The cheapest click in this trade is the one job you cannot price without driving there first.
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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Nearly double the price, and the only job on that list you can quote without leaving the house.
This is the one trade on the hub where we would tell you to pay more per click on purpose. Handyman near me is $5.04 with 9,900 searches a month, and every one of those callers has a job you cannot price until you have seen it. Gutter cleaning is $9.01 with 8,100 searches, and you can quote it off a roof size and a photo. Named jobs cost more and convert without a visit.
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 top of this chart is where the named jobs sit. Gutter cleaning, door repair and TV wall mounting all cost more per click than the generic search, and all of them have a scope the customer can describe on the phone in one sentence.
The bottom is where the trouble is. Pressure washing at $0.80 has 33,100 searches a month, more than every other row on this chart combined, and it is almost entirely people pricing a machine to buy or hire. The cheapest click in the trade is also the emptiest.
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 named job instead of a Services list, a Google Business Profile built properly, and a review process after every visit. Slow to arrive, and the only thing that eventually takes the expensive named job clicks off your bill.
THE FAST LEVER
Campaigns split by named job rather than one campaign called Handyman, so gutter rounds never compete with odd jobs for the same budget. Negative keywords so you stop paying for handyman jobs, handyman rates, tool hire, and the very large number of people looking to buy equipment. Call tracking, because this trade is booked entirely by phone.
THE ONE MOST HANDYMEN SKIP
The cheapest reach available, and the right channel for a trade that lives on being remembered. Nobody searches for a handyman until something breaks, but they will call the one whose van they have seen on the street twice.
We start from what a job is worth, not what a click costs. A handyman doing gutter rounds and one doing full day jobs 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 locally. 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 handyman, and what each one is actually for.
Built around “gutter cleaning”
8,100 searches a month at $9.01 a click. It costs nearly double the generic search and it is worth it, because the scope is obvious, the price comes off a roof size, and the same house needs doing again next year. No quoting visit, no travel you do not get paid for.
Built around “door repair”
$7.32 a click, and the same logic as gutters. A sticking door, a torn fly screen or a television that needs mounting are jobs a customer can describe completely in one sentence, which means you can price them, book them and do them without a separate trip to look.
Built around the searches we exclude
Handyman jobs, handyman rates, handyman courses, tool hire, equipment for sale, and the enormous volume of people pricing a pressure washer rather than hiring anyone to use one. 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.
Nine dollars for the click, a job you quote in ninety seconds on the phone, and a house that needs it again next year. Gutter cleaning costs nearly double the generic search and produces work with no unpaid travel attached to it, which is why we would build it first.
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.
Five dollars for the click and a caller who says they have a few things that need doing. You cannot price that. You drive out, you look, you quote, and a decent share of the time you do not get it. The click was cheap. The hour in the car was not.
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 handyman.
Everything goes into the generic search because it is the obvious buy and it looks cheap at $5.04. Every enquiry is a different job at a different value with a different travel cost, and the account has no way of telling which searches produced the good ones.
Gutter cleaning at $9.01, door repair at $7.32, TV wall mounting at $6.70. Dearer clicks, and every one of them arrives with a scope already attached. You can price it on the phone, and you know exactly which campaign paid for it.
A call count is easy to grow and tells you almost nothing here. A gutter round and a request to look at a few things are the same event on that report, and one of them costs you an hour in the car before you have earned anything.
Cost per click, then cost per lead, then cost per booked job by job type, with the quoting visits counted as the cost they are. That last number is what tells you the dearer click was the cheaper job.
Pressure washing has 33,100 searches a month at $0.80 a click. It is the most tempting line in the account and it produces almost nothing, because the people typing it are pricing a machine, not looking for somebody to bring one.
We look at what the searcher wants before we look at what the click costs. A trade with this much cheap traffic will happily spend your whole budget on people who were never going to hire anyone.
We start with what a job is worth and work backwards to what a click can cost.
A gutter round and a half day of odd jobs cannot carry the same cost per click, and neither can a job you price on the phone against one you drive out to look at. We count the quoting visit as a real cost, because it is, and most accounts never do.
Gutters, doors, screens, mounting and general work each get their own campaign, budget and landing page, so the jobs you can price by phone are not fighting the ones you cannot for the same dollar.
Search terms reviewed weekly and negatives added, because this trade attracts an enormous volume of equipment and job seeker searches. Then monthly reporting on cost per booked job by job type, not clicks and impressions.
Worth saying before you enquire, because it saves everyone three months.
If you are already booked out by word of mouth, this buys you a longer waiting list rather than more money. And if you cannot answer the phone while you are on the tools, expect to pay for clicks that go nowhere, because this is a trade where people ring three numbers and take the first one that picks up.
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 the click price is not the cost of the job. Handyman near me is $5.04 and gutter cleaning is $9.01, but the gutter job gets quoted on the phone in ninety seconds and the generic enquiry gets an hour in the car before you know what it is worth. Count the unpaid travel and the dearer click is the cheaper job.
Not at scale. It has 33,100 searches a month, more than every other row on that chart combined, and it costs $0.80 a click, which is exactly why it is so tempting. Most of those people are pricing a machine to buy or hire. There is real work in there, but you will pay for a lot of shoppers 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.
Yes, modestly. It has 9,900 searches a month and some of them are exactly the work you want. The mistake is making it the entire account, because you cannot tell a good enquiry from a bad one until you have driven there. Put the budget on the named jobs and keep a presence on the generic.
Enough that the data means something, which in this trade is less than most. Clicks run under ten dollars, so a modest budget still buys enough to learn from. We would rather run two named jobs properly than spread thinly across everything you are capable of doing.
Cost per lead is close to meaningless here because your leads are not comparable. We report cost per booked job by job type, and we count the quoting visit as a cost. That is what shows the gutter campaign outperforming the generic one even though its clicks are dearer.
Three places, in this order. Equipment and job seeker searches, which this trade attracts more of than almost any on the hub. Driving out to quote jobs that were never going to be worth it. And a service radius wider than you would really travel for a two hour job.
Split gutter cleaning out into its own campaign with its own page. In most handyman accounts everything sits in one campaign called Handyman, which means the job you can price by phone is being funded at the same rate as the one that costs you an hour in the car.
For the named jobs, yes. A gutter page with a price range by house size will book work off the page without a call. A generic Services page cannot do that, because there is no job on it to price. That is the whole advantage of the named searches and most handymen give it away.
We look at what it is wasting, how much is going to equipment searches, whether the named jobs are split out at all, and what your cost per booked job looks like once the quoting visits are counted. You get it in writing and you keep it whether or not you hire us.
