Why your tradie Google Ads aren't working (5 mistakes I see every week)

I audit a couple of tradie Google Ads accounts every week. The same five mistakes keep showing up. None are sexy and none take genius to fix, but they're the difference between burning $2,000/mo and booking jobs.

1. Broad match without negative keywords

Google's default match type is 'broad,' which means your 'plumber Perth' ad shows for 'plumbing apprenticeship', 'plumbing supplies', 'plumber salary' and a hundred other queries that have nothing to do with booking a job. Without a thick negative-keyword list, you'll spend 30–50% of your budget on clicks that will never convert.

Fix: tighten match types to phrase or exact for your money keywords, and build a negative list that grows weekly. Aim for 200+ negatives within the first 60 days.

2. No call tracking

If you can't see which keyword, ad and time-of-day generated which phone call, you're optimising blind. Half the tradie accounts I see have form-conversion tracking but no call tracking, and for plumbers, sparkies, glaziers and HVAC the call IS the conversion.

Fix: install Google Ads call tracking with dynamic numbers on your landing page so every call gets attributed back to the keyword that drove it. Costs $20–$60/mo and pays for itself the first week.

3. Sending all clicks to the homepage

Someone clicks an emergency-plumber ad and lands on your generic 'about + services + gallery + contact' homepage. They scroll, they get confused, they hit back. Conversion rate craters at 1–3% instead of the 12–25% a proper landing page does.

Fix: build a landing page per campaign type. Emergency, hot water, blocked drains, same business, three pages with three different headlines and three different proof stacks. See landing pages.

4. No ad schedule

If you're a sparkie, your phone rings on weeknights and weekends, but your ads are running flat 24/7 at the same bid. You're paying premium prices at 2pm Tuesday when nothing converts, and getting outbid at 7pm Saturday when calls actually come in.

Fix: pull your conversion data by hour and day, then bid up 20–40% during your high-converting windows and bid down 30–60% during dead hours. Same budget, twice the booked jobs.

5. Single ad, never refreshed

Google's algorithm needs at least 3 ads per ad group to test against each other, and creative fatigue is real, the same ad that crushed it in month one will quietly bleed CTR by month four. Most tradie accounts have 1 ad per ad group, untouched since launch.

Fix: run 3–5 responsive search ads per ad group with varied headlines (urgency, price, proof, locality). Refresh creative every 60–90 days. The tradie ads that win in Perth are the ones whose copy gets boring to write, that means it's working.

If two of these apply to you…

…your account is leaking. Easiest sanity check: pull your last 30-day search-terms report from Google Ads. If more than 10% of spend is on terms you don't want, you've already paid back the cost of fixing this. These five mistakes are common across plumber, electrician and builder accounts in Perth, and the lost spend bites hardest in premium-CPC suburbs like Subiaco and Scarborough. Book a call and I'll go through your account live.