A click on "bathroom renovation london" costs £12.05 on average and bids at the top of the page reach £25.06. On "loft conversion london" it is £14.27. With a 5% conversion rate, which is what a well-built landing page achieves, a quote request costs between £240 and £285 before a site visit has even been booked. Anyone who opens an account without doing this sum closes it after three weeks.
Google Ads for builders works when the account buys local searches with quote intent (service + town), sends them to a page with a form that filters the client's budget, and optimises for booked site visits instead of clicks. The sector is crowded because lead platforms and directories (Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Bark, Which? Trusted Traders) sit on the same searches: on "builders london" they fill the carousel at the top of the page and half of the organic results (DataForSEO, Google UK, London, September 2026). You can compete with them, on two conditions: enough budget and real tracking.
A note on this article's keyword: "google ads for builders" has no measurable volume in Keyword Planner. People looking for this use "marketing for builders" (40 searches a month) or "construction marketing" (320). The numbers below come from homeowners' searches, not from the searches of building firms.
How much a click costs in the building trade
| Keyword | Monthly volume | Average CPC | Top-of-page bid | Cost per enquiry at 5% conversion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| builders | 18,100 | £3.58 | £1.58-4.68 | £72 |
| builders near me | 18,100 | £2.46 | £1.16-4.67 | £49 |
| house renovation | 1,900 | £3.34 | £1.17-4.05 | £67 |
| building company london | 390 | £3.82 | £1.68-7.61 | £76 |
| builders london | 720 | £5.47 | £2.19-9.08 | £109 |
| home renovation quote | 110 | £5.72 | £3.93-14.73 | £114 |
| house extension london | 720 | £8.37 | £3.47-16.22 | £167 |
| bathroom renovation london | 880 | £12.05 | £3.07-25.06 | £241 |
| bathroom fitters london | 590 | £12.79 | £3.05-21.00 | £256 |
| loft conversion london | 1,600 | £14.27 | £3.59-15.44 | £285 |
The first rows are misleading. "builders" has 18,100 searches and costs £3.58 because it includes students, suppliers, people looking for building jobs and people asking "Who are the top 10 house builders in the UK?" or "What are the top 10 construction companies in London?" (questions Google shows on the "builders london" SERP). It is one of the cheapest keywords and the one that produces the fewest site visits.
The rows with a town and a specific job cost two to four times as much and are the only ones worth the budget. 5% is the conversion rate of a sound landing page. With a generic homepage, in the local projects we run, it drops below 2%; with a service + town page, phone number at the top and a short form it reaches around 9%. These are orders of magnitude, but on a £12.05 CPC the difference is between £603 and £134 per enquiry.
The first-hand reference we have is in the neighbouring installation sector: at Valore Solare, solar PV for homes and businesses in Italy, the average cost per enquiry over 11 months was €70.78. In the first month it was €212.
Which campaign to open first
Search, with service + town keywords. Not Performance Max, not Display, not the "local" campaigns suggested in the guided setup.
The reason is that Performance Max optimises for the conversions you feed it, and a new account has no real ones. Sunscape counted 1,487 "conversions" in 2024 at €0.61 each: they were technical events on the site. Valore Solare had 15,267 in one month against 5,467 clicks. A Performance Max campaign fed those numbers spends everything generating more technical events. In 2026, with the tracking rebuilt, Sunscape counts 144 real enquiries.
Performance Max makes sense later, when the account has at least 30 real conversions a month and a well-kept Google listing. For Contesini Consulenze, two energy advice offices in the province of Mantua, local Search plus Performance Max produced 299 leads in 7 months at €7.20 each, with 68% becoming opportunities. It is a sector with much lower CPCs than building, but the path is the same: Search first, then the rest.
Recommended reading: when Google Ads makes sense.
How to structure a building firm's account
One campaign per service, one ad group per search variant, one landing page per group. For a renovation firm in London the typical structure is this.
- "Full renovation" campaign: groups for "house renovation london" (480 searches, CPC £1.91) and "renovation company london" (170, CPC £3.74).
- "Bathroom" campaign: groups for "bathroom renovation london" (880 searches, CPC £12.05) and "bathroom fitters london" (590, CPC £12.79). The client usually has a budget in mind already, as the questions on that SERP show ("Is 10k enough for a bathroom remodel?", "Can I get a new bathroom for 5k?").
