highest, usually 3–5 qualifier fields and a 30-second call script.

Specific to your trade: see how I filter on the plumber, electrician and builder playbook pages. Want a second opinion on whether your current campaigns are letting in junk? Book a call, I'll review your last 30 days of leads together and tag them.