Google Ads for electricians: the campaigns that pay and the ones that burn budget
Budgets, campaign structure, the EV charger and panel upgrade terms worth bidding on, negative keywords, and what a booked electrical job really costs.
Google Ads works for electricians and it fails for electricians, and the difference is almost never the budget. It is whether the account is built around jobs or around the word "electrician."
A shop spending $2,500 a month on a single campaign targeting "electrician," "electrician near me" and "electrical contractor" on broad match, running 24 hours, will generate calls at $90 to $200 each, most of them for a $180 outlet repair or a wrong number. The same $2,500 split into three campaigns aimed at specific jobs will generate fewer calls at a similar cost per call and two to four times the revenue, because the jobs behind them are worth $2,000 instead of $180.
Build the account around three job types
Separate campaigns, separate budgets, separate ad schedules. They behave nothing alike.
Emergency and repair. Keywords: "no power in house," "breaker keeps tripping," "electrician open now," "emergency electrician," "burning smell outlet." Converts in minutes. Runs whenever you can answer. Cost per click $12 to $30, cost per call $45 to $110. Ticket $180 to $700. Budget share: 30%.
Upgrade and capacity. Keywords: "200 amp service upgrade," "electrical panel replacement cost," "federal pacific panel replacement," "sub panel installation," "whole house surge protector." Converts over days. Cost per click $15 to $40, cost per call $70 to $180. Ticket $2,200 to $6,000. Budget share: 40%.
EV charging and generators. Keywords: "EV charger installation," "Tesla wall connector installer," "level 2 charger install cost," "whole house generator installation," "generac installer near me." Longest sales cycle, highest intent. Cost per click $10 to $35, cost per call $60 to $160. Ticket $900 to $14,000 for a standby generator with a transfer switch. Budget share: 30%.
The reason to split them is the ad schedule and the follow-up. Emergency runs evenings and weekends. Upgrade and EV run business hours, when someone can answer a question about load calculations. Mixing them means the emergency clicks eat the whole budget by noon.
Match types and the negative keyword list
Use phrase and exact match. Broad match with smart bidding works once you have 30 or more conversions a month feeding the account; before that it spends your money teaching Google what an electrician is.
Build the negative list on day one. The standard electrician waste list:
- jobs, hiring, salary, apprentice, journeyman, union, school, courses, license, exam
- parts, supply, wholesale, home depot, lowes
- diy, how to, youtube, wiring diagram
- car, automotive, boat, rv (unless you do RV pedestals, then keep rv)
- free, cheap, handyman
- utility, power company, outage map, report outage
That last group matters more for electricians than any other trade. When the grid goes down, searches for "power outage" and "electric company" spike enormously, and an unfiltered account will spend a day's budget on people looking for the utility. Add "outage," "power out in my area," and your local utility's name as negatives before storm season.
Review the search terms report every Friday for the first month. Expect to add 20 to 40 negatives in that first month alone.
Budget: what is actually enough
The floor is roughly $1,500 a month plus management for one metro. Below that, you get too few clicks to learn anything and the campaign never leaves the noise.
A workable starting point for a three-truck residential shop in a mid-size metro is $2,000 to $3,500 a month. Expect 20 to 45 calls, of which 60% to 75% are real opportunities, of which you should book 40% to 55%. That is roughly 8 to 18 jobs. If your blended ticket across those is $900, the campaign returns $7,000 to $16,000 on $3,000. Those are ranges, not promises, and they collapse instantly if nobody answers the phone.
Do not start Google Ads before the profile and reviews are in reasonable shape. Traffic sent to a business with 7 reviews, which is the median for electricians, converts at a fraction of the rate of the same traffic sent to one with 80. The reviews guide is cheaper than the ad account.
Local Services Ads sit above everything else
Google's Local Services Ads, the "Google Guaranteed" block, appear above the regular search ads and charge per lead rather than per click. For electricians they typically run $35 to $90 per lead depending on the metro. You have to pass a license and insurance check and a background check, which takes one to three weeks.
They are worth running for most residential shops, but with two cautions. The lead quality is mixed and you must dispute the bad ones within 30 days to get credited, which nobody does consistently. And your position depends on review count and responsiveness, which loops back to the same two things everything else does.
Run Local Services Ads and search ads together, not instead of each other. They occupy different rows of the page and the searcher who skips one often clicks the other.
Tracking, or you are guessing
Three things, none optional:
- Call tracking numbers on the ads, with recording. Not your main line. You need to hear which keywords produce which conversations.
- Conversion actions for phone calls over 60 seconds and for form submissions, imported into the ad account so bidding optimizes toward calls rather than clicks.
- A weekly 15-minute look at the search terms report and the call recordings.
Most electricians who tell me Google Ads did not work never listened to a single recorded call. When you do, the usual finding is not a traffic problem: the person answering quoted a price in nine seconds and lost a job that wanted booking. That is a phone problem, covered in the missed calls guide.
Landing pages, not the homepage
Send panel upgrade clicks to a panel upgrade page. Send EV charger clicks to an EV charger page. The page needs a price range, a phone number at the top that dials on tap, three photos of that exact work, your license number, and a short form. Sending everything to the homepage costs 30% to 50% of the conversions, and the fix is a week of work described in the website guide.
Frequently asked
Can I run this myself? Yes, if you will spend an hour a week on the search terms report for the first two months. Below that level of attention the account drifts toward broad, cheap, worthless clicks. Honest opinion: the setup is learnable, the weekly discipline is what most owners lack.
Should I bid on my competitors' names? It is legal and it is cheap, but it converts poorly for electricians because the searcher already has a referral. Spend that money on service terms instead.
What about Performance Max? Not until you have consistent conversion data. It will happily spend an electrician's budget on display placements that generate nothing you can trace.
Google Ads management is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, set up in your own account so the data stays yours. Text or call (385) 832-6175.