Google Ads for electricians

What do you need before you turn the ads on?

Electrical is one of the harder trades to advertise, because two of the biggest search groups in it are people who will never hire anybody: homeowners about to do it themselves, and people who want to become an electrician. Sorting the basics out first is what keeps you from paying to find that out.

• Somebody who picks up. A homeowner with a burning smell at the panel calls three electricians and books whoever answers. Voicemail is a job you already paid for. Decide who covers evenings and weekends before you set a bid.
• An honest service area. Not the area you would like to cover, the area a van will actually drive to for a two hour service call. Every mile past that buys calls you will turn down.
• Ad scheduling that matches who is answering. If nobody takes calls after six, do not run emergency ads at midnight. If you do take night work, bid up then rather than down, because that is when the caller has the fewest options.
• Call tracking that counts real calls. Google optimizes toward whatever result you give it, and if you give it nothing it chases cheap clicks. In electrical the cheapest clicks are DIY searches, so count calls over sixty seconds and completed forms, never clicks to the contact page.
• A page that names the work, the city and your license. Sending an expensive click to a homepage with a form at the bottom throws away a good share of what you spend. The page needs a tappable number at the top, the service they searched for, your towns, and your license number where they can see it.

That list is yours, and nobody can do it for you. The Google Ads half is the part myAgency does.

How do you set up an electrical campaign?

Five ad groups, split by how urgent the call is and what the job is worth. Keeping them apart is how you stop a run of $180 outlet repairs hiding the panel upgrade and generator work that pays the month.

The settings that matter, and the ones that do not

Google's defaults are set up for Google. Four are worth changing on day one.

• Turn off Search Partners and the Display Network. A new Search campaign opts you into both, and for a local electrician they spend real money on placements that never produce a service call.
• Target people in your area, not people interested in it. The default includes anyone showing interest in your towns, which for electrical means a lot of people researching a house they have not bought yet. Change it to presence only. One dropdown, and the highest value change on this list.
• Set the ad schedule to your answering hours. Covered above, and it belongs in the settings pass too.
• Pick a bidding strategy with something to aim at. Maximize clicks buys the cheapest traffic in the account, and in electrical the cheapest traffic is somebody halfway through a wiring video. Once call conversions record properly, move to a conversion based strategy.

Not worth your time: bid adjustments by device, time of day or demographic. Once Smart Bidding is running it accounts for all of that on every auction and your adjustments are ignored.

Which electrical keywords actually make the phone ring?

A short list where every keyword describes a job you want, in the words a homeowner uses. Not two hundred variations, which is how electrical accounts end up with a hundred and eighty keywords that never produced a single call.

Two rules keep it honest. Every keyword names a job you would send a van to, and every keyword is what a homeowner would type rather than what an electrician would type. Nobody searches for a load calculation or a service entrance conductor. They search for why half the house has no power.

A word on match types

Add keywords as phrase match, not broad. Broad lets Google show you against anything it decides is related, and in electrical that includes appliance repair, solar, alarm installers, TV mounting and a steady stream of people looking for an apprenticeship. Broad earns its place a month or two in, once you have a working negative list and real conversion history. Start tight and open up, because opening up is cheap and closing back down costs whatever you spent finding out.

What wastes electrical ad budget?

This is where an electrical account leaks, and it leaks harder than most trades. Six groups of negatives, added at campaign level so they apply everywhere. Build them before you turn the ads on rather than after you have paid to discover them.

The mistake almost everyone makes with electrical negatives

Blocking the money words. Somebody searching panel upgrade cost is not window shopping, they are deciding whether to book you or keep ringing round, and they are among the likeliest people in your account to convert. Same for price, quote and estimate. Block the DIY intent, not the intent to spend.

The second is blocking a word without checking what else it appears in. Negate wire to keep out wiring diagrams and you switch off wire a hot tub, rewire and every wiring repair search you have. Negate panel to keep out solar panels and you lose the panel upgrade group entirely, which is the most profitable group on the page. Add the phrase, not the word, whenever the word does more than one thing.

Then keep going. A list built once is out of date within a month. Somebody has to read the search terms report every week or two and add what turned up. It is the most reliable predictor of whether an electrical account works, and the first thing that stops when you get busy.

Where are the big tickets, and how do you advertise for them?