- "Builder" campaign: "builders london" (720, CPC £5.47) and "building company london" (390, CPC £3.82), for people looking for the firm before the service.
- Separate campaigns for extensions ("house extension london", 720, CPC £8.37), loft conversions, windows, roofing or insulation, if you do them. Each with its own page.
Location targeting is the setting we most often find wrong. It should be set to "Presence: people in or regularly in" the area, with a radius of 15-25 miles from the yard or a list of the boroughs and towns where you actually do site visits. The default option includes people "interested in" London, and brings clicks from all over the country.
Keywords, match types and negatives
Phrase match for keywords with a town, exact match for the three or four that convert best after the first month. Broad match only with smart bidding switched on and at least 30 real conversions a month, because without that signal Google expands it towards "building jobs london".
You can read the negatives on the SERP before opening the account. From the related searches and the People Also Ask boxes on "builders london" and "bathroom renovation london" come these: jobs, vacancies, apprenticeship, top 10, biggest, house builders, trends, course, diy, cheap, reddit, reviews (someone searching "builders london reviews" is comparing, not asking for a quote).
A separate case is cost and planning searches: "house extension cost" (1,900 searches a month, CPC £3.14) and "do i need planning permission for an extension" (590, CPC £1.51). They are informational searches with a low conversion rate, but they are also the moment the homeowner decides whether to do the work this year or next. We keep them out of the main campaign and, if the budget allows, put them in a separate campaign with a low manual bid and a page that explains costs and when permission is needed. The same goes for grants and VAT reliefs on energy-saving work: terms have changed several times in recent years, so check the current rules on gov.uk before putting a figure in an ad, because an ad with a wrong figure can be disapproved as misleading, and in any case attracts people who then don't find what they were promised.
Read the search terms report every week in the first month. That is where you see whether 30% of the budget is going on searches you should exclude, which in the building accounts we inherit is almost always the case.
The seasonality the budget has to follow
Renovation searches follow the months when people plan. In the UK data, "builders london" has 1,000 searches a month from January to March 2026 and 480 from June to August; "loft conversion london" peaks at 3,600 in January 2026 and falls to 720 in August. Look at the month-by-month figures in Keyword Planner for your own town before setting a flat budget, which runs out by 11am in peak months and buys worse clicks in quiet ones.
A limit of our data: neither of the two London SERPs we captured showed ads in the snapshot. That is almost certainly an underestimate, because local campaigns with ad scheduling run in office hours, and top-of-page bids of up to £25.06 on "bathroom renovation london" say that someone is bidding. It also shows how much of the page the platforms already hold before any ad appears.
Where to send the click
Not to the homepage. One page per campaign, with the service and the town in the title, a clickable phone number at the top, three or four photos of jobs you actually did with the square metres and the duration, your number of Google reviews (in the London local packs we captured, firms have between 4 and 112: if you have 80, say so) and the form.
The form is where lead quality is decided. In our accounts it asks for type of work, square metres, postcode, when you would like to start and a budget range as multiple choice. A long form lowers the conversion rate by one or two points and raises quality: at Contesini 68% of leads became opportunities, and that is the number the site manager looks at, not the cost per enquiry.
For homeowners, a "budget" field with options such as "under £10,000", "£10,000-30,000", "over £30,000" also works as an exit filter: someone with £5,000 for a full bathroom finds out from the form, not at the site visit. "Is 10k enough for a bathroom remodel?" is one of the four questions Google shows under "bathroom renovation london", and two of the organic results on that page are firms' own cost guides quoting London price ranges: the page can answer that question too.
Recommended reading: how to build a landing page that converts.
What to count as a conversion
Three things: the form submitted (measured on the thank-you page, not on the button click), the call from the ad or from the number on the page with a minimum duration of 60 seconds, and the WhatsApp click if you really use it for quotes. Everything else stays as a secondary event, outside optimisation.
The rule for telling whether tracking is broken: if conversions exceed clicks, it is. Valore Solare had 15,267 conversions and 5,467 clicks in the same month. 1,487 conversions at €0.61, as at Sunscape, are a warning sign too: no building firm receives quote requests for less than a pound.
The next step, which almost no firm takes, is importing the site visit. Every enquiry that turns into an appointment is marked in the CRM (or a spreadsheet) and uploaded to Google Ads as an offline conversion. From then on smart bidding optimises for site visits, not forms. This is the kind of clean-up that brings the cost per enquiry down: at Valore Solare it fell 40% compared with the first quarter.
