The service you already offer has thirty times the demand of the one you advertise, and costs a third as much to reach.
What your clicks actually cost, which searches are wasting money, and what your cost per booked job looks like. Fifteen minutes, and you keep it either way.
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A third of the price, thirty times the demand, and work most bricklayers already take on.
Brick repair is the most expensive search in this trade at $7.20 a click and it gets 480 searches a month. Rendering gets 14,800 at $2.76. Bricklaying sits at $4.95 and bricklayer near me at $3.93. Brisbane is full of brick homes from the sixties and seventies whose owners want them to stop looking like brick homes from the sixties and seventies, and that is a much larger market than repair work.
Average cost per click across Australia, from Google Keyword Planner. What your account pays will differ with location, competition and quality score. The gap between these rows is the argument, not the exact figures.
The expensive end is small. Brick repair costs the most and has the least volume behind it, because it is urgent, specific and every bricklayer in the city bids on it. It is worth having and it will not fill a diary on its own.
The cheaper end is where the volume is. Rendering has more searches than every other row on this chart combined, at a third of the price of repair work, and it is a job most bricklayers can already do without buying anything new.
Three numbers, and only the last one decides anything. It is the same chain our Brisbane digital marketing agency works through in every industry, only the dollar figures change.
We work it right to left. What a job is worth sets what a lead can cost, which sets what a click is worth bidding.
Cost per click is the easiest number to improve and the least useful one. Bid on cheaper searches and it drops immediately, whether or not those searches ever turn into work. That is why we will sometimes tell you to pay more per click rather than less.
Google Ads is the fastest of the three and the only one you pay for by the click. Here is what the other two do, and where the expensive clicks eventually stop.
THE SLOW ASSET
A real page per service with before and after work instead of a gallery, a Google Business Profile built properly, and a review process after every job. Slow to arrive, and the thing that eventually stops you paying for the repair clicks at all.
THE FAST LEVER
Campaigns split by service so rendering never competes with repairs for the same budget. Negative keywords so you stop paying for bricklaying courses, bricklayer wages, apprenticeships, brick prices, render prices per bag, and the very large number of people costing a DIY job. Call tracking, because this trade is quoted on site.
THE ONE MOST BRICKLAYERS SKIP
The cheapest reach available, and the obvious channel for rendering in particular. A rendered house is a before and after photograph, and that is a decision people make after seeing what it did to somebody else’s place.
We start from what a job is worth, not what a click costs. A bricklayer doing repairs and one rendering whole houses cannot afford the same cost per click. Google Ads does the fast work, SEO eventually takes the paid clicks off your bill, and Meta Ads is where before and after photos do the selling. We will tell you if one is not worth running.
Not a strategy document. These are the three campaigns we would build first for a Brisbane bricklayer, and what each one is actually for.
Built around “rendering”
14,800 searches a month at $2.76 a click. It is a whole house job with a price per square metre, it transforms the look of the place, and it is the single largest piece of demand in this trade. The page needs before and after photographs above everything else, because that is the only thing that sells it.
Built around “brick repair”
The most expensive click in the trade at $7.20, and only 480 searches a month to spend it on. Cracked brickwork, failed lintels and movement are urgent, specific and worth having. Run it, keep the budget small, and do not expect it to fill a week.
Built around the searches we exclude
Bricklaying courses, bricklayer wages, apprenticeships, brick prices, render prices by the bag, laying rates per thousand, and the large number of people costing a job they intend to do themselves. On broad match you pay full price for all of it.
Send us access to your Google Ads account and we will come back with what it is wasting, which searches are costing you the most for the least, and what we would change first. Fifteen minutes, no obligation, and you keep it either way.
Two clicks can cost the same and be worth completely different amounts. That gap, not the click price, is what decides whether an account works.
Under three dollars for the click and a job measured across an entire house. Rendering is the largest search in this trade by a wide margin, it is priced by the square metre, and most bricklayers advertising in Brisbane are not bidding on it at all because they think of themselves as bricklayers rather than as renderers.
Your Google Business Profile, suburb pages, and local listings optimised so customers in your area find you first.
Technical fixes and service-focused SEO that make your site easy for Google to understand and trust.
Build your reputation through reviews, with monthly reports tracking rankings and leads from organic search.
Seven dollars and change for the click, and 480 people a month looking. Brick repair is real work and worth taking. It is also the smallest and dearest corner of the trade, which makes it a poor foundation for an account and an excellent thing to run alongside something larger.
