The question is never whether a channel works. It is whether it works at your job value and your close rate. What follows is Google Ads applied to one trade only, landscapers: what it costs per enquiry and per signed job, where the ceiling sits, what it demands of you, and an unhedged answer at the end.

The numbers that govern the decision: projects run EUR 2,000 to EUR 8,000, the buyer is typically a homeowner planning a terrace, fence or full garden redesign, demand peaks March to June and falls away in November to January, and 5 to 9 genuine enquiries are needed for each customer signed.

The numbers, at a glance

• What one enquiry costs: EUR 34 to EUR 238, being clicks at EUR 2.40 to EUR 7.15 against a landing page converting at 3.0 to 7.0 percent

• What one signed job costs: EUR 170 to EUR 2,142, after allowing 5 to 9 enquiries for every customer signed

• Time from a standing start to the first enquiry: days, assuming you begin with nothing in place

• Straight answer for landscapers: Marginal for landscapers unless you tighten the match types hard, because the searches that look relevant mostly are not.

The shape of Google Ads for this trade

Intent on Google Ads is the highest of any channel, because the person typed the problem into a search box. It captures demand that already exists. Nobody searches for a roofer on a whim.

The limit that rarely appears in a sales conversation: a minimum of around 30 conversions a month before the automated bidding has enough signal to work with. For a garden and landscaping business covering one metro, check that before anything else, because a channel you cannot feed will underperform its own benchmarks indefinitely.

The downside is worth stating plainly. You are bidding against every other installer in the postcode plus at least one lead marketplace with deeper pockets and better data than you. Skill required: Real. An untended account will spend a full budget on broad matches that were never going to convert.

What counts as a qualified garden and landscaping enquiry

Whatever the channel, an enquiry for garden and landscaping work is only useful if it carries garden size, scope, budget band and start date. Anything short of that is a phone number, not a lead.

Build the qualification into the form rather than into the phone call. Three well-chosen questions cost you perhaps fifteen percent of your submissions and remove most of the wasted quoting time, which is a trade almost every contractor should take and very few do.

You are not only bidding against other installers

Lead marketplaces and comparison sites bid on the same terms, hold far more conversion data than any single contractor, and can afford a higher click price because they resell the same enquiry several times. That structural disadvantage is why specific long-tail queries matter so much for one business: they are the searches a national aggregator has not written a page for.

The arithmetic, with every assumption visible

Here is the full chain for garden and landscaping, with every assumption visible so you can substitute your own.

1. Click cost: EUR 2.40 to EUR 7.15 for garden and landscaping keywords, which tracks job value rather than competition alone.

2. Landing page conversion: 3.0 to 7.0 percent of clicks become an enquiry, assuming a page built for one trade rather than a homepage.

3. Cost per enquiry: EUR 34 to EUR 238, which is click cost divided by conversion rate.

4. Enquiries per customer: 5 to 9 for this trade, because not everyone answers, quotes or proceeds.

5. Cost per signed job: EUR 170 to EUR 2,142.

Set the worst case of EUR 2,142 against a midpoint project of EUR 5,000 and acquisition is 42.8 percent of the contract. Whether that works is a question about your gross margin rather than your turnover, which is the step almost everybody omits.

Budget is the qualifier and most enquiries will not volunteer it

Landscaping has the widest gap in home improvement between what a household imagines and what the work costs, because the visible materials are a minority of the price. Presenting bands, for instance a modest refresh, a full terrace and planting scheme, or a complete redesign involving levels, lets people place themselves without being asked to name a figure. It also legitimises the higher band by putting it on the same page as the lower one.

Levels, access and spoil are what blow a landscaping quote

A sloping site, a house with no side access and several tonnes of excavated material to remove will move a price further than the choice of paving ever does. All three are invisible in an online enquiry and all three are cheap to establish with two photographs and one question about whether a barrow can reach the rear garden. Landscapers who ask before travelling quote faster and lose fewer days.

Keyword clusters and negatives that decide a landscaping account

Maintenance queries dominate the search volume in this trade and they will consume a design-and-build budget within days. Separating construction intent from upkeep intent is the whole exercise.

• Bid at full value on: landscaping company plus a place name, patio installation cost, garden design and build, driveway installation, fencing installation, artificial grass installation

• Negatives to load on day one: maintenance, mowing, lawn care, hedge cutting, tree surgery if you do not offer it, weeding, clearance, plants for sale, furniture, turf delivery, jobs, DIY

• Put a price signal on the page: a starting-from figure for a typical terrace removes the enquiries that were never going to reach your minimum, which in this trade is most of them

• Bid seasonally and hard: the auction inverts between February and June, and a flat annual budget spends most of its money in the months with the worst conversion

Phone calls are the conversion in most trades and most accounts do not count them

A large share of enquiries from search arrive as calls rather than forms, especially on urgent work. Accounts that count only form submissions systematically undervalue their best keywords and move budget away from them. Call tracking with a minimum duration threshold, imported as a conversion, usually reorders the keyword ranking inside a fortnight of being switched on.

Work through this before committing to Google Ads

1. Start with your gross margin on a typical garden and landscaping job as a percentage. Not turnover, margin.

2. Divide your ceiling per signed customer by 5 to 9, the enquiries-per-customer range for this trade, to get the maximum you can pay for one enquiry.

3. Compare your maximum per enquiry against the EUR 34 to EUR 238 per enquiry modelled above. If your ceiling is lower, fix conversion or job value before you touch the channel.

4. Agree the test volume and the review date before anything goes live, so that continuing or stopping is a decision about evidence rather than about mood.

How these figures were built

These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote. The channel assumptions behind this page are separate: click prices and conversion rates come from home-improvement campaign performance across Western Europe, and they move with the auction rather than with the trade.

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