Straight answers about construction marketing

Percentage-of-revenue rules are a poor planning tool for trades because job values vary so widely. A better method: decide how many extra jobs a month you want, multiply by your target cost per booked job, and that is your monthly media budget.

Worked example. You want four extra renovation jobs a month. You expect to book roughly one job for every four qualified enquiries. At a $70 cost per qualified enquiry, sixteen enquiries costs about $1,120 — so budget $1,500–2,000 a month in media to hit four jobs with headroom for testing.

Separately, expect the first 4–6 weeks to be a learning budget. Campaigns need conversion data before the platform can optimise, so early cost per job will be higher than steady state. Judge the spend at month three, not week one.

Ranges vary widely by service. High-value, low-frequency work like knockdown rebuilds and full-home renovations sits at the top of that band because competition for those searches is fierce. Smaller jobs like bathroom renovations sit lower.

The number is easy to game, which is why it should never be the headline metric. An agency can halve your cost per lead overnight by loosening targeting — you'll get twice the enquiries at half the price and book fewer jobs.

Insist on two figures instead: cost per qualified lead (someone in your service area, with budget, wanting work you actually do) and cost per booked job. If an agency can't report the second one, they aren't measuring outcomes.

Demand for demolition is almost entirely non-discretionary. Nobody scrolls Instagram and decides to knock their house down. They decide first, then search — which makes Google Search the highest-intent channel and the right place to spend the first dollar.

Meta earns its place second, in two specific roles: retargeting people who visited your site but didn't call, and reaching small developers and project builders who make repeat buying decisions and respond to visible proof of capability.

The exception is asbestos and strip-out work, where search volume is thin. There, a broader Meta campaign targeting property managers and strata committees can outperform search simply because there aren't enough searches to spend a budget on.

Unlike demolition, renovation demand can be created. A homeowner who wasn't actively planning an extension will enquire after seeing a well-shot transformation in a suburb they recognise. That makes Instagram and Facebook unusually effective for renovation builders.

Google Search still matters for the bottom of the funnel — 'bathroom renovation quote', 'extension builder [suburb]' — where the buyer is already committed and comparing. It converts at a higher rate but at lower volume and a higher cost per click.

The practical split for most renovation builders is roughly 60/40 in favour of Meta for volume, with Search capturing the ready-to-buy demand. Your own job photography matters more than the platform choice — creative quality is the single biggest lever on renovation ad performance.

Search volume for these terms is thin, which is actually an advantage — the searches that do happen are almost all high intent, and a small budget can own the category in a defined service area.

Licensing is the entire conversion argument. SafeWork NSW Class A or Class B licence numbers, air monitoring arrangements and EPA waste tracking should be stated plainly on the landing page. Buyers in this category are managing risk, not shopping on price.

Referral flow from builders, demolition contractors and property managers usually outperforms cold advertising. Paid campaigns work best supporting that — staying visible to the trades who refer you rather than chasing homeowners directly.

Negative keywords are the first place to look. Without them, a demolition campaign pays for 'demolition jobs hiring', 'skip bin hire' and 'how to demolish a shed yourself'. These are cheap clicks that convert into enquiries you'd never quote.

The second cause is that nothing filters for budget. Putting an indicative price band in the ad copy and a budget question in the form loses you enquiries — deliberately. The ones you lose were never going to proceed, and every one you screen out is an hour of quoting time back.

The third is the deepest. If your conversion event is 'form submitted', the platform will find you people who love submitting forms. Feed booked jobs back into the ad platform as the conversion event and its targeting changes materially within a few weeks.

Speed matters more in construction than almost any other trade category because the buyer is comparison shopping by default. A homeowner planning a renovation will fill in several forms in one sitting. Whoever calls back first sets the frame that everyone else is compared against.

You do not have to answer the phone yourself to win on speed. An automated SMS acknowledgement inside sixty seconds — confirming you got the enquiry and when you'll call — captures most of the benefit while you're still on site.

