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Where should your $1,000 go?
Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, or hipages. Put in your trade and your numbers and see what the same money buys in each, and which one comes back with more jobs. Sometimes the answer is none of them yet.
Your trade, your numbers
Estimates, not promises. Every number behind them is in the table further down, with where it came from. All figures ex GST.
Or have us look instead
Free. We email you what we find within a business day. No call unless you ask for one.
We never share or sell your details, and we do not add you to a mailing list.
Catching demand, or creating it
Google and hipages catch demand. The customer already has the problem and is looking for someone to fix it. You pay to be in front of him at that moment, so the enquiry is warm, and the number of them is capped by how many people are looking.
Facebook and Instagram create demand. Nobody opens Instagram to find a fencer. The ad puts a finished job in front of someone who has been meaning to do theirs, so the enquiries are cheaper and colder, and it only works for work people plan.
That is why the tool asks what kind of work you want more of before it compares a single dollar.
Why the answer is sometimes “not yet”
If you answer enquiries the next day, every paid channel leaks. The customer who filled in the form has usually rung someone else by then. Fixing that costs nothing, and it makes every dollar you spend later go further.
If a job leaves too little after materials and wages, no channel can pay for itself. The money comes back as work that pays for the ads and not much else.
We run Google and Facebook ads for trades. We don’t sell hipages. The tool still says so when hipages is the better spend.
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.
The numbers behind it
Where a number is measured, it says who measured it and when. Where it is our working assumption, it says that instead.
| What | Figure used | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Searches a month and the price of a click | Two searches per trade, whole metro area, | Google Ads data through DataForSEO, read 18 Sep 2026. Prices are converted from US dollars at US$1 = A$1.42, Trading Economics, 29 Sep 2026. |
| How many of those searches you can buy | At most 1 in 10 | Our working ceiling, not a measurement. Several ads share the top of the page. |
| Ad clicks that become an enquiry | You set it. Starts at 8% | 8.05% is the US home and home improvement average across 13,474 search campaigns (WordStream, 19 May 2026). US data. |
| Facebook and Instagram, cost per enquiry | $60 | The only published figure for home trades is the US home and home improvement average, US$42.95 a lead across 452 campaigns (WordStream, 14 Sep 2026), about A$61. The Australian median across all industries is lower, $50.80, July 2025 to June 2026 (Superads). We use the higher one. Nobody publishes a figure for Australian trades. |
| hipages, cost per lead | $46 | 58 credits, the middle of the 42 to 75 a reviewer reported, at about 80c a credit from the plan prices the same reviewer reported (KingTradie, 6 Sep 2026). hipages does not publish a price list, and the credits a lead costs move with demand. |
| How each channel’s enquiries close | Google: your usual rate. Facebook and Instagram: half. hipages: about a third. | Our assumption. Someone who searched for you is further along than someone who saw an ad. On hipages, up to three businesses can claim each job (hipages FY25 results, 22 Aug 2025), so with everything else equal you win about one in three. |
| How answer speed changes that | Within 5 minutes: full. Within the hour: 85%. Same day: 60%. Next day: 40%. | Our assumption. The direction is well measured: firms that answered inside an hour were about seven times as likely to have a real conversation as those that waited longer (Harvard Business Review, March 2011, US firms). |
| Least worth spending on Facebook and Instagram | $600 a month | About $20 a day, the bottom of the $20 to $30 a day starting range an Australian trades agency publishes (Light Leads). |
| When two channels come out close | Within a fifth of each other | The estimates can’t separate them, so the one with no contract and an enquiry nobody else is sent goes first. |
What it deliberately leaves out
Management fees. If someone runs the ads for you, their fee comes out of the same margin. Our own is $897 a month, and it has to come out of what you keep before any of this is worth it. Run the numbers before you hire anyone, us included.
Where the enquiry lands. Ads send people to your website. A slow or thin site loses them after you have paid for the click, and the tool assumes yours doesn’t.
Repeat work and referrals. A customer who comes back, or sends his neighbour, is worth more than one job. Your real return is higher than this shows if you hold customers well.
The Google Ads break-even calculator goes deeper on one question: what a click is worth to you before it stops making you money.
The enquiry you don’t pay for
Every channel here stops the day you stop paying. A page that ranks for your suburb doesn’t bill you per click. The free audit shows where you come up now, and who is above you.
Run the free audit