Who it is for
PPC for trades and local services: calls, service areas, and Local Services Ads
For a plumber, an electrician, a locksmith or a roofer the conversion is a phone call, and the search that matters most is made on a phone, often outside office hours, from within a few miles. We manage Google Ads for trades from the Starter tier at £249 a month: location set to presence in the area you actually drive to, call assets and call reporting so a call over a minute counts and a misdial does not, an ad schedule that follows whoever answers the phone, and the Search Terms read every week for the jobs you do not do.
Calls are the conversion
An account that counts form fills is optimising for the wrong customer
Most trade searches end in a call, so the account has to see calls. A call asset on every ad puts a tap-to-call button next to the headline on a phone; call-only ads, for the emergency searches, have no landing page at all and go straight to the phone. On the landing page a forwarding number replaces yours for visitors from ads, and the call is reported with its duration and the search that produced it. Calls under a minute are not counted as conversions, because a wrong number teaches Smart Bidding to buy more wrong numbers.
The form is still there, for the planned jobs: a rewire, a new boiler, a roof. Those get a short form and a promise of a call back within a working hour, and the submission counts once. At month end we ask which leads became jobs and what they were worth.
Service area targeting
The setting that decides whether you pay for searches from Spain
| Option | What it does | When we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Presence, not presence or interest | Shows ads only to people physically in the target area. The default includes anyone anywhere who searched about the area | Always. It is the first setting checked on every trade account and it is wrong on most of them |
| Radius from your base | A circle of chosen miles around a postcode | A sole trader who charges by distance; simple and honest about how far the van goes |
| Postcode districts | A list such as LL11, LL12, LL13, CH1 to CH4 | A team covering a patch with a hole in it, a river or a motorway that changes the real travel time |
| Location exclusions | Towns inside the radius you will not go to, or a city centre where parking makes the job unprofitable | Whenever the Search Terms report shows a place name you keep declining |
Local Services Ads next to Search
Pay per lead above the results, pay per click below them
Local Services Ads exist in the UK for plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, cleaners and other trades. They sit above the paid search results with a Google Guaranteed badge once the business has passed a background, licence and insurance check, you pay per lead rather than per click, and a lead that turns out to be a job seeker can be disputed and credited. For the broad “near me” searches they are often the cheapest lead on the page.
They do not show for everything. The specific searches, a make of boiler, a type of certificate, a job in a named town, still go to Search ads, and the LSA profile has no Search Terms report. So the two run together, with the report showing both as separate lines.
Emergencies and the schedule
The ad runs when the phone is answered
An emergency plumber who answers at 11pm should be bidding at 11pm, with a bid adjustment up, because the competition is thinner and the customer is not comparing quotes. A kitchen fitter who answers 8 to 6 should not be paying for clicks at midnight that go to voicemail. The ad schedule is set from who answers the phone and when, and the report shows calls by hour so the schedule is corrected from data rather than habit.
The Search Terms read matters more for trades than for most sectors, because the same words mean different jobs: “electrician” brings apprenticeships and salary searches; “roof” brings car roof boxes; “boiler” brings manuals and error codes. Our free negative keyword generator seeds the list for each trade.
Related
Where this connects
Questions from trades
Should I run Local Services Ads or Google Ads?
Both, where LSAs exist for your trade in the UK. Local Services Ads charge per lead rather than per click, carry the Google Guaranteed badge after a background and insurance check, and sit above the paid search results for searches like "plumber near me". Search ads catch the specific jobs LSAs do not show for. We manage the LSA profile and dispute the leads that are not leads as part of the plan.
How do you count a phone call as a conversion?
Through a Google forwarding number in the call assets and on the landing page for visitors from ads, with a minimum duration of about a minute so misdials and wrong numbers are not counted. The report shows calls, their length and the search that produced them, and we ask you monthly which became jobs.
One trade per area: does that include neighbouring towns?
One business per sector and area on the monthly plans, confirmed personally in the reply. The area is the one you target, so an electrician in Wrexham and one in Chester can both be clients; two in Wrexham cannot.
Tell us your trade, your patch and the hours you answer. The reply has the CPC, the LSA position and the fee.
If you already run ads, add the customer ID and the reply also says how much of last month went to searches outside your area or outside your trade.