The most expensive click on this hub is an office fitout. The word your clients actually type costs a fifth of it.
What your clicks actually cost, which searches are wasting money, and what your cost per won project looks like. Fifteen minutes, and you keep it either way.
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A fifth of the price, and slightly more searches behind it.
Office fitout at $40.74 is the most expensive search on this entire hub, dearer than any emergency callout term we advertise, and it gets 880 searches a month. Shopfitters gets 1,000 and costs $7.85. Commercial construction companies is $12.65 and construction management $5.37. It is frequently the same buyer. The price depends almost entirely on which word they happened to type.
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 fitout is high value work with a very small number of searches and a very large number of firms chasing them. Every contractor in the city bids on office fitout, and a good share of those clicks are designers, competitors and people assembling a tender list.
The cheaper end is not a smaller client. Shopfitters, civil contractors and construction management are the words used by people who already know what they need and are looking for someone to do it. Fewer firms bid on them because they are less obvious, not because they are worth less.
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 project type and a case study per sector instead of a Projects gallery, a Google Business Profile built properly, and a review process after handover. Slow to arrive, and the only thing that eventually takes the $40 clicks off your bill.
THE FAST LEVER
Campaigns split by project type, not one campaign called Construction, so shop fitouts never compete with civil work for the same budget. Negative keywords so you stop paying for construction jobs, courses, management degrees and homeowners looking for a residential builder. Form and call tracking, because commercial enquiries arrive both ways.
THE ONE MOST CONTRACTORS SKIP
The cheapest reach available, and the right channel for a market where the decision takes months. A retail group planning a rollout is not searching yet, but the firms they shortlist later are the ones they have already heard of.
We start from what a project is worth, not what a click costs. A firm chasing office fitouts and one chasing civil work 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 keeps you familiar to the people who will run the tender. 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 commercial contractor, and what each one is actually for.
Built around “shopfitters”
1,000 searches a month at $7.85 a click, against 880 for office fitout at more than five times the price. Retail and hospitality operators say shopfitters. Property and design firms say fitout. The project is the same, and one of those words costs a fifth of the other.
Built around “civil contractors”
$8.23 a click on 1,000 searches, and a buyer running a procurement process rather than a panic. Slow to convert, large when it lands, and worth a page that names the sectors you work in, your largest completed project, and your insurance and prequalification position.
Built around the searches we exclude
Construction jobs, construction courses, construction management degrees, apprenticeships, tender portals, and the large number of homeowners looking for a residential builder. On broad match you pay $40 a click 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.
Eight dollars for the click and the same project at the end of it. Shopfitters is what a retail operator types, and almost nobody in this market bids on it because the industry calls the work something else. It is the cheapest way to reach a buyer who already has a site and a budget.
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.
Forty dollars and change for the click, and a decent chance the person clicking is a designer, a competitor, or somebody assembling a list of six firms to invite. Office fitout is worth bidding on. It is not worth being the whole account.
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 commercial contractor.
Office fitout and fitout are the obvious buys so they take the whole budget, at $40.74 and $25.33 a click, against fewer than 2,000 searches a month between them. The account spends heavily competing for a very small pool of clicks.
Shopfitters is $7.85 a click and construction management $5.37. Cheaper clicks, more searches, and buyers who have already decided they need someone. Most accounts we audit have never bid on either.
An enquiry count treats a tender invitation and a genuine direct approach as the same event. On a sales cycle this long, that is the difference between a pipeline and a spreadsheet.
Cost per click, then cost per enquiry, then cost per won project by type, tracked across a cycle that can run six months or longer. Almost nobody in this market connects the two ends.
Commercial work does not close in the month it was clicked. An account judged on a thirty day window looks like a failure for the first two quarters and gets switched off right before the pipeline lands.
Enquiries tagged by source and followed through your CRM to the point a contract is signed, so a click in March gets credited to a project won in September rather than written off.
We start with what a project is worth and work backwards to what a click can cost.
A shop refit and a full floor fitout cannot carry the same cost per click, and neither can a firm that wins one tender in four against one that wins one in twelve. We work out your project value and your strike rate first, because together they decide what a click can be worth.
Fitout, shopfitting, civil and construction management each get their own campaign, budget and landing page, so a small pool of expensive fitout clicks never eats the budget that should be buying the cheaper ones.
Search terms reviewed weekly and negatives added, because at $40 a click the waste compounds faster here than anywhere else on this hub. Then monthly reporting on cost per enquiry and cost per won project by type.
Worth saying before you enquire, because it saves everyone three months.
If your work comes entirely through repeat clients and referrals and the pipeline is full, this will buy you tender invitations you do not want. And if nobody can follow up an enquiry within a day, do not start at these prices, because a buyer assembling a shortlist moves on quickly.
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.
It can be, and the click price is the wrong place to judge it. On a project worth six figures, $40.74 is nothing if you win a reasonable share of what you quote. The problem is that most accounts spend the entire budget on that one search, against fewer than 900 searches a month, when cheaper words reach the same buyer.
By bidding on what your clients call the work rather than what the industry calls it. Shopfitters is $7.85 a click with 1,000 searches a month against office fitout at $40.74 with 880. Construction management is $5.37. Those are real buyers using a different word, and almost nobody in this market bids on them.
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 $40 a click is more than most contractors expect. A budget that buys a handful of clicks a week will not tell you anything for a very long time. We would rather run shopfitting properly than fitout thinly, and we will say so on the call.
Longer than any other industry on this hub. Commercial work does not close in the month it was clicked, so the first two quarters look worse than they are. That is exactly why the tracking has to survive the cycle, and why we will not judge the account on a thirty day window.
It varies too much by project type for a single honest number, and cost per enquiry is the wrong target anyway. A tender invitation and a direct approach are not the same thing. We report cost per won project by type, which takes longer to produce and is the only figure that matters.
Three places, in this order. The whole budget sitting on office fitout, which is the most expensive search on this hub against a very small pool of clicks. Searches you should never have bought, mostly jobs, courses, degrees and residential enquiries. And enquiries that nobody follows up inside a day.
The keyword list. In nearly every account we audit the firm is bidding on what it calls itself rather than what its clients type. Adding shopfitters, civil contractors and construction management usually drops the blended click cost immediately without losing a single real buyer.
At $40 a click, absolutely. Sending that click to a Projects gallery is the most common way commercial accounts waste money. A fitout buyer wants to see comparable projects, your programme and how you handle a live site. A civil buyer wants prequalification, insurance and your largest completed project.
We look at what it is wasting, how much of the budget sits on the two most expensive searches, whether you bid on the words your clients actually use, 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.
