In One Trades Ad Account, Roughly a Third of the Spend Could Never Convert

The enquiry line lies in this vertical

Here is the same budget spent two ways for a trade business. Look at the enquiries row, then look at the row underneath it.

Illustrative model, not a benchmark — the shape of the arithmetic, not the figures. Run it on your own CPCs, landing page conversion rate and qualification rate.

Both columns produce the same number of enquiries. That is the trap in trades and local services: broad match looks identical on the number most operators report, and falls apart on the number that pays wages.

What an inherited trades account actually contained

Our audit of the existing Google Ads account of MLA Traffic — traffic management and traffic control across Melbourne and regional Victoria, on civil projects, utility work, events and council contracts — scored it 35 out of 100, with roughly a third of spend going to traffic that could never convert.

The specifics are worth listing, because they recur:

• A Performance Max campaign that turned 174,000 impressions into a single conversion. Broad automated inventory with no conversion signal worth learning from is a budget shredder in a low-volume, high-value category.
• Competitor brand keywords carrying quality scores of 1 and 2 — the bottom of Google's 1–10 scale — producing nothing.
• A meaningful slice of budget on job-seeker intent: traffic controller courses, traffic control jobs.
• Every ad pointing at the homepage, because there were no service pages to point them at.

The last two are the same problem seen from both ends. Match type and landing page are one decision: a tightly matched query deserves a page that answers it, and a broadly matched query has no page that could.

The three audiences that cannot hire you

• Job seekers. In any licensed trade the same words describe the service and the career. “Traffic control”, “electrician”, “plumbing” are all typed by people looking for work.
• DIY searchers. Looking for how to do it themselves, what it should cost, or which part to buy. Often high volume, and cheap clicks.
• Price shoppers with no job. Researching a hypothetical, or checking a number for an insurance claim.

Any of the three can fill in a contact form, and the enquiry count will look perfectly healthy. None of them can give you work.

The job seekers are an asset, once they have somewhere to go

This is the part most trades accounts get backwards.

The old MLA account was quietly paying for people searching “traffic controller course” and “traffic control job” — correctly treated as wasted spend, because an ad for commercial traffic management cannot convert a job seeker. But since the rebuilt site launched in June 2026, it has brought in 72 enquiries and 58 job applications (the count on 27 September 2026), 19 and 18 of them in the first six weeks.

For a traffic management company that second number is not a side effect. It is the constraint. Winning work you cannot crew is worse than not winning it, and in traffic management the limit on growth is accredited people rather than demand. Give that intent a careers page of its own and it stops being waste and starts being the thing that lets you say yes to the next contract.

So the rule is not just “negative out the job seekers”. It is “stop paying to send them to a page about commercial services, and build the page they were looking for”.

Lead with the thing that makes you eligible

MLA hold VicRoads pre-qualification for Traffic Management Design and Implementation, Categories 1 and 2. A principal contractor cannot legally engage a company that does not. The rebuilt homepage leads with exactly that — the pre-qualifications, AS 1742.3 and Austroads AGTTM, 24/7 operation with under two-hour metro mobilisation — because councils, civil contractors and utilities are not buying traffic cones. They are buying confidence that the paperwork survives an audit.

Substitute your own trade's version: the licence number, the tier, the insurance limit, the accreditation. It belongs above the fold, and it belongs in the ad.

In local services, organic can do much of the work

In a regional market especially, earning can beat buying, because local intent is specific and the competition for it can be thin.

Mr Mow Garden Services mow lawns out of Gore, in Southland, New Zealand. Their old site was three self-built pages with a gallery that redirected to Facebook, and it was not bringing in a single new enquiry. We rebuilt it as fourteen pages in about two weeks for NZ$1,000 all in — a page per service, a page per area, and a homepage that opens with the town — built to be found in local search on no ongoing ad spend at all. Between April and August 2026, its first and fifth full months live, its monthly Google search impressions tripled.

In a regional market you do not need thousands of visitors. You need the twenty people searching this week for what you sell, where you sell it, to find you first. That is an architecture problem before it is a budget problem.

A page per service and a page per area is the structure our small-business website packages build, with versions set up for plumbers, electricians, builders and renovators, painters, cleaners and lawn and garden businesses.

The negative list to start from

• Careers: job, jobs, vacancy, salary, apprenticeship, course, certificate, training, licence, ticket.
• DIY: how to, DIY, yourself, tutorial, guide, tool hire, buy, kit, parts, supplies.
• Price shopping: price list, calculator.
• Adjacent trades you do not actually do — the fastest-growing section of the list once broad match is off.

Keep single words like “free”, “estimate”, “hire” and “hiring” off it: in trades, “free quote” and “hire an electrician” are how buyers search. “Cheap” is a positioning call; negative it only if you don't want work won on price. And negative keywords don't match close variants, so add plurals yourself, as with job and jobs.

Build the rest from your own search terms report, monthly. This is where much of the waste lives, and it grows back if nobody prunes it.

Do this on your account

1. Count quoted jobs, not enquiries. If you cannot separate the two, that is the finding.
2. Check whether every service and every area has its own page. If the ads all point at the homepage, fix the pages before the bids.
3. Look at what your Performance Max campaign has actually produced. Impressions in the hundreds of thousands against single-digit conversions is a shredder, not a campaign.
4. Give job-seeker intent a careers page, then negative it out of the commercial campaigns — Performance Max included, which now accepts negative keywords for its Search and Shopping inventory.

The arithmetic behind all of this is in broad match is the most expensive cheap traffic you can buy.