Missed-call text-back is the other half. A rung-out phone is a lost job; an automatic text saying 'on site, back to you within the hour' converts a meaningful share of those into booked quotes.

Homeowner-side, the winning search terms are cost and process questions — 'house demolition cost', 'knockdown rebuild process', 'do I need a DA to demolish'. These people are 3–9 months from breaking ground, so the job is to capture the enquiry early and stay in front of them with automated follow-up until the DA lands.

Builder-side is a different motion entirely. Project builders and small developers buy repeatedly, so one relationship is worth many jobs. Search intent is thinner here; visibility, fast quoting and demonstrated compliance do more work than ad spend.

Compliance is the conversion lever on both sides. SafeWork NSW licences, EPA waste tracking and asbestos accreditation shown prominently — not buried in a footer — is what converts a nervous homeowner who has read horror stories.

Most construction marketing is reported on cost per lead, which is misleading because it counts enquiries that were never answered, never qualified and never quoted. Cost per booked job is the only figure that connects advertising spend to revenue.

To calculate it you need three things: ad spend from the platform, lead-stage feedback from whoever answers the phone, and a way to attribute the booking back to the campaign that produced it. Without call tracking and lead-stage feedback you cannot measure it at all — which is why most agencies quietly don't.

A useful sanity check: cost per booked job should be a small single-digit percentage of your average job value. If a demolition job averages $18,000 and you're paying $400 to book one, that is 2.2% — healthy. If you're paying $3,000, something upstream is broken.

The first two to three weeks are genuinely a learning budget. The platform is testing audiences, placements and search terms, and performance in that window is not representative of steady state. Judging a campaign at day ten is the most common reason contractors kill something that would have worked.

There is a real exception. If the account is spending on obviously wrong search terms, or the follow-up is broken, that's visible in week one and should be fixed immediately rather than waited out.

Seasonality also distorts the picture in Australian construction. Enquiry volume drops hard around the Christmas shutdown and moves again at EOFY, so compare like periods rather than consecutive months.

The practical difference shows up in the reporting. A performance engagement opens with 'you spent this, you booked this many jobs, each one cost this'. A general digital marketing report opens with reach, engagement and traffic.

It also changes what gets built first. Performance marketing installs measurement before spend — call tracking, server-side conversions, lead-stage feedback — because without those the outcome cannot be attributed. Activity-based marketing skips this because it doesn't need it.

Neither is inherently better for every business. But if your goal is a specific number of extra jobs per month at a cost you can afford, activity metrics can't tell you whether you're winning.

Google's ad auction factors in landing page experience, so a slow or irrelevant page raises what you pay per click and lowers how often your ad shows. A generic homepage that lists eight services is relevant to none of them.

The fix is a dedicated page per service line — one for knockdown demolition, one for strip-outs, one for extensions — each matching the ad that sent the visitor there. These can sit alongside an existing website; a full rebuild is a separate project.

Load speed is not a technicality here. Your buyer is often standing on a site with one bar of reception. If the page takes four seconds, they're gone before it renders.

Ad accounts accumulate conversion data that platforms use to target. Starting a fresh account means re-entering the learning phase and paying for that data again. An agency that owns your account owns your ability to leave.

Ask three questions before signing: whose billing details are on the account, who is the account owner in Google Ads and Meta Business Manager, and do the landing pages sit on a domain you control. If any answer is 'the agency', you're renting your own marketing.

The same applies to call recordings, creative files and the customer data captured by your forms. All of it should be exportable by you at any time.

A demolition campaign and a plumbing campaign look nothing alike. Demolition has a months-long consideration window, a five-figure job value and compliance-driven objections. Emergency plumbing is a same-hour decision at a few hundred dollars. The negative keyword lists, ad copy and follow-up cadence share almost nothing.

Specialisation also compounds. Every campaign run in the same trade improves the next one — the search terms that waste money, the objections that stall quotes, and the creative angles that work are already known.

The honest trade-off is that a specialist will turn you away if you're outside their niche. That's the point of the model.