Free trade lead cost calculator

This free calculator shows what Google Ads clicks cost for your trade, using real Google Ads cost per click data for 15 UK trades and 10 cities, then estimates your enquiries, cost per enquiry and cost per booked job from your own budget and conversion rates. It is free, runs in your browser and needs no email or sign-up. Unavoidable Marketing is a UK-wide, Leeds-based agency that runs Google Ads for trade businesses across the UK, measured on booked jobs rather than clicks, and founder Andrew Heppinstall is on every strategy call.

Last updated: 22 October 2026

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How the calculator works

The calculator takes one real number and four of yours. The real number is the median cost per click for your trade and area, taken from Google Ads keyword data. Your numbers are your monthly budget, your click to enquiry rate, your enquiry to booked job rate and your average job value.

From there the maths is simple, and you can check it with a calculator on your phone:

• Clicks per month = your budget divided by the cost per click.
• Enquiries per month = clicks multiplied by your click to enquiry rate.
• Cost per enquiry = your budget divided by your enquiries.
• Booked jobs per month = enquiries multiplied by your enquiry to booked job rate.
• Cost per booked job = your budget divided by your booked jobs.
• Revenue = booked jobs multiplied by your average job value, and the return is that revenue minus your ad spend.

The two sliders are labelled as your estimate for a reason. Nobody can tell you your conversion rates from a spreadsheet. They depend on your website, your reviews, your prices, how quickly you answer and what kind of work you do. If you track calls and forms, use your real figures. If not, move the sliders to see how much difference a better website or faster call back would make.

The return figure is revenue minus ad spend only. It does not take off materials, labour, van costs, VAT or anyone’s fees, so it is not profit.

Where the data comes from

The cost per click figures come from Unavoidable Marketing analysis of Google Ads keyword data and Google Maps listings (via DataForSEO), 22 October 2026. For each of the 15 trades we took five keywords a customer would type when they want the work done, such as "plumber near me", "boiler repair" or "tree surgeon", and pulled the cost per click and monthly searches for the whole UK. For plumbers, electricians, roofers, heating engineers and locksmiths we also pulled the same keywords for London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Sheffield, Newcastle upon Tyne and Cardiff.

The calculator uses the median of those keywords, the middle value, so one very expensive keyword does not drag the whole figure up. Nationally, the highest median was locksmiths at £30.32 per click and the lowest was window cleaners at £2.41. In London, the median for locksmiths was £47.01.

City figures are small samples. Some city keywords get so few searches that Google returns no cost per click at all, so the calculator tells you how many of the five keywords it used. For the other ten trades only UK figures exist, and the calculator says so when you pick a city. The full method, every keyword and the limits of the data are in the UK trades Google cost report 2026.

What cost per click is, and what it is not

Cost per click is the average amount advertisers paid Google each time someone clicked their ad for that keyword.

It is not a cost per lead, and it is not a cost per job. Plenty of people click, read your page and leave. That gap between a click and a phone call is where most of the money in a Google Ads account is won or lost.

It is also an average across advertisers. What you pay depends on your bids, your ad quality, your landing page, the time of day and who else is bidding that week. Treat the figure as a guide to the market, not a quote.

Worked example

This is an example, not a forecast. It uses the calculator’s default settings and the UK median cost per click for plumbers, and the conversion rates are example figures, not measured ones.

Example: a plumber spends £500 a month at the UK median cost per click of £8.09. That buys about 62 clicks. With an example click to enquiry rate of 10%, that is about 6.2 enquiries, so each enquiry costs about £80.90. With an example enquiry to booked job rate of 40%, about 2.5 of those become booked jobs, at about £202.25 per booked job. At an average job value of £300, that is about £742 of revenue, or about £242 more than the ad spend, before materials and labour.

Now move one slider. In the same example, lift the click to enquiry rate from 10% to 20% and the cost per enquiry halves to about £40.45, with the same budget and the same cost per click. That is why fixing the page people land on, getting reviews in front of them and answering the phone quickly usually does more than chasing a cheaper click.

What to do with your numbers

If the cost per booked job looks too high, do not just cut the budget. Find the weak link: too few enquiries from clicks points at your website and targeting, and too few booked jobs from enquiries points at speed of reply, pricing or the type of enquiry coming in. If you would rather talk it through, book a free call. We work on a flat monthly fee quoted after that call, with ad spend paid straight to Google on your own card, never marked up, and no contract.