Panel upgrades, EV chargers and standby generators are the difference between an electrical account that pays for itself and one that breaks even on service calls. They also behave nothing like the rest of the account, so they need their own settings and their own patience.

They are compared, not called

Nobody rings the first result for a $12,000 generator. They read three installer pages, check what the rebate is worth, and then call two of them. That means a higher cost per lead, a longer gap between click and booking, and a conversion that lands weeks after the click that caused it. Judge these groups on booked work over six to eight weeks. On a thirty day report they look like a failure right up until the invoices land.

Rebates and tax credits are mixed intent, not waste

A lot of EV charger and generator searches carry a rebate or tax credit angle, and the instinct is to block them. Do not, at least not straight away. Some of those people are researchers, but plenty are homeowners who have already decided to install and are working out what it costs after the credit. Put them in their own ad group instead so you can read them separately, and say on the page that you handle the paperwork, because most competitors do not mention it at all.

Lead time is the thing worth advertising

For emergency work the promise is how fast you arrive. For specialty work it is when you can schedule and how long the job takes, including the permit and the utility. A generator ad that says installed in two weeks beats a generator ad that says licensed and insured, because every competing ad says licensed and insured.

Commercial deserves its own campaign, not just its own ad group

Commercial clicks cost more, take longer to convert and are worth more when they do, and a shared budget always resolves that in favour of the fast residential call. Split it out once it produces at all, give it its own budget and its own hours, and expect a property manager to compare you against two other contractors and then keep calling you for three years. Electrician lead generation for commercial work is a slower, steadier thing than the residential side, and it is worth measuring on its own.

What does electrician PPC cost?

PPC for electricians has two separate costs, and they get confused constantly. What you pay Google for clicks, and what you pay somebody to manage it.

The click

There is no published benchmark for electrical work on its own. The closest real number is Home and Home Improvement in WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, which puts the category at an average $8.33 per click and $90.92 per lead, at a 6.47% click-through rate and an 8.05% conversion rate, drawn from 13,474 US search campaigns running between April 2025 and March 2026.

Source: WordStream, 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks. That category also holds plumbing, roofing, HVAC and remodelling, so read it as a range check rather than an electrical figure.

Treat it as the middle of a wide spread. Emergency and panel terms in a competitive metro run well above it, and small residential repairs run below. Your own market matters more than any national average, and Google's Keyword Planner will show you the top of page bid range for your keywords in your towns for free before you spend anything.

The click price is not what decides this anyway. What a booked job is worth to you is. At a $180 outlet repair a $60 lead is uncomfortable. At a $4,500 service upgrade it is cheap, which is the whole reason the campaign is split by ticket size.

The management

Then there is the cost of somebody doing the work on this page. An electrician PPC agency charges a monthly retainer, often a percentage of ad spend, usually with a minimum and frequently on a contract. What you buy is somebody reading the search terms report, adding negatives, moving bids and pausing keywords that stopped producing. It is real work and it matters. It also runs to a consistent set of rules, which is why software can now do it at a fixed price.

There is the cost of a click, and there is the cost of somebody managing it. The second one you can change. An electrician marketing agency retainer runs around $1,500 a month, and myAgency is $150 a month with no contract.

How much should you budget, and how far should you drive?

The two questions every electrician asks first share an answer: buy enough clicks in a small enough area to learn something.

Work backwards from the click. If clicks run eight to fifteen dollars and one in ten to one in fifteen turns into a call, a booked job costs somewhere near a hundred dollars in ad spend. A budget buying three or four clicks a day gives you a lead every few days, which is far too little to tell a good week from a bad one.

For most one van to five van residential electricians that means fifty to a hundred dollars a day on the emergency and service groups only, adding panel upgrades and specialty once those two produce consistently. Small and wide is the common mistake. Small and narrow beats it, because a budget spread over five ad groups and forty miles never gathers enough data anywhere to improve.

How far to advertise

Set the radius by what the job pays, not by how far you would go in principle.

• Emergency and service calls: tight. Fifteen to twenty miles, or half an hour of driving. The value of an emergency call is being able to get there, and a caller waiting two hours has already phoned somebody else.
• Panel upgrades and rewires: your normal service area. Scheduled work, so drive time is a cost rather than a dealbreaker, and the permit usually ties you to towns you already know.
• EV chargers, generators and commercial: wider. A five figure install justifies an hour in the van, and this is the one place where advertising into the next county pays for itself.

