Mel had been burned by four agencies and was ready to walk away from digital marketing entirely. Here's how rebuilding Tiger Electrical's Google Ads from scratch turned a stagnant pipeline into record-breaking revenue months.
Mel runs Tiger Electrical, a small electrical contracting business she's built over 17 years on the north side of Brisbane. By the time she found WJE Digital, she'd already been through four or five different marketing agencies. Not one of them delivered a return on investment.
As a small contractor, cash flow is everything. Spending a couple of thousand dollars a month on ads that weren't bringing in work wasn't just frustrating, it was creating real financial pressure. Mel was completely jaded with the industry and ready to walk away for good.
When she came across our ad, she gave it one last go. Her words: "You were the last roll of the dice."
Electricians do emergency call-outs, residential fit-outs, commercial work, and aircon installs. Each service type attracts different searchers with different job values. Lumping them into one vague campaign means paying the same rate for a tyre-kicker as a ready-to-book customer.
Someone searching "electrician near me" at 9pm has a problem that needs fixing tonight. Generic ad copy that reads like a Yellow Pages listing loses every time to a competitor who acknowledges the situation and gives the searcher a clear reason to call right now.
Without a proper negative keyword list, broad electrical searches pull in people looking up how to wire a plug themselves, compare pricing out of curiosity, or research for school. Every one of those clicks burns budget that should be going toward people ready to book.
When ads aren't converting, the monthly agency fee comes straight out of your pocket with nothing coming back in. For Mel, four agencies in a row had burned through budget and delivered nothing, creating real financial stress on a business she'd built over 17 years.
Rather than patch a broken account, we scrapped the old campaigns entirely and rebuilt from the ground up, using the data from the old account to inform what was actually working.
We researched how Brisbane locals actually search for electricians and built tightly themed ad groups by service type, separating emergency, residential, commercial, and aircon. Every click had genuine, high-value intent behind it.
We wrote ads that matched the searcher's exact situation, whether they needed an emergency sparky at midnight or a quote for a commercial fit-out. Specific, local, and written to get the phone ringing rather than just get a click.
We deliberately targeted higher-intent searches, trading cheap broad traffic for fewer but far more qualified visitors ready to book. The result was a lower cost per lead despite a higher cost per click.
Within three months, the rebuilt campaigns were delivering over four times the monthly leads at nearly half the cost per enquiry. Turnover grew month on month, and January through March became the highest-grossing months Tiger Electrical had seen in 17 years of operation.
"January, February, March this year were the highest grossing months we've had since we started our business 17 years ago." Mel, Owner, Tiger Electrical
| Metric | Previous Agency (6 months) | WJE Digital (3 months) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Leads * | 46 | 102 | +121% |
| Leads Per Month | ~7.7 | ~34 | +341% |
| Conversion Rate | 3.25% | 13.03% | +301% |
| Cost Per Lead | $83.43 | $46.27 | ↓45% |
| Click-Through Rate | 5.18% | 7.87% | +52% |
| Search Impression Share | <10% | 35.84% | +258% |
* Total Leads reflects different measurement periods (6 months vs 3 months) and is not a direct comparison. Leads Per Month is the like-for-like metric.
The average CPC went from $2.71 to $6.03. That was a strategic choice. Cheap clicks from broad keywords look good on a report but don't fill a job schedule. By targeting searches where someone is actively ready to book an electrician right now, we convert at 4x the rate, which is why cost per lead dropped 45% and Mel's revenue grew month on month despite a higher CPC.
"January, February, March this year were the highest grossing months we've had since we started our business 17 years ago.""We've had literally increases in turnover month on month. In one month alone, we increased our revenue by almost $20,000. It's huge."
"Cash flow is not such an issue now. There's money in the bank at the end of the month. We can afford to pay our suppliers. We can afford to get more guys on the road."
"You say what you're gonna do and you deliver on what you say. Transparency, communication, that's what we really appreciate."
WJE Digital is a Brisbane-based digital marketing agency that manages Google Ads and Meta Ads exclusively for Australian trades and home service businesses. Every campaign we run is measured against one thing: confirmed jobs, not just click volume. Tiger Electrical is one of a growing number of trade operators we work with across Brisbane and beyond.
If you're interested but not quite there yet, these are the questions we hear most from operators in the same spot Mel was in before she signed up.
No. The improvements came from fixing structural problems that are common across poorly managed Google Ads accounts: wrong keywords, weak copy, no negative keyword lists, and no coherent bid strategy. When those are fixed properly, the results follow. The same process is applied to every account we take on.
Yes. The intent-based keyword strategy and service-specific ad group structure we use works across any Australian metro area. We build each campaign around how people in your specific area search, not a copy-paste template. The fundamentals are the same regardless of location.
For electrical services in a metro area, you typically need a minimum of $1,500 to $2,000 per month in ad spend to generate meaningful volume and enough data to optimise. Below that, results come in too slowly to improve performance. We'll give you a realistic figure for your specific area in a free strategy call.
If you're spending on ads and not seeing results, the problem is almost always fixable. Book a free strategy call and we'll tell you exactly what's wrong and what we'd do differently.
Book a Free Strategy CallNo obligation. No hard sell. Straight answers.