The biggest search in this trade costs a quarter of the others, and it is the only thing you sell with a price on it.
What your clicks actually cost, which searches are wasting money, and what your cost per signed contract looks like. Fifteen minutes, and you keep it either way.
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A quarter of the price, 22,200 searches a month, and the only thing on your website you can put a number next to.
Granny flat gets 22,200 searches a month, more than every other row on that chart combined, and it costs $2.01 a click. House extensions is $12.40, knockdown rebuild $10.67 and builder near me $7.91. We are usually the ones telling you a cheap high volume search is a trap. This is the exception, and the reason is that a granny flat is a product rather than a project.
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 expensive because extensions and knockdown rebuilds are large, considered and heavily contested. Those buyers are worth chasing. They are also twelve to eighteen months from signing anything, which is a long time to be paying $12.40 a click.
The bottom row is the one worth arguing about. Granny flat traffic includes a lot of people reading up on council rules, and normally we would tell you to leave it alone. At a quarter of the price of everything else, with a fixed price product at the end of it, the maths comes out the other way.
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 product with real completed projects instead of a gallery, a Google Business Profile built properly, and a review process at handover. Slow to arrive, and the only thing that eventually takes the expensive extension clicks off your bill.
THE FAST LEVER
Campaigns split by product, not one campaign called Builder, so granny flats never compete with custom homes for the same budget. Negative keywords so you stop paying for building jobs, apprenticeships, builders licence, owner builder courses and people looking for a house to buy. Form and call tracking, because this trade converts slowly and by email as often as by phone.
THE ONE MOST BUILDERS SKIP
The cheapest reach available, and the most important channel in this trade after search. Nobody picks a builder off one ad. They pick the builder whose finished work they have been looking at for six months, which is exactly what this channel is for.
We start from what a contract is worth and how long it takes to sign, not what a click costs. A builder selling granny flats and one chasing custom homes cannot afford the same cost per click or the same patience. Google Ads does the fast work, SEO eventually takes the expensive clicks off your bill, and Meta Ads carries the twelve month decision. 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 builder, and what each one is actually for.
Built around “granny flat”
22,200 searches a month at $2.01 a click, and the one thing a builder can put a price against without a site visit. It only works if you actually sell it that way. A page with three floor plans, a price for each and what is and is not included will do more work than any amount of budget on the generic search.
Built around “house extensions”
The most expensive click in the trade at $12.40, and a buyer who already owns the land and has decided what they want to do with it. Worth running, and worth being honest about: this is a twelve to eighteen month decision, so the account has to be judged on a timeframe that matches it.
Built around the searches we exclude
Building jobs, apprenticeships, builders licence, owner builder courses, building supplies, house and land listings, and the large number of people searching for a home to buy rather than one to build. 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.
Two dollars for the click, the largest search volume in the trade, and a job you can quote off a floor plan. Granny flats convert on the page rather than in a meeting, which is why the cheapest click in this vertical is also the fastest. It is the one search where we would tell a builder to stop qualifying and start publishing prices.
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.
Eight dollars for the click and somebody at the very beginning of thinking about it. Builder near me has 6,600 searches a month and no information in it at all. You cannot tell an extension from a new home from somebody pricing a deck, which means every enquiry starts with a meeting.
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 builder.
Building has the longest sales cycle on this hub. An account that gets reviewed monthly looks like a failure for the first two quarters, and gets switched off in month four, right before the enquiries from month one start signing.
We tag enquiries by source and follow them through your CRM to contract, so a click in March gets credited to a build that started in December. It takes longer to produce a number and it is the only honest way to run this vertical.
Granny flats, extensions, knockdown rebuilds and custom homes all share a budget, so the $2.01 clicks and the $12.40 clicks compete for the same dollar. Whichever one Google finds easiest to spend on wins, which is rarely the one you wanted.
Each product gets its own budget, its own page and its own target, because they convert on completely different timeframes. The granny flat campaign can be judged in weeks. The custom home campaign cannot be judged until next year.
Almost every builder website answers a price question with a contact form. For a custom home that is fair enough. For a granny flat it is the reason a $2.01 click does nothing, because the person wanted a number and you asked for their phone number instead.
Fixed price products get published prices and inclusions. Custom work gets a range and a clear explanation of what moves it. The enquiries drop in number and rise in quality, which is what you want when a meeting costs you half a day.
We start with what a contract is worth, and how long it takes to sign, then work backwards to what a click can cost.
A granny flat and a custom home cannot carry the same cost per click, and neither can a builder who converts one enquiry in five against one who converts one in twenty. We work out your contract value and your conversion rate by product first, because together they set what a click can be worth.
Granny flats, extensions, knockdown rebuilds and custom homes each get their own campaign, budget, landing page and timeframe, so the fast cheap product is never funding the slow expensive one or the other way around.
Search terms reviewed weekly and negatives added, because building attracts a large volume of job seekers, students and people looking for a house to buy. Then monthly reporting on cost per qualified enquiry by product, and cost per signed contract as the cycle allows.
Worth saying before you enquire, because it saves everyone three months.
If you cannot commit to at least six months, do not start. The cycle in this trade is longer than the patience most accounts are given, and stopping at month four means paying for every click and collecting none of the contracts. And if you will not put a price on anything, the cheapest campaign on this page is closed to you.
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 a granny flat is a product and most cheap searches are not. Bathroom tiles and pressure washing are cheap because the people typing them are shopping for materials. Granny flat is cheap because the intent is mixed, but there is a real fixed price product at the end of it. At a quarter of the price of every other search in the trade, you can afford to sort through the research traffic.
Then that campaign is not for you, and we will say so on the call rather than after you have paid for it. The whole argument depends on being able to publish floor plans, prices and inclusions. If a granny flat enquiry goes into the same custom quoting process as everything else, the cheap click stops being an advantage.
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.
Longer than any trade on this hub except commercial contracting. Extensions and custom homes run twelve to eighteen months from first search to contract. Granny flats move in weeks. That is the main reason we split them, so you have something to judge in the short term while the slow work matures.
Modestly. It has 6,600 searches a month, and no information in it. You cannot tell an extension from a new home from somebody pricing a deck, so every enquiry starts with a meeting. Keep a presence there and put the budget on the searches that arrive with a brief.
Enough that the data means something, and for long enough to see the cycle through. A large budget for three months is worse than a modest one for twelve in this trade, because the contracts land after most accounts have already been switched off.
It varies enormously by product, which is why we will not quote one. A granny flat enquiry and a custom home enquiry are not the same thing and do not convert at the same rate or on the same timeline. We report cost per qualified enquiry by product, and cost per signed contract once the cycle allows.
Three places, in this order. Every product sharing one budget, so Google spends where it finds it easiest rather than where you wanted. Job seekers, students and people looking for a house to buy. And accounts switched off at month four, which wastes everything spent up to that point.
Split the products into separate campaigns. In nearly every builder account we audit they share one budget, which means the enquiry you can win in a fortnight is competing with the one you win next year. After that, get a price onto the granny flat page.
We look at what it is wasting, whether the products share a budget, how long the account has been judged on, and whether anything connects a click to a signed contract. You get it in writing and you keep it whether or not you hire us.