Use separate campaigns rather than one at the widest radius. A single radius set to the biggest job you might take means paying emergency prices for calls forty miles out that you will decline.

What should the ad and the landing page say?

The ad has one job: repeat what they searched for and tell them you can come now. Most electrical ads fail on the second half, and a lot of them fail on the first by advertising the company rather than the job.

Put the service and the town in the headline, because somebody searching panel upgrade in Fresno should see panel upgrade and Fresno. Then say when you can be there, specifically. Same day beats fast, and a two hour response beats same day. If you answer at night, say so, because round the clock cover is one of the strongest things an electrical ad can carry and most competitors do not offer it.

Then the things that make somebody dial instead of going back to the results: your license number, whether you are bonded and insured, that you pull the permit, whether the estimate is free, flat rate pricing rather than an hourly guess, and financing on the four figure work. On a service upgrade or a generator, financing moves more people than any adjective. Skip best electrician and quality workmanship, because every competing ad says both, and never advertise a price you have not committed to.

The page has to hold up its end. Phone number at the top, tappable, at a size somebody can hit with one hand. The service they searched for in the first line. Your towns written out. Your license number visible without hunting for it, because it is the first thing a careful homeowner checks and the first thing a nervous one worries about. Reviews above the fold. A short form for the people who will not phone, which for panel and EV work is more of them than you would think. Send every ad group to the same homepage and you are paying for the click, then asking the customer to go and find what they came for.

What does month one actually look like?

Knowing the shape of the first month stops you switching the whole thing off in week two, which is when most electricians switch it off.

One habit matters more than the rest: read the search terms report. Not the dashboard, the actual list of what people typed. It tells you what to block and what to add, and it separates an account that improves every week from one that spends the same money forever.

That is a useful hour every week, and somebody has to spend it. If you would rather it was not you, myAgency spends it for you and tells you what changed.

What does Google Ads management for electricians cost?

Everything above is genuinely how to do it properly. It is also an evening of setup and an hour every week forever, and you are up a ladder.

That is what we built myAgency for. You connect your Google Ads account and it creates the campaign for you: the ad groups, the keywords, the negative list, the radius, the ads. Creating it, optimizing it and managing it all takes under five minutes. After that it runs on its own, twice a day. It reads the search terms you would have read on a Sunday night, blocks the people wiring their own ceiling fan and the ones looking for an apprenticeship, tunes the keywords producing calls, pauses the ones that stopped, and writes every change down in plain English.

No agency. Google Ads management for electricians has meant a monthly retainer for somebody to log into your account a couple of times, usually on a contract, and you can compare that side by side. myAgency is $150 a month, no contract, no setup fee.

And no dashboard to learn. Google Ads has hundreds of settings and no instructions, which is the real reason most electrical businesses either overpay an agency or leave a half-built campaign running at ten dollars a click. You do not need to learn any of it. You need the phone to ring with somebody whose panel is sparking.

Your electrical campaign, built in five minutes

Connect your Google Ads account and myAgency creates, optimizes and manages the whole thing for you. Then you go back to the job.

Build my electrical campaign

$150 a month, and after that you only open Google Ads if you want to. Already running ads? start with what your account is doing now.

Other trades we cover

The same guide, written for a different job. Each one covers the campaign structure, the keywords, the negative list and what month one looks like for that trade. The full set is on the industries hub.

• Google Ads for dentists. Some of the most expensive clicks in local search, and a lot of the traffic that looks dental is job hunters, students and home remedies.
• Google Ads for plumbers. Emergency work and DIY research share almost the same words, so a lot of the budget goes to people who are about to fix it themselves.
• Google Ads for roofers. Storm season pulls in out-of-area crews who bid the market up for a few weeks, and a lot of roofing traffic is homeowners pricing a job they are not ready to book.
• Google Ads for HVAC. Demand inverts twice a year, so cooling and heating belong in separate campaigns from day one. Budget is a campaign setting, not an account one.
• Google Ads for pest control. The season decides the search, so the calendar runs the campaign. A recurring contract and a one-time callout look identical in the keyword list.
• Google Ads for junk removal. The word junk covers six unrelated jobs, and this is the one trade where the cost of doing the work changes with the search term, so a cheap lead can still lose money.
• Google Ads for mobile detailing. Most detailing searches are people learning to detail their own car, or heading for a cheap drive-through wash.