Google Ads works for a cleaning company when it splits clients by type, because the cost of a click changes up to six times: in the UK "office cleaning london" costs an average of 16.49 $ per click, "domestic cleaning" 2.85 $ (DataForSEO, Google Ads United Kingdom, 14 November 2026). The base is one Search campaign per type of client (offices and businesses, residential blocks, households, one-off jobs), with job seekers excluded from day one.
The first mistake is buying "cleaning company" on its own. Behind it there is the managing agent of a block of flats, the family looking for two hours a week and the procurement team of a firm with three sites.
The second is not excluding people looking for work: "cleaning jobs" gets 9,900 searches a month in the UK.
The third is counting every phone call as a result, including the one asking what you pay per hour.
Why listen to us on this?
Because local campaign numbers are what we work on every day. For Contesini Consulenze, two energy agencies near Mantua in Italy, Google Ads brought 299 enquiries at 7.20 € each, and 68% became sales opportunities.
For Sunscape we found the opposite mistake: an account recording 1,487 "conversions" in a month at 0.61 €. They were technical events, not enquiries.
What does that have to do with cleaning?
A cleaning company has Contesini's problem (very different clients behind the same search) and risks Sunscape's mistake (measuring the click instead of the contract). In this guide you will find:
- what a click costs for offices, commercial contracts, end of tenancy and households, in the UK and in Italy;
- who advertises today, from 12 searches we read in six Italian cities;
- Local Services Ads, listed for cleaning in both the UK and Italy;
- campaign structure, negative keywords and seasonality;
- the budget sum and how to measure signed contracts.
Let's start.
What a click costs a cleaning company (and why offices cost up to six times homes)
Cost per click (CPC) is what you pay on average each time someone taps your ad, and in cleaning it depends on who the client is. Business searches cost 3 to 6 times household ones in the UK, because an office contract is worth years of revenue.
These are the UK figures measured on 14 November 2026 with DataForSEO on Google Ads (12-month average, CPC in dollars as the tool returns them):
| Search | Type of client | Searches a month | Average CPC | High top-of-page bid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| office cleaning london | business | 1,900 | 16.49 $ | 24.48 $ |
| commercial cleaning london | business | 1,300 | 13.45 $ | 22.87 $ |
| office cleaning | business | 1,600 | 11.92 $ | 29.38 $ |
| commercial cleaning | business | 2,400 | 9.09 $ | 17.67 $ |
| contract cleaning | business | 880 | 8.36 $ | 14.32 $ |
| end of tenancy cleaning | one-off | 12,100 | 8.29 $ | 13.14 $ |
| after builders cleaning | one-off | 480 | 7.89 $ | 13.40 $ |
| cleaning company london | mixed | 4,400 | 5.43 $ | 10.13 $ |
| cleaning company near me | mixed | 1,900 | 3.53 $ | 6.82 $ |
| cleaners near me | mixed | 14,800 | 3.42 $ | 5.30 $ |
| domestic cleaning | households | 2,900 | 2.85 $ | 4.67 $ |
| cleaning company | mixed | 3,600 | 2.69 $ | 6.67 $ |
| cleaning jobs | job seekers | 9,900 | 2.14 $ | 2.22 $ |
So should you go after businesses?
One click on "office cleaning london" costs as much as almost six clicks on "domestic cleaning". If an office contract means a year of weekly visits, the sum works. If you win one client in twenty enquiries, it does not.
Then there is the city. "Cleaning company london" costs 5.43 $, "cleaning company manchester" 2.52 $. "Office cleaning manchester" sits at 7.92 $ against 16.49 $ in London.
Italy shows the same gap, wider: on 14 November 2026 "pulizie uffici milano" (office cleaning Milan) cost 17.48 $ and "pulizie casa" (home cleaning) 1.61 $, a ratio of about 11 to 1. If you want to know what drives these numbers, we explain it in our guide to cost per click.
Who advertises today (3 ads on 12 Italian searches, all at the bottom)
On 12 cleaning searches we read on 14 November 2026 in Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples, Bologna and Brescia we found 3 ads in total, on 2 results pages. All of them sat at the bottom, below the organic results.
The method: DataForSEO, localised Google results, 8 on mobile and 4 on desktop, at 15:35 UTC on a Saturday. The searches were "impresa di pulizie" (cleaning company) in five cities, plus office, block, after-builders, industrial cleaning and sanitisation. One moment does not tell you about Monday morning, but it does tell you one thing.
The space above the map was empty.
What filled the page instead:
- the map with 3 to 6 listings on 11 pages out of 12: 30 different firms, an average rating of 4.92 and a median of 55 reviews;
- an AI Overview on 11 pages out of 12;
- "related websites", a carousel of cleaning firms' sites, on 10 pages out of 12;
- directories (Paginegialle, Virgilio, ProntoPro) among the first organic results, often for other cities.