Recommended reading: how to set up Google Analytics for conversions.
How much budget you really need
Work backwards. A renovation firm typically wins one job for every 4-6 site visits, and gets one site visit for every 2-3 enquiries from the website: these are orders of magnitude from the local projects we run, not a sector statistic. So one job a month from Google Ads needs 10-15 enquiries.
With London CPCs for builders and extensions and a 5% conversion rate, an enquiry costs £109-167. Fifteen enquiries is £1,650-2,500 a month, or £55-85 a day; for bathrooms and lofts, at £241-285 per enquiry, it is £3,600-4,300. Below about £1,300 a month the account does not collect enough data to get out of the phase where every enquiry costs what Valore Solare's did in its first month (€212). That account started at €2,000 a month and reached €14,000 because the cost per enquiry was falling as the budget rose.
In a smaller city (Leicester, Norwich, Exeter) volumes are lower: the budget drops to £35-55 a day, but the keywords with the town run out quickly and you need to add the surrounding county. The margin on a £40,000 renovation covers £2,000 of Ads; the real question is whether the firm can handle ten more site visits a month.
Recommended reading: Google Ads for SMEs: the sensible minimum budget.
The mistakes we find in building firms' accounts
- Traffic goes to the homepage. With CPCs of £12, every click on a page without a form costs twice as much as one on a landing page.
- Targeting on "interest" instead of "presence". Clicks from Manchester on "bathroom renovation london".
- Broad match from day one, with no negatives: 30% of the budget goes on people looking for work or for rankings of building companies.
- Conversions that count views of the contact page. The account "converts" at 40% and not a single phone call comes in.
- Closing after three weeks because the first enquiries cost £250. The first month always costs that much; the third doesn't, if someone reads the search terms report.
- Ads promising a "free survey" or quoting a grant figure nobody checked: the grant figure can get the ad disapproved, and the free survey attracts people who want a free visit and nothing else.
- No remarketing. Someone who saw the bathroom page and didn't fill in the form is worth a second ad at a much lower cost than the first click (how to do remarketing).
Google Ads or SEO for a building firm?
On "bathroom renovation london" seven of the ten organic results are bathroom or building firms; on "builders london" five are, and the local pack goes to firms with 4 to 18 reviews. That means that with a well-kept Google listing and one page per service the organic first page is within reach in six to twelve months, and every organic click on "bathroom renovation london" replaces a £12.05 click.
Ads covers the period when organic isn't there yet and stays on the keywords where the platforms compete hardest, where even on page one the carousel, the pack and the ads push organic results below the fold. How to build the organic side is in SEO for building firms; how to make the two channels work together in SEO and Google Ads together. The Google Ads management service we offer always starts, in this sector, from tracking.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a renovation lead cost on Google Ads?
In London, with CPCs of £5.47-14.27 and a 5% conversion rate, between £109 and £285 per enquiry depending on the job. In the neighbouring solar PV sector Valore Solare reached an average of €70.78 across 1,506 enquiries in 11 months, starting from €212. A lead platform sells a contact, often shared with other firms, for less per lead but with a much lower close rate.
What is the minimum budget for a building firm?
In London, £1,650-2,500 a month for 15 enquiries on general building and extensions, more for bathrooms and lofts; below about £1,300 the account doesn't get out of the learning phase. For a smaller city, £1,000-1,600. The maths is in the budget section and should be redone with your own town's CPCs in Keyword Planner.
Search or Performance Max?
Search for the first three to six months. Performance Max when the account has at least 30 real conversions a month and a Google listing with photos and reviews: at Contesini (energy, Mantua) the combination produced leads at €7.20, but starting from clean tracking.
Is it better to buy leads from platforms than run Ads?
In the first months it can help, if your margin can carry a contact shared with several firms. In the long run the platform competes for the same searches you would buy ("home renovation quote" at £5.72) and adds its own margin: with your own account the cost per site visit falls every month, with the platform it doesn't.
Where to start
Before putting a pound into the auction: open Keyword Planner, search "renovation + your town" and "builders + your town", note CPC and volume, divide the CPC by 0.05. That is the cost of one enquiry. Multiply it by fifteen and compare it with the margin on an average job. If the maths holds, the second thing to do is the page with the five-field form, and the third is tracking the thank-you page. The campaign comes last. If you want someone to check the maths before you start, get in touch.
