How much should a contractor spend on Google Ads?
Paid Ads — answered straight, by an operator who builds these systems rather than an agency selling them.
Work backwards from job value, not from a percentage. If your average job profits $1,200 and you close one in four leads, you can pay up to $300 a lead and break even. Set the monthly budget at the number of jobs you actually want times your target cost per job.
The longer version
The starting budget people ask for — "is $1,000 a month enough?" — is unanswerable without cost per click in your trade and market. Emergency plumbing clicks in a major metro can run many times what a landscaping click costs in a small town. Pull the numbers for your own market before committing.
The more common failure is capacity, not budget. Spending into more leads than your crew can quote produces slow callbacks, bad reviews, and wasted spend. Scale the budget to the jobs you can actually service well, then grow it as capacity grows.
More on paid ads
Other questions
Let's build something real.
Want this done for your business instead of explained? Email bannisterderik@gmail.com or call/text 530-736-7085 — you get a straight answer from me, not a sales sequence.
Tell me what you need.
Name and a phone number is enough. You get me — not a form that disappears into an agency inbox.
A 250+ page site for your business. $500 if you check out now.
Every service you offer and every town you serve gets its own page — built on your logo, your colors, your license number. Schema, sitemap, and llms.txt so search engines and AI assistants both read you correctly. Delivered in 7 business days. You own all of it, source code included.