And the ads? Two in Milan for "impresa di pulizie" (one about offices, showrooms and industry, with "Richiedi Preventivo Immediato", request an instant quote) and one in Rome for after-builders cleaning promising "Prezzi Economici", cheap prices. None of the three showed a price in figures, none mentioned residential blocks.
In the two UK searches we ran ("google ads for cleaning companies" and "cleaning company google ads") there were no paid ads either, only a map of agencies and cleaning firms. A listing under 4.8 stars was an exception in the Italian maps: two out of 30. If yours has few reviews, ads are the fastest way above firms with 500, but keep working on your Google reviews. How Google picks the map listings is covered in our article on the local pack.
Local Services Ads: listed for cleaning in the UK and Italy
Local Services Ads are a separate format from Google Ads: they appear at the top with the "Google Verified" badge and you pay per lead, not per click. In Google's getting started guide for the UK, read on 14 November 2026, the category list includes "Cleaning services", "Carpet cleaning services" and "Window cleaning services". The Italian version lists the same three.
In our 12 Italian results pages, though, no Local Services unit appeared.
So are they available or not?
The guide points to the "Check eligibility" button, area by area. Run it for the postcodes you cover: if you are eligible, test it next to Search, because you pay for the lead and not the click.
One rule matters for cleaners: if you do not regularly answer calls and messages, your ad ranking may suffer.
How to structure the campaigns (one per type of client, not one for everything)
The structure that works is one Search campaign per type of client, with different ads and landing pages. That way the business budget does not leak to households and vice versa.
- Offices and commercial. "Office cleaning", "commercial cleaning", "contract cleaning" plus the town. Ads with site survey, frequencies and insurance. The most expensive: keep it tight on area.
- Residential blocks. Searches from managing agents: communal areas, stairs, a quote per building.
- One-off jobs. "End of tenancy cleaning", "after builders cleaning", "deep cleaning". In the UK end of tenancy is the biggest single search in this list at 12,100 a month.
- Households. "Domestic cleaning", "cleaners near me". Cheap clicks, high volume, small ticket: switch it on only when you have staff available.
What about Performance Max?
It mixes channels and decides where to spend, and on a small account you lose sight of which client brings contracts. Start with Search and consider Performance Max once your conversion data is reliable.
For the business campaign, most of what we wrote on Google Ads for B2B applies. Each campaign needs a page on your site that talks to that client: how to build them is in how to build a website for a cleaning company.
Negative keywords (job seekers make up thousands of searches)
Negative keywords are the terms you tell Google not to show your ad for, and in cleaning the first group is people looking for work. In the UK "cleaning jobs" gets 9,900 searches a month; in Italy "offerte lavoro pulizie" (cleaning job offers) gets 880. Every one of those clicks is a CV, not a client.
On "pulizie uffici roma" (office cleaning Rome), in our Italian survey, 6 of the first 8 organic results were job sites, with the Google Jobs box at the top.
Negatives to add from day one:
- jobs and applications: jobs, vacancies, hiring, careers, salary, wage, apprenticeship;
- DIY: how to clean, products, chemicals, machines, hire;
- training and start-ups: course, how to start a cleaning business, franchise;
- services you do not offer: pest control, rubbish removal, car valeting.
Watch how they work: according to Google Ads Help, negatives do not cover close variants such as plurals. If you exclude "job", "jobs" still gets through. Add both.
Then open the search terms report every week.
How many CVs are you paying for as clicks?
"Cleaning jobs" alone gets 9,900 searches a month in the UK, and none of them will sign a contract. We will go through your search terms report with you and show how much budget went there.
Book a strategy callArea, hours and seasonality (spring cleans, summer tenancies)
Three settings decide where the budget goes: location, hours and time of year.
Location. Target the areas you actually send teams to and choose "Presence", which according to the location options guide shows ads to people in or regularly in the area, not to people who only showed interest. If you have no premises open to the public, set the same area on your profile: we explain it in our guide to the Google service area.
Hours. The business campaign makes sense in office hours. One note from the ad scheduling guide: even if ads run only on some days, monthly spend aims at 30.4 times your average daily budget. Switching off at weekends does not halve the bill.
Seasonality. In the last 12 months of UK data the peaks are clear:
- "end of tenancy cleaning" went from 8,100 searches in December 2025 to 14,800 in July 2026;
- "window cleaning" from 5,400 in December 2025 to 12,100 in April 2026;
- "after builders cleaning" from 720 in March 2026 to 210 in September and October.
In Italy the pattern is different: block cleaning searches peak in October, office cleaning in January and October. Raise the budget ahead of your own peak months, and cut it in the slowest one.
