How much should a man and van spend on Google Ads?

It’s the first question almost every owner asks about Google Ads, and the honest answer is: it depends. Not on what other businesses spend, but on your numbers. Once you know them, working out a sensible budget takes about ten minutes.

This guide walks you through it. The figures in the examples are made up to show the maths. Swap in your own.

Start with what a job is worth to you

Not the price on the invoice, but what’s left after the job-specific costs. For a typical rubbish removal job that means:

• Tip or transfer station fees for the load
• Fuel for the trip
• Labour, if you’re paying a second pair of hands
• Any special disposal costs (mattresses, fridges, upholstered furniture that needs separate handling)

Say your average job is £180 and the job-specific costs come to £80. That leaves £100 gross profit per job. That number is the ceiling on what you can afford to pay to win a job through ads, and you’d obviously want to pay a lot less than that.

Work out what you can afford to pay per booked job

Decide what share of that £100 you’re happy to spend to win the job. There’s no rule here. It’s your call, and it depends on whether the customer is likely to book again or refer you.

If you’re happy to spend £30 to win a £100-profit job, your target cost per booked job is £30.

Turn that into a cost per enquiry

Not every enquiry books. Some are tyre-kickers, some are outside your area, some go with a cheaper quote. If you know roughly how many enquiries turn into jobs, use that. If you don’t, start tracking it now: it’s the most useful number in your business.

Say one in two enquiries books. Then you can afford £15 per enquiry (£30 ÷ 2).

Then a monthly budget

Now decide how many extra jobs you actually want, and can handle. This is where a lot of owners go wrong: they set a budget that would bring in 40 extra jobs a month when they only have room for 15.

If you have room for 15 extra jobs a month at £30 each, that’s a starting budget of about £450 a month.

Here’s the whole thing in one place:

1. Average job value: £180
2. Job-specific costs: £80
3. Gross profit per job: £100
4. Target cost per booked job: £30
5. Enquiry-to-booking rate: 50%
6. Affordable cost per enquiry: £15
7. Extra jobs you can handle: 15 a month
8. Starting monthly budget: around £450

You can model your own numbers with our ROI calculator.

Why a “starting” budget, not a fixed one

Your real cost per enquiry depends on your area, your competition, your ads, your landing page and the time of year. You won’t know it until you’ve run ads properly for a few weeks with call tracking in place.

So treat the first month or two as finding out:

• If your real cost per booked job comes in under target, you can raise the budget, as long as you have the capacity.
• If it’s over, don’t just cut the budget. Look at why. Usually it’s wasted searches, poor location targeting or a landing page that doesn’t get the call. We cover the common causes in why waste removal Google Ads get expensive.

Don’t spread a small budget too thin

If your budget is modest, focus it. One or two services you most want (say, house clearances and full-load rubbish removal), a tight area around your yard, and the hours you can actually answer the phone. A small budget spread across every service and every town in the county gets you a trickle of clicks everywhere and not enough data to improve anything.

Seasonality matters

Demand in this trade isn’t flat. Spring clear-outs, summer garden waste, end-of-tenancy periods and the weeks after Christmas tend to be busier, and quiet weeks happen too. A good account raises spend when demand and your capacity are both there, and pulls back when you’re already fully booked. There’s no point paying for calls you can’t take.

Questions to ask whoever runs your ads

• Do I own the Google Ads account? You should. If you leave, you keep the history.
• Are calls being tracked as conversions? If not, Google’s bidding is guessing.
• Can I see the search terms report? It shows exactly what people typed before clicking.
• What are the negative keywords? There should be a long list, and it should keep growing.
• What’s my cost per booked job, not per click?

If you don’t get straight answers, that’s your answer.

The short version

Work backwards from your gross profit per job, decide what you’re willing to pay to win one, factor in how many enquiries book, and cap the budget at the work you can actually handle. Then let real tracked data, not guesswork, tell you when to spend more.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your numbers or your existing account, that’s exactly what our Google Ads for man and van consultation is for.