The services you already do on the same visit cost a third of the search everyone fights over.
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, the same van, and very often the same house on the same afternoon.
Every carpet cleaner in the city bids on carpet cleaning near me at $9.38 and on the bond terms above it. Almost nobody bids on the services they already carry the equipment for. Tile and grout cleaning is $2.94 on 2,400 searches. Upholstery is $9.58 on 1,000. Rug cleaning is $5.90 on 2,400. Same truck, same trip, a fraction of the competition.
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 the bond market. End of lease at $16.06 and bond cleaning at $11.84 are deadline driven, high intent and fought over by every cleaner and every bond cleaning franchise in Brisbane. Good work, and the most contested corner of the trade.
The middle of the chart is the opportunity. Tile and grout, rug cleaning and upholstery are jobs you already do, with equipment you already own, and hardly anybody advertises them separately. The click costs a third of the generic search and the customer has told you exactly what they want.
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 instead of a Services list, before and after galleries by stain type, a Google Business Profile built properly, and a review process after every job. Slow to arrive, and the only thing that eventually takes the expensive bond clicks off your bill.
THE FAST LEVER
Campaigns split by service so tile and grout never competes with bond work for the same budget. Negative keywords so you stop paying for carpet cleaner hire, steam mops, machines for sale, carpet cleaning courses and DIY guides. Call tracking, because this trade is booked by phone and usually for a date this week.
THE ONE MOST CLEANERS SKIP
The cheapest reach available, and the right channel for a trade sold on before and after photographs. A stain nobody thought could come out is the most persuasive thing this industry has, and it does not belong on a search results page.
We start from what a job is worth, not what a click costs. A cleaner chasing bond work and one chasing regular domestic maintenance cannot afford the same cost per click. Google Ads does the fast work, SEO eventually takes the expensive clicks off your bill, and Meta Ads is where the before and after photos earn their keep. 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 carpet cleaner, and what each one is actually for.
Built around “tile and grout cleaning”
2,400 searches a month at $2.94 a click, against $9.38 for the generic carpet search. You already own the machine and you are already going to the house. The page needs before and after photographs and a price by square metre, because this is a job people put off for years and book the moment somebody makes it easy.
Built around “end of lease cleaning”
The most expensive click in the trade at $16.06 and the fastest converting, because the customer has a date on a lease and a bond they want back. Worth running if you can take a job this week and if you will state plainly whether you guarantee the inspection. Not worth running if you cannot.
Built around the searches we exclude
Carpet cleaner hire, steam mops, machines for sale, cleaning solutions, carpet cleaning courses, and the enormous number of people working out how to get a stain out themselves. Steam cleaning sits at $0.60 a click on 33,100 searches for exactly that reason. On broad match you buy 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, equipment you already own, and frequently the same house you were going to anyway. Tile and grout is the clearest example in this trade of a service that is cheap to advertise purely because the industry has never thought to advertise it separately.
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.
Sixty cents a click and 33,100 searches a month, which is more traffic than every other row on that chart combined. Steam cleaning is what people type when they are pricing a hire machine or looking up how to do it themselves. It is the cheapest click in the trade and very close to the emptiest.
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 carpet cleaner.
Every service shares a budget, so the $16.06 bond clicks and the $2.94 tile clicks compete for the same dollar. Google spends where it can spend fastest, which in practice means the bond terms take everything and the cheap services never get funded.
Tile and grout at $2.94, rug cleaning at $5.90, upholstery at $9.58. Each with its own budget and its own page, so the services nobody else advertises get bought at the price nobody else is bidding.
Most accounts in this trade treat every booking as a win and never look at what happened next. A bond clean is a one off by definition. A regular domestic customer is worth several times more over a few years, and nothing in the reporting distinguishes them.
Cost per click, then cost per lead, then cost per booked job by service, and then what share of those customers came back. That last figure is what tells you whether to keep buying bond clicks at $16.06 or move the money to the services that create regulars.
A cleaner is already in the house with the equipment in the van. Most accounts spend heavily to get there and then sell one service, which makes the click cost far harder to justify than it needs to be.
We advertise the add on services in their own right and price them so they are obvious to add on the day. The cost of getting to the house does not change. What you earn once you are there does.
We start with what a job is worth and work backwards to what a click can cost.
A bond clean and a regular domestic customer cannot carry the same cost per click, because one of them is a single visit and the other comes back twice a year. We work out your job value and your repeat rate by service first, because together they set what a click can be worth.
Bond, domestic, tile and grout, upholstery and commercial each get their own campaign, budget and landing page, so the expensive bond terms never quietly absorb the budget meant for the cheap services.
Search terms reviewed weekly and negatives added, because this trade attracts an enormous volume of machine hire and DIY searches. Then monthly reporting on cost per booked job by service, and on how many of those customers came back.
Worth saying before you enquire, because it saves everyone three months.
If you cannot take a job inside a week, stay out of the bond terms. That customer has a date on a lease and will ring until somebody says yes. And if you are a one van operation already booked out, this buys you enquiries you will turn down at $16.06 each.
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.
That is exactly why it works. You already own the machine and you are already going to the house, but almost nobody in this trade bids on it, so the click costs $2.94 against $9.38 for the generic carpet search. The customer has told you precisely what they want, and it is a job people put off for years until somebody makes it easy to book.
Barely. It has 33,100 searches a month, more than every other row on that chart combined, which is exactly why it is so tempting. Most of those people are pricing a hire machine or looking up how to do it themselves. There is real work in there and you will pay for a lot of browsers to find it.
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.
If you can take a job this week, yes. It is the fastest converting search in the trade because the customer has a date and a bond at stake. It is also the most contested and the most expensive at $16.06, and it produces one off customers by definition. Run it, and do not let it be the whole account.
Enough that the data means something. This trade has the cheapest usable clicks on the hub outside the cheap traps, so a modest budget goes further here than almost anywhere. We would rather fund three services properly than put everything on the bond terms.
It varies by service and, more importantly, by whether the customer comes back. A bond clean and a regular domestic customer are not comparable. We report cost per booked job by service and then how many of those customers rebooked, because the second number is what makes the first one affordable.
Three places, in this order. Machine hire and DIY searches, which this trade attracts more of than almost any on the hub. Every service sharing one budget so the bond terms absorb it all. And getting to the house and selling one service when the van is already full of equipment.
Split tile and grout, upholstery and rug cleaning out with their own budgets and pages. In nearly every account we audit they are either buried in one campaign or not advertised at all, which means the cheapest clicks in the trade are going unbought.
Yes, and this is the trade where it is easiest to do well. Every service has an obvious before and after photograph and a price by the square metre or by the room. A bond page needs your availability and whether you guarantee the inspection. A tile page needs a photo of the grout.
We look at what it is wasting, how much of the budget the bond terms are absorbing, whether the add on services are advertised at all, 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.
