With Google Ads for builders, a quote request in London costs between £240 and £285 before a site visit has even been booked: a click on "bathroom renovation london" costs £12.05 on average (top-of-page bids reach £25.06), one on "loft conversion london" £14.27, and at a 5% conversion rate you need twenty clicks per enquiry (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026). The sector is crowded because lead platforms like Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Bark and Which? Trusted Traders sit on the same searches.
So is it better to stay away?
No.
Google Ads for a building firm works on three conditions: you buy local searches with quote intent (service + town), you send them to a page with a form that filters the client's budget, and you optimise for booked site visits instead of clicks.
Anyone who opens an account without doing these sums closes it after three weeks.
Why trust our sums?
Because we have done them in a neighbouring sector, installations. At Valore Solare, solar PV for homes and businesses in Italy, an enquiry cost €212 in the first month. Over 11 months the account brought in 1,506 enquiries at an average of €70.78.
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.
How much a click costs in the building trade (from £2.46 to £14.27)
In the building trade a click costs from £2.46 on "builders near me" to £14.27 on "loft conversion london", and the keywords with a town and a specific job cost two to four times the generic ones.
| 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.
A bargain?
No: 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 more and are the only ones worth the budget.
And 5% is not a given. In the local projects we run:
- with a generic homepage 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.
Which campaign to open first (Search, and nothing else)
A building firm's first campaign is Search, with service + town keywords. Not Performance Max, not Display, not the "local" campaigns suggested in the guided setup.
Why not Performance Max?
Because it optimises for the conversions you feed it. And a new account has no real ones.
Look at what happens when conversions are wrong:
- 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.
So when is it time for Performance Max?
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. CPCs there are much lower than in 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)
A building firm's account is structured with one campaign per service, one ad group per search variant and one landing page per group. For a renovation firm in London the typical structure is this:
- "Full renovation": groups for "house renovation london" (480 searches, CPC £1.91) and "renovation company london" (170, CPC £3.74).
- "Bathroom": 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": "builders london" (720, CPC £5.47) and "building company london" (390, CPC £3.82), for people looking for the firm before the service.
- Extensions ("house extension london", 720, CPC £8.37), loft conversions, windows, roofing or insulation, if you do them: separate campaigns, each with its own page.
Location targeting (the most common mistake)
Set it 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.
Result: clicks from all over the country.
Keywords, match types and negatives (where 30% of the budget goes)
A building firm starts with phrase match on keywords with a town, and exact match on 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: without that signal Google expands it towards "building jobs london".
And the negatives?
You can read them 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).
The cost and planning case
"house extension cost" gets 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. 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.
The search terms report
In the first month, read it every week.
That is where you see whether 30% of the budget is going on searches you should exclude. In the building accounts we inherit, it almost always is.
How much of your budget goes on "building jobs london"?
In the building accounts we inherit, 30% of the spend almost always goes on searches that should be excluded, with clicks costing up to £14.27. Let's open your account's search terms report together and see where the budget stops.
Book a strategy consultationThe 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 something else: how much of the page the platforms already hold before any ad appears.
Where to send the click (not the homepage)
A building firm's click goes to one page per campaign, never to the homepage: 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 square metres and duration, your number of Google reviews and the form.
Reviews too?
Yes. In the London local packs we captured, firms have between 4 and 112. If you have 80, say so.
The form decides lead quality
In our accounts it asks for five things:
- type of work;
- square metres;
- postcode;
- when you would like to start;
- a budget range as multiple choice.
Won't a long form lose enquiries?
A few: it 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.
And "Is 10k enough for a bathroom remodel?" is one of the four questions Google shows under "bathroom renovation london", where two of the organic results are firms' own cost guides quoting London price ranges. Your page can answer that question too.
Recommended reading: how to build a landing page that converts.
What to count as a conversion (and the one-second test)
A building account counts three conversions: 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 a secondary event, outside optimisation.
How do I know if my 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 step almost no firm takes
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.
Does your account count more conversions than clicks?
Valore Solare counted 15,267 against 5,467 clicks. Once the tracking was rebuilt, the cost per enquiry fell by 40%. Let's check together what your account is optimising for before you raise the budget.
Book a strategy consultationHow much budget you really need (£55-85 a day in London)
For one job a month from Google Ads, a London building firm needs £1,650-2,500 a month on general building and extensions, or £55-85 a day. Work backwards.
- A renovation firm typically wins one job for every 4-6 site visits.
- It gets one site visit for every 2-3 enquiries from the website.
- So one job a month needs 10-15 enquiries.
These are orders of magnitude from the local projects we run, not a sector statistic.
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. For bathrooms and lofts, at £241-285 per enquiry, it is £3,600-4,300.
And with less?
Below about £1,300 a month the account doesn't 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 (seven of them)
- 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? (Ads covers the wait)
For a building firm, Google Ads covers the six to twelve months before organic results arrive and stays on the keywords where the platforms compete hardest. 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.
In other words: 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.
Where the carousel, the pack and the ads push organic results below the fold, Ads stays. 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
It depends: on the job and the landing page. In London, with CPCs of £5.47-14.27 and a 5% conversion rate, between £109 and £285 per enquiry. 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.
It depends: on the city and the service. 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. Redo the maths with your own town's CPCs in Keyword Planner.
It depends: on the stage of the account. 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.
No, not in the long run. In the first months a platform can help, if your margin can carry a contact shared with several firms; but it 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)
Not "builders" at £3.58, but service + town.
Not the homepage, but a page with a five-field form.
Not contact page views, but imported site visits.
Not three weeks, but three months: the first enquiries cost £250, then it comes down.
Now, the maths.
One: 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.
Two: if the maths holds, build the page with the five-field form and the tracking on the thank-you page. The campaign comes last.
If you want someone to check the maths before you start, book a strategy consultation.
See you next time!
