Google Ads for home improvement companies / London
Extensions, loft conversions, groundworks. Big jobs with long decision windows, where a cheap enquiry from somebody pricing a daydream is worth nothing and a good one is worth thousands. We run the campaign against the second kind.
Why bought leads feel like hard work
Most home improvement companies we speak to have spent money with a lead site at some point. The enquiry arrives, you ring within twenty minutes, and the homeowner has already spoken to three other firms because the same enquiry was sold to all of you. Then everyone races to the bottom on price and the job goes to whoever guessed lowest.
Your own Google Ads campaign is a different transaction entirely. The person searched, they landed on your page, and they contacted you. Nobody else got sent that enquiry, because there is nobody else to send it to.
A bought lead
Your own campaign
The number that actually matters
On a forty thousand pound job, the click is a rounding error. What decides whether advertising works for you is how many enquiries reach survey stage and how many surveys become signed work. Chase a cheaper cost per enquiry and you will get exactly that: more enquiries, worse ones, and a diary full of surveys that were never going to happen.
So we work down the chain instead. Here is the shape of it with illustrative numbers. Put your own conversion rates in and it will tell you in five minutes whether this is worth a conversation.
Typical for extensions and loft conversions in London, where the clicks are expensive and heavily contested. Groundworks and foundations run far cheaper.
If one enquiry in three is serious enough to put in the diary. This ratio is the one worth improving, and it is decided by which searches we buy and what your page says before they ring.
If you convert one survey in four. That is the real acquisition cost, and it is the only figure worth putting next to the value of the work.
A forty five thousand pound conversion at twenty per cent. Three thousand to win nine is a business that works. Judged on the £250 click alone you would never have known either way.
This is why we upload your won jobs back to Google. You mark which enquiries reached survey and which became signed work. We send that back, so the bidding chases people who resemble your paying customers rather than people who resemble form fillers. On long, high value sales cycles that is the single biggest lever there is, and almost nobody at your budget level bothers with it.
From a live client account
A groundworks and foundations installer, anonymised at their request. Real figures over the period stated, measured against ad spend. Not a projection and not an industry average.
Foundations campaign, six months to August 2026
£25
average cost per enquiry
6 mo
held at roughly that level every month since March
A single foundation job is worth several thousand pounds · The arithmetic on this one has never been close
Groundworks is a quieter corner of the market than loft conversions, and that is exactly the point. The less obvious the search, the cheaper the click and the more serious the person typing it. Part of our job is finding those corners in your trade rather than bidding on the phrase everybody else is fighting over.
Don runs your account. Before any of this he spent years on the tools and on site, and he still holds the tickets to prove it.
What we actually do
DIY guides, how much does it cost articles, materials suppliers, apprenticeships, planning permission research, and people forty miles outside your patch. Read every week and blocked for good.
Homeowners ring, and most accounts count none of it. Yours will show which search produced each call, and WhatsApp taps counted the same way.
Somebody searching for a rear extension should not land on a homepage with a slideshow. Photographs of your actual work, the process, rough price ranges, and a form. Changed the same afternoon when needed.
Set to where you genuinely work and where the housing stock suits the job. Paying to appear in a borough of new build flats when you convert Victorian lofts is the easiest money to stop losing.
The lever that matters most on long sales cycles. You mark the outcome, we upload it, and the bidding starts hunting people who sign rather than people who browse.
Enquiries, surveys booked, what each cost, and which job type they came from. One page you can read in the van between appointments.
If we run ads for you we will not take the firm you keep bidding against. Putting two clients in the same auction pushes both their costs up and earns us two fees for it. Ask any agency you are speaking to whether they do the same, and watch how they answer.
Thanks for all your work and ideas. I am far more pleased with it than I expected to be.
What it costs
Campaign setup
From £1,200
One off. Research, account build, call and form tracking, and the job type pages the campaign points at.
Monthly management
From £350
Weekly search term reviews, bidding, ad testing, page changes, outcome uploads and reporting. No long contract.
Your ad budget
From £600
A month, paid straight to Google and never through us. For extensions and lofts in London, expect to want more than the minimum.
One signed loft conversion covers a year of management and then some. That is the sum worth doing before you ring us, and it is exactly the sum we will do with you on the call using your own numbers rather than ours.
Straight answers
Then the problem is which searches are being bought and what the page says, not the volume. Someone typing how much does a loft conversion cost is researching. Someone typing loft conversion company plus their town is shopping. Buying the first and sending them to a homepage produces exactly the enquiries you are describing.
You may not need to change straight away, and running both for a while is a fair test. The difference is that a bought lead was sold to your competitors at the same moment and stops the day you stop paying. Your own campaign, pages and data stay yours, and the cost per job tends to fall as we feed outcomes back. If your lead site is working well, we will tell you to keep it.
Yes, and it is one of the few genuine advantages of running your own campaign. Extensions and lofts get searched hardest from late winter through summer. We push budget into the months that convert and pull it back when nobody is booking, which a lead site will not do for you.
You do. It sits under your own billing and we are added as a manager. If we part ways we step out and everything stays where it is. Agencies that keep the account in their own name are protecting themselves, not you.
Enquiries usually within days. But on jobs this size the honest measure is surveys booked, and you need six to eight weeks before that tells you anything reliable. Anyone judging a loft conversion campaign on its first fortnight is judging noise.
Don, from the first call onwards. Bold Tony is a husband and wife studio in London. Where a job needs a specialist we bring in people we have worked with for years, all of them London based, and we manage them ourselves.
Start here
A short call with Don. What your average job is worth, how many enquiries reach survey, and how many surveys you sign. We will work out what a job would cost to win and tell you honestly whether it stacks up. If it does not, we will say so on that call.