How much should a NZ tradie actually spend on ads?

Nearly every tradie we speak to asks the same first question: what should I be spending? The honest answer is that the number comes out of your own maths, not an industry average. Work backwards from the jobs you want and the budget sets itself.

Start with the job, not the budget

Take your average job value and your gross margin on it. If a typical job is $6,000 and you keep 35%, that job is worth roughly $2,100 to the business. Now decide what you'd happily pay to win one — most trades are comfortable spending 8-12% of gross profit to acquire a customer, so somewhere around $170-$250 per booked job.

Next, look at your conversion rate. If you quote well and close one in three of the leads that come through, you can afford roughly $55-$85 per lead. That's your cost-per-lead ceiling, and it's the only number that tells you whether a campaign is working.

Then multiply by the work you need

If you want four extra jobs a month at a one-in-three close rate, you need twelve leads. At $70 a lead that's $840 a month in ad spend. That is the budget — not a round number someone suggested, but the amount required to produce the work you actually want.

Why spending too little fails

Under about $700-$800 a month in New Zealand, Meta and Google struggle to gather enough conversion data to optimise properly. You end up paying learning-phase prices forever and concluding that ads don't work. It's usually better to run a properly funded campaign in one suburb cluster than a starved one across a whole region.

The numbers only mean something if you track them

All of this falls apart if you can't tell which leads turned into jobs. Call tracking, a simple lead source field in your quoting software, and a habit of asking every caller where they found you will tell you more than any dashboard.