Quick answer
They are not the same product. Checkatrade is a fixed monthly subscription — you pay whether the phone rings or not, and the price varies by trade and territory (commonly advertised from roughly £100+ per month plus VAT, higher for busy trades in big catchments). Google Ads is an auction — you pay per click, typically £1.50–£8 per click on trade search terms, and a well-run campaign turns that into an enquiry for roughly £25–£70. A badly run one burns £80–£150 per enquiry. For most trades in 2026 the right answer is neither-first: fix the free Google Business Profile, then add whichever paid channel matches your job value.
How each one actually charges you
The comparison falls apart if you treat both as “lead sources”, because the risk sits in completely different places.
- Checkatrade — fixed cost, variable output. You buy a membership tied to your trade categories and a geographic area, usually on a 12-month agreement. Vetting and the review system are the product. Quiet month? You still pay. Busy month with fifteen enquiries? You still pay the same — which is exactly when it looks like brilliant value.
- Google Ads — variable cost, controllable output. You bid in a live auction for search terms. You pay only when someone clicks, you can pause instantly, and you can turn the tap up in your quiet season. Quiet month? Spend nothing. But the money disappears fast if the targeting, negative keywords and landing page are wrong.
Pricing on both moves. Directory membership is quoted individually by trade and postcode area, and Google’s click prices float with demand — plasterers in a rural county and emergency electricians in a city are not remotely the same auction. Get your own quote and check your own keyword costs before budgeting; anyone giving you a single national number is guessing.
The comparison table
| Checkatrade | Google Ads | |
|---|---|---|
| Charging model | Fixed subscription, typically 12-month term | Pay per click, cancel or pause any time |
| Typical spend | From around £100+/month plus VAT, trade and area dependent | You set it — £300–£600/month is a realistic trade starting budget |
| Cost per enquiry | Depends entirely on volume: brilliant at 10 enquiries, poor at 2 | Roughly £25–£70 tuned; £80–£150 untuned |
| Buyer intent | High — people on the site are actively hiring | High on exact terms (“emergency electrician [town]”), low on broad ones |
| Competition at the moment of contact | You appear beside direct rivals; customers commonly contact three | They land on your page alone if the ad and landing page are right |
| What builds over time | Reviews and a profile — but the asset lives on their platform | Nothing, if you stop. The traffic ends the day the budget does |
| Speed to first lead | Days to weeks, once vetted and reviewed | Hours |
| Control | Low — their ranking, their layout, their rules | High — your keywords, your area, your hours, your message |
| Main risk | Paying through a quiet quarter on a fixed contract | Spending real money on unqualified clicks while you learn |
Worked example one: a £250 average job
Take a domestic electrician or a plumber doing mostly small jobs — call-outs, sockets, taps, minor repairs — averaging £250 with maybe £110 of that as gross profit after materials and travel.
- Checkatrade at £130/month. Six genuine enquiries a month, converting three, is £43 per enquiry and about £87 per won job. That is comfortably inside the margin. Drop to two enquiries in a quiet February and the same membership costs £65 per enquiry, which hurts.
- Google Ads at £400/month. At £3.50 a click that is roughly 114 clicks. At an 8% conversion rate on a decent landing page, that is 9 enquiries — about £44 each. Convert half and you have won around £1,125 of work for £400. Workable, but only once the campaign is tuned; in month one, a 3% conversion rate would make each enquiry cost over £100 and wipe out the margin.
Verdict at this job value: the fixed subscription is usually the lower-risk choice, provided your trade and area actually generate volume on the platform. Ask for realistic local enquiry numbers for your specific trade and postcode before signing anything, and get the answer in writing.
Worked example two: a £6,000 average job
Now take a renderer, a full-house rewire specialist, a bathroom fitter or a landscaper averaging £6,000 with roughly £1,800 gross profit per job.
- Google Ads at £600/month. Even at a poor £120 per enquiry, five enquiries converting at one in four means one job for £600 of spend — a 3:1 return on gross profit. Get the campaign properly tuned to £60 per enquiry and it becomes 10 enquiries, two or three jobs, and the maths becomes very hard to argue with.
- Checkatrade at £150/month. One won job a quarter still pays for the year several times over. The catch is different here: on high-value work, customers contact three firms from the same results page, so you are entering a price comparison by default.
Verdict at this job value: paid search usually wins, because a single job funds months of spend and you control the message the customer sees. This is also where a dedicated landing page rather than your homepage makes the biggest difference — our guide to Google Ads costs for UK small businesses covers the budget mechanics in detail.
