Paid search is the fastest way to buy attention and the fastest way to waste money, and which one you get is usually decided before a single ad goes live.
They work well for urgent work where someone needs an electrician today and will call whoever appears first. They work poorly for considered projects like a full rewire, where people research for weeks. The channel is not the variable. The type of job is.
The short version
Ads send more people to whatever you already have. If calls go unanswered or the site does not convert, paid search does not fix that. It just makes it cost more per week.
Every one of these is free or cheap. Every one of them changes what your ad spend returns.
| Must be true | If it is not | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Calls get answered, or texted back automatically | You are paying for calls a competitor will take |
| 2 | Call tracking is running | You will never know which ad produced which job |
| 3 | The landing page matches the ad | You pay for the click and lose them in three seconds |
| 4 | You know your average job value | You cannot tell a good cost per click from a ruinous one |
| 5 | Negative keywords are set up | You will pay for "electrician jobs", "electrician salary" and "electrician courses" |
Number five is not theoretical. This very search term returns job adverts, because plenty of people searching around electricians are looking for work rather than for one.
They get lumped together as "paid". They charge differently, appear differently and suit different jobs.
| Local Services Ads | Google Ads | Meta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How you are charged | Generally per valid lead | Auction-based, per click | Auction-based delivery, optimised toward your chosen objective |
| Where it shows | Above everything, with a badge | Top of search results | In a feed, unprompted |
| Demand | Someone is looking now | Someone is looking now | Nobody is looking |
| Best for | Emergency and urgent work | Specific services with clear intent | Considered projects and remarketing |
| Entry requirement | Licence and insurance verification | A card and a landing page | A card and creative |
| Wasted spend risk | Lower, you can dispute leads | Higher without negatives | Highest without a clear offer |
| Start here if | You do call-outs | You sell a specific named service | You sell high-ticket planned work |
For most electricians starting out, Local Services Ads suit the budget better, because paying per lead is easier to reason about than paying per click.
In rough order of how much they cost, and how often we see them.
Paying for jobs, salaries, courses and apprenticeships. The single most expensive omission, and the easiest to fix.
Someone searched for a panel upgrade and landed on a page about everything you do. They leave.
Unless something answers at 2am, you are buying calls that ring out and paying full price for them.
Clicks from areas you will not travel to cost exactly the same as clicks from your own street.
Convenient, and it quietly finds searches you would never have chosen to buy.
The calls happen, the jobs happen, and nobody can prove which came from the ads. So the budget gets cut on a hunch.
The Growth Score checks whether your business is actually ready to turn paid clicks into booked jobs, and estimates what each gap costs you every month. Cheaper to find out now than after a quarter of ad spend.
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