Google Ads for trades and installers / London
You cannot outspend the national chains. You do not have to.
Windows, doors, flooring, shading, driveways, EV chargers. The big names bid on everything and pay a fortune for it. A local installer wins somewhere else entirely, on the specific searches they cannot be bothered to write an advert for.
- Narrow searches, serious people. The exact product, the exact area, the exact job.
- Run by someone who has been on site. NVQ Level 6, SMSTS, Black CSCS card.
- One installer per trade, per area. We will not run ads for your nearest rival.
Where a small firm actually wins
The searches worth having are the ones nobody writes ads for.
A national advertiser bids on the broad phrases because they have the budget to and a call centre to absorb whatever arrives. Those clicks are the most expensive in the auction and the people typing them are usually still browsing.
Underneath that sit hundreds of narrower searches. Specific products, specific materials, specific problems, specific towns. Individually they are small. Together they add up, they cost a fraction as much per click, and the person typing them already knows what they want.
What the chains are bidding on
new windows double glazing home improvementsEnormous volume, the highest cost per click in the auction, and a lot of people who are eighteen months from buying anything. You cannot win this fight and you should not try.
What we would buy instead
aluminium bifold doors Bromley sash window replacement conservation area who fits Karndean flooring near meA fraction of the volume and a fraction of the price. The person typing this knows the product, knows roughly what it costs, and is looking for somebody to come and measure up.
Your unfair advantage
Say the four things the chains cannot.
Anybody who has had a national installer round has a story about it. Those experiences are the reason a homeowner hesitates before filling in any form, and they are the reason your advertising can beat a company fifty times your size. You just have to say so plainly, on the page, before they ring.
No commission salesman
Nobody sitting at their kitchen table for three hours. You measure up, you quote, you leave.
The price is the price
No discount that expires at midnight, no ringing the manager. The quote stands next week too.
Our own fitters
Not whoever the subcontractor sent that week. The same faces who quoted are the ones who turn up.
Somebody answers
A local number that a person picks up, not a queue and a reference number.
None of this is a marketing trick. It is true of almost every independent installer we have met and almost none of them put it in writing. Getting it onto the page is usually worth more than any bid adjustment we could make.
From a live client account
What this looks like in a real 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 installation is worth several thousand pounds · Exactly the narrow corner of the market described above
You will not have to explain your own trade.
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.
- NVQ Level 6 in Residential Construction Management
- SMSTS site management safety training certificate
- Black CSCS card
- Five properties renovated largely with his own hands
What we actually do
Six things, and most accounts we inherit are missing four.
Product and area searches, not broad ones
Every material, every style, every town you cover, built out properly. Small individually, substantial together, and a fraction of the cost per click the broad terms carry.
Blocking the time wasters
DIY guides, how to fit it yourself, materials suppliers, trade counters, jobs and apprenticeships, and anyone outside your travel radius. Read weekly and blocked for good.
A page per product, built and hosted by us
Photographs of your own installations, honest price ranges, and the four promises above stated plainly. Somebody searching for bifolds should not land on a homepage slideshow.
Calls and WhatsApp both counted
Homeowners ring installers, and a lot of them send a photograph of the job. Both tracked back to the search that caused them, which most accounts cannot do at all.
Measured jobs fed back to Google
You mark which enquiries turned into a measure up and which became an order. We send that back, so the bidding chases buyers rather than browsers.
Seasonal budget, not flat budget
Driveways and outdoor work sell in spring, shading in early summer, flooring through winter. We push spend into the months that convert instead of dribbling it out evenly.
One installer per trade, per area.
If we run ads for your flooring company we will not take another flooring company on your patch. 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.
Would you rather hear it from a client than from us?
Ask on the call and we will put you on the phone with somebody whose campaign we run, so you can ask them the questions you would not ask us. We would rather you did that than take our word for any of the above.
What it costs
Published, so neither of us wastes a call.
Campaign setup
From £1,200
One off. Research, account build, call and WhatsApp tracking, and the product 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. Below roughly this level there is not enough data for the bidding to learn from.
If your average installation is worth a few thousand pounds, one job a month covers the lot with room to spare. That is the sum worth doing before you ring us, and it is the sum we will do with you on the call using your figures rather than ours.
Straight answers
What installers ask us first.
We tried Google Ads and the big firms just outbid us.
They will, on the broad phrases, and that is usually what the old account was bidding on. The way through is not a higher bid, it is a different set of searches. Narrower terms, tighter areas, and a page that actually matches what was typed. We will look at your old account and show you where the money went.
Is our budget too small to bother?
Possibly, and we will tell you. Below about six hundred a month the bidding has too little to learn from and you end up paying for the education without getting the benefit. Above it, a small budget aimed at narrow searches can work very well, because you are not competing for the expensive clicks at all.
We get plenty of enquiries but they all want a price over the phone.
That is a page problem more than a campaign problem. Honest price ranges on the page filter out the people who were only ever going to ask, and warm up the ones who stay. Installers resist this and it almost always improves the quality of what comes through.
Who owns the Google Ads account?
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.
How soon would we see anything?
Enquiries usually within days of going live. The first month is about volume, the second about cutting waste, and by the third the cost per measure up is normally where it should be. Seasonal trades can take a little longer simply because we time the spend to the season.
Who would we be dealing with?
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
Bring your own numbers.
A short call with Don. What an average installation is worth, how far you will travel, and what you have tried before. We will work out what a measured job would cost to win and tell you honestly whether it stacks up. If it does not, we will say so on that call.