The channel both of these are competing with
Here is the uncomfortable part. For most UK trades, the biggest single source of enquiries is neither of the above — it is the free Google map listing that appears when someone searches “electrician near me”. A complete Google Business Profile with correct service areas, real job photos, current opening hours and a steady flow of reviews frequently out-produces paid channels, at a marginal cost of zero.
If that listing is half-finished, spending £400 a month on ads is like advertising a shop with the shutters down. Fix it first: our guide to Google Business Profile optimisation is a couple of hours’ work with no ongoing fee, and the companion piece on earning and handling Google reviews covers the part that actually drives ranking in the map pack.
The same logic applies to your website. Both directories and ads send people somewhere to make a decision. If that somewhere is a slow, thin page with no photos of your work and no obvious phone number, you are paying full price for traffic and converting a fraction of it.
Five mistakes that make both channels look worse than they are
- Not answering the phone. The single biggest waste in trade marketing. Directory and ad enquiries are usually contacting several firms in the same ten minutes; the first to respond wins a disproportionate share. A missed call is a paid-for lead handed to a competitor.
- Sending ad clicks to the homepage. Someone searching “bathroom fitter [town]” should land on a page about bathroom fitting in that town, with photos, prices and one obvious call to action — not a general homepage they have to navigate.
- No negative keywords. Without them, budgets get eaten by searches for jobs, courses, DIY guides and “free” anything. This one setting is the usual difference between £40 and £120 per enquiry.
- Judging a directory on one quiet month. Trades are seasonal. Judge a subscription over two quarters against tracked enquiry numbers, not against how last month felt.
- Tracking nothing. If you cannot say how many enquiries each channel produced last month, you are not comparing them — you are guessing. Ask every caller where they found you and write it down; it takes seconds and settles the argument permanently.
What we would do with £400 a month
- £0 — finish the Google Business Profile. Categories, service areas, hours, twenty real job photos, and a routine for requesting reviews after every completed job.
- £0 — make sure you look the part. Consistent branding across the van, quotes and profile photos is what turns a click into a call. If the logo is holding you back, ours is a flat £129.
- £300–£400 — run one tight Google Ads campaign on your highest-value service, in a radius you will genuinely travel, during hours you can answer the phone, with a proper negative keyword list and a dedicated landing page.
- Then add the directory if, and only if, the local enquiry numbers for your trade stack up — and only after you can measure what each channel delivers.
Over a longer horizon, neither paid channel builds an asset you own. Search rankings and a strong website do, which is why the sensible sequence for most trades is ads for cash flow now and organic search for cost per lead later. Our comparison of SEO versus Google Ads works through that trade-off, and the trades marketing statistics guide puts the channel mix in context.
Getting help with it
We build and manage trade campaigns end to end: Google Ads management including keyword research, negative lists, landing pages and call tracking, plus SEO for the longer game where the leads eventually stop costing per click. We have delivered 4,500+ orders for UK businesses since 2017, rated 4.8/5 “Excellent”.
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Sources & Further Reading
- Checkatrade membership information for trades — Checkatrade
- How the Google Ads auction and costs work — Google
- UK construction industry data — Office for National Statistics
Frequently asked questions
Is Checkatrade or Google Ads cheaper for a UK trade business? +
It depends on volume and job value. Checkatrade is a fixed subscription (commonly advertised from around £100+ per month plus VAT, varying by trade and area), so its cost per enquiry falls the busier it gets. Google Ads costs roughly £1.50–£8 per click, giving about £25–£70 per enquiry when tuned and £80–£150 when not. High-value trades usually do better on ads; small-ticket trades often prefer the fixed cost.
How much should a tradesperson budget for Google Ads? +
A realistic UK starting budget is £300–£600 per month, concentrated on one high-value service in a radius you will genuinely travel. Below about £200 a month there is rarely enough data to optimise, and clicks get spread too thin to learn anything from.
Do trade directories still generate work in 2026? +
Yes, for trades and areas with real search volume on the platform. The caveat is that customers routinely contact three firms from the same page, so you are competing on price and response speed from the first minute. Ask for local enquiry figures for your specific trade and postcode before committing to a 12-month term.
What is a good cost per lead for a trade business? +
Judge it against your gross profit per job, not against a national average. A useful rule of thumb is keeping cost per won job under 10–15% of the gross profit on that job. On a £250 job that means single-digit to low-double-digit pounds per enquiry; on a £6,000 job, £100 per enquiry can still be excellent value.
What should I do before spending anything on either channel? +
Complete your Google Business Profile, add real job photos, set correct service areas and hours, and build a routine for requesting reviews after every job. It costs nothing, frequently out-produces paid channels for trades, and it makes every pound you later spend on ads or a directory convert better.