Site speed, crawlability, schema markup, and Core Web Vitals sorted so Google can index and trust your site.
Service pages and suburb landing pages written to rank and convert, not just fill space.
Backlink building and on-page optimisation that compounds month over month.
Three things come up in nearly every Google Ads account we audit for a bricklayer.
Bricklaying, bricklayer near me and brick repair take the whole budget because that is what the business is called. Between them they have a fraction of the volume of rendering, at a higher price, against every other bricklayer bidding on exactly the same words.
Rendering at $2.76 with 14,800 searches, brick fences at $2.37. Cheaper clicks, far more of them, and work you already do. The account stops competing on who you are and starts competing on what the customer wants done.
Trade work from builders and direct work from homeowners are completely different sales, different margins and different volumes, and most accounts run them together. The homeowner searches spend faster, so they quietly take the budget.
Direct residential work gets its own campaign and its own page with prices and photographs. Trade and builder work gets a different page about capacity, rates and reliability. They are not the same pitch and they should not share a budget.
Brickwork is quoted on site, and at these click prices the quoting trip costs far more than the advertising. Most accounts we audit have nothing in the ad or on the page about minimum job size or how far you will travel.
Rates per square metre on the page, a minimum job size in the ad, and a service radius held to what you would really drive. Fewer calls, and a much better share of them worth putting in the ute for.
We start with what a job is worth and work backwards to what a click can cost.
A cracked lintel and a fully rendered house cannot carry the same cost per click, and neither can trade work against direct residential. We work out your job value by service and by customer type first, because together they decide which searches are affordable.
Rendering, repairs, fences and new brickwork each get their own campaign, budget and landing page, so the largest and cheapest piece of demand in the trade is not sharing a dollar with the smallest and dearest.
Search terms reviewed weekly and negatives added, because this trade attracts a large volume of pricing, rates and DIY searches. Then monthly reporting on cost per booked job by service, with quoting visits counted.
Worth saying before you enquire, because it saves everyone three months.
If your work comes entirely from builders on repeat and the crew is committed for the year, this buys you domestic enquiries you will turn down. And if you do not render, the biggest campaign on this page is not available to you, which makes the rest of it a much smaller opportunity.
Fast answers, clear decisions.
Spend, leads and trends at a glance.
Your data, your accounts.
Budget goes to what converts.
4+ years average client retention.
Specialists across each platform.
Because it is where the demand is and most bricklayers already take the work. Rendering gets 14,800 searches a month at $2.76 a click against 480 at $7.20 for brick repair. If you do render, you are leaving the largest piece of demand in your trade unbought. If you genuinely do not, we will tell you this page is a smaller opportunity for you.
Yes, with a small budget. It is urgent, specific, high intent work and worth having in the mix. It is also the smallest pool in the trade at 480 searches a month, so it cannot carry an account on its own no matter how much you bid.
Agency fees usually work one of three ways: a percentage of ad spend, a flat monthly retainer, or a base fee plus a percentage above a threshold. Percentage models get expensive as you scale and quietly reward the agency for spending more of your money. Ask which model an agency uses and why before you ask for a number.
Enough that the data means something, which at under five dollars a click is achievable on a modest budget. The real constraint in this trade is crew capacity and how many quotes you can physically get to, not what the clicks cost.
Low, and cost per lead is not the number that matters. Every lead costs you a site visit, so we report cost per booked job by service with the quoting trip counted as the real cost it is. That is a less flattering figure and a far more useful one.
Three places, in this order. The whole budget on the trade name searches, which are dear and small. Pricing, rates and DIY searches, which brickwork attracts a lot of. And driving out to quote jobs nothing on the page filtered out.
No, and in most accounts they do. They are different sales with different margins, and the homeowner searches spend faster, so they quietly absorb the budget meant for builder work. Split the campaigns and give each one its own page.
Add rendering as its own campaign with its own page and before and after photographs. In nearly every bricklaying account we audit it is not being bid on at all, which means the biggest and cheapest demand in the trade is sitting there unbought.
Yes, and for rendering it is the whole thing. That job is sold on before and after photographs and a rate per square metre. Nothing else persuades somebody to change the appearance of their house. A Services list will not do it.
We look at what it is wasting, how much sits on the trade name searches, whether rendering is bid on at all, whether trade and residential share a budget, and what your cost per booked job looks like by service. You get it in writing and you keep it whether or not you hire us.