How much budget you need (the sum starts from the contract, not the click)
Minimum budget comes from CPC and the number of enquiries you need: cost per enquiry = CPC divided by the page's conversion rate. Conversion rate is the share of clicks that become an enquiry, and it varies from site to site.
Here is a sum with a stated assumption, a 10% conversion rate:
| Campaign | Average CPC | Cost per enquiry at 10% | Budget for 10 enquiries a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office cleaning, London | 16.49 $ | about 165 $ | about 1,650 $ |
| Commercial cleaning | 9.09 $ | about 91 $ | about 910 $ |
| End of tenancy | 8.29 $ | about 83 $ | about 830 $ |
| Domestic cleaning | 2.85 $ | about 29 $ | about 290 $ |
Is 1,650 $ a lot for ten enquiries?
It depends how many you close. If you sign one in five and the office contract runs for a year, it is a cheap client. If your typical job is a one-off clean, it is not.
The method to set the figure is in our guide to Google Ads for small businesses.
What to count as a conversion (the contract, not the call)
A conversion is the action you tell Google to count as a result, and that choice decides how it spends your budget. For a cleaning company the real result is a booked site survey or a signed contract, which come weeks after the click.
Three levels, from the simplest:
- Calls and forms. Call tracking from your website counts a call only above a minimum length you choose. Pick one that excludes the caller asking "what's your hourly rate?" and hanging up.
- Call assets. Call-only ads are being retired: according to Google's guide, from February 2027 existing call ads will no longer get impressions. The number goes into responsive search ads as a call asset.
- Signed contracts. With offline conversion imports you upload the enquiries that became contracts, tied to the click by the Google Click ID (GCLID). The algorithm then learns to look for managing agents and facilities managers, not browsers.
The Sunscape case shows the risk: with 1,487 fake "conversions" Google optimised for technical events, then with broken tracking 1,500 € a month of spend and zero recorded conversions. Without clean counting, no automated bidding works for you.
Ads, profile and AI answers: what ChatGPT reads when a business looks for cleaners
Paid ads are not quoted by AI Overviews or ChatGPT: AI answers read pages, profiles and reviews. The campaign gets you seen today; the pages it sends clicks to can get you quoted tomorrow.
In our Italian survey the AI Overview for "pulizie uffici milano" gave an indicative price between 1.50 € and 4.00 € per square metre, citing Indeed, Subito.it, instapro.it and the sites of three Milan cleaning firms. The sources wrote numbers, not "tailored quote".
We also asked ChatGPT (in Italian) whether Google Ads is worth it for a cleaning company: budget bands and a "hypothetical" CPC of 1.50 €. It did not mention Local Services Ads, the CPC gap between businesses and households, or seasonality. That is the space a page with real data can fill.
What makes a cleaning company easier to quote:
- landing pages with starting prices (per square metre, per hour or per job) and the areas covered;
- a Google profile with the right category and reviews that name the service ("office cleaning", "communal areas").
Nobody can guarantee a citation. How AI picks local businesses is tested in our article on local AI visibility. For the organic side of the same sector, see our guide to SEO for cleaning companies.
Frequently asked questions about Google Ads for cleaning companies
It depends on the type of client. For domestic cleaning clicks cost about 2.85 $ in the UK and enquiries come at a sustainable price. For office cleaning in London a click is 16.49 $ and it only pays if the contract is recurring (DataForSEO, November 2026).
On average 2.69 $ in the UK, with 3,600 searches a month. It changes with the city: "cleaning company london" is 5.43 $, "cleaning company manchester" 2.52 $ (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, 14 November 2026).
Yes, in principle. Google's UK guide lists "Cleaning services", "Carpet cleaning services" and "Window cleaning services" among the categories. Availability depends on the area, so check your postcodes with Google's eligibility tool.
Start with job seekers: jobs, vacancies, hiring, careers, salary. Then DIY, products, courses and services you do not offer. Negatives do not cover plurals, so add both forms.
It depends on what you lack, but usually you need both. The map appeared on 11 of 12 searches in our Italian survey and ads on only 2: a profile with good reviews brings enquiries over time without paying per click, ads put you in front straight away where the profile is not enough.
Google Ads for cleaning companies, in short (and the search to run on Monday morning)
One campaign per type of client: offices, blocks, one-off jobs, households.
CPC from 2.52 $ to 16.49 $ in the UK: check your city and your client.
Job seekers in the negatives from day one.
Area on "Presence", budget ahead of your peak months.
Conversion = signed contract, imported from your CRM.
On Monday at nine, search "office cleaning" plus your town on your phone. If there is no ad above the map, that space is open at the price the tables above let you calculate. If you want to set it up on your account, our work on Google Ads campaigns starts there, and for the other channels that bring enquiries there is our guide to lead generation for cleaning companies.
