Electrician leads Sydney at $81.48 each in a 19-day period

A phone that either rings with the right people or does not

Aus Electrical and Data Services does electrical and data work across Sydney — switchboards, power, cabling, comms racks, and the call-outs that come with all of it. One good commercial job pays for a month of marketing. A quiet fortnight is felt within a week. There is no marketing department here. There is a phone.

Contracting of this kind sits in an awkward commercial spot. Residential emergency work is urgent, small and fiercely contested. Commercial cabling is worth many times more per job, but the buyer is slower and much rarer — a builder, a facilities lead, an office fit-out manager who searches once and then decides over a week. Advertising has to reach both without paying commercial prices for residential curiosity.

When we looked at the account, exposure was not the problem. Across the two periods reported below — both picked out of the account and left undated on purpose — it was put in front of Sydney searchers 901,856 times. Plenty of people saw it.

What that exposure cost to turn into work was the problem. Those impressions produced 3,115 clicks over the same stretch, a click-through rate of 0.35%, and taken together the account ran at $246.89 per enquiry with just 1.25% of clicks becoming an enquiry. For an electrician chasing switchboard upgrades, data cabling and emergency call-outs, that is a number you feel in the bank account. Every dollar spent on a click from someone who was never going to book is a dollar that did not go into the van, the apprentice, or the next quote.

This is the ordinary failure mode of electrical advertising in a large city, and it is worth naming because from a distance it looks like success. A six-digit impression count reads beautifully on a report. It was also, here, a description of the problem. Bringing the cost of an enquiry down was never about buying more attention. It was about buying much less of the wrong kind.

What we took on

Two short stretches of trading, three campaigns running side by side, and 901,856 impressions to sort through — each one a decision about whether that search was worth paying for at all. We rebuilt the account around the enquiries that actually turn into booked work, with ads written to the specific job the customer is trying to get done rather than to the broad category they happen to fall into.

How that is done is our own work. It is granular, it happens continuously rather than being set once and forgotten, and it is why the numbers below moved.

This was a short run. We print both periods, including the one that looks worse on the headline metric, because the story only makes sense with both.

The result

In the first period, 23 days long, the account produced 20 enquiries at $163.34 each, from 2,507 clicks and 813,764 impressions. Alongside those enquiries it generated 5 phone calls.

Cost per enquiry is the first thing most people look at, so take the bad-looking version first. It climbed from $163.34 in the first period to $334.84 in the second. On its own that says the account got twice as expensive.

Set it beside the enquiry counts and it says something quite different. Twenty in the first, nineteen in the second — a difference of one. Now add the traffic. The second period bought 608 clicks from 88,044 impressions, roughly a quarter of the earlier click volume and around a tenth of its impressions, and produced almost the same number of enquiries. The enquiry rate went from 0.8% of clicks to 3.13%. Click-through rate went from 0.31% to 0.69% across the same two months, an improvement of 124.15%, and the share of clicks becoming an enquiry improved by 291.72%.

Phone calls tell it more bluntly. Five in the first. Fifteen in the second. Three times the calls from a quarter of the traffic.

Device data makes the shift concrete.

In the first period, desktop was served 89,267 impressions, drew 52 clicks and produced 1 enquiry. Nearly ninety thousand appearances for a single piece of work.

In the second, desktop served 23,703 impressions, drew 188 clicks and produced 9 enquiries. Tablet tells the same story in miniature: 225,168 impressions and 67 clicks in the first period, against 16,792 impressions and 19 clicks in the second.

• 20 enquiries at $163.34 each — a 23-day period in 2026
• 19 enquiries and 15 phone calls — a 27-day period in 2026
• 3.13% of clicks became an enquiry — the second period, up from 0.8% in the first
• 0.69% click-through rate — the second period, up from 0.31% in the first
• 39 enquiries and 21 phone calls in total — across both periods
• $246.89 per enquiry and a 1.25% enquiry rate taken over the two together

One of the three campaigns carried 16 of those enquiries on its own, at $108.04 each.

So why did cost per enquiry rise in the second period if the quality improved? Because the account stopped buying enormous volumes of very cheap, very low-intent attention. Those hundreds of thousands of cheap impressions were not free — they dragged an average down while contributing almost nothing to the phone. Strip them out and what remains is dearer per click and far more likely to be a job. We print the $334.84 rather than burying it, because a case study that only shows a metric moving the flattering way is not evidence of anything.

What it meant for the business

39 enquiries and 21 phone calls across two short periods is a real pipeline for a contracting business. A call from somebody with a dead switchboard or a half-finished data run is not a lead in the abstract. It is a van booked, a quote written, a job that either lands or does not. Going from 5 calls in the first period to 15 in the second changed the daily texture of the place: fewer tyre-kickers on the line, more people who already knew what they needed done and wanted a date.

That matters more in electrical and data than in most trades, because of who answers the phone. Usually the owner, or a coordinator with plenty of other work on. Every unqualified call costs a few minutes of somebody who is otherwise billable, and a hundred of them costs a day nobody planned to lose. Trebling the call count while cutting the click count meant the same person spent less time screening and more time quoting.

It also hands the business a number to plan against. When you know 19 enquiries in the second period came from 608 clicks, you can talk sensibly about what a busier month would take.

Questions we get from Sydney electrical and data contractors

Why would a higher cost per enquiry count as progress?

Because cost per enquiry is an average, and averages can be held down by traffic that never converts. In the first period this account paid for 2,507 clicks and got 20 enquiries. In the second it paid for 608 clicks and got 19. The later enquiries cost more each, $334.84 against $163.34, but the account bought a quarter of the clicks to land almost the same result. Judge those two periods on enquiries and calls, not on the average alone.

Are 901,856 impressions a good sign for an electrician in Sydney?

Not on their own. This account was seen 901,856 times across the two periods with a 0.35% click-through rate and a 1.25% enquiry rate. Volume of exposure is the easiest metric in any account to inflate and the least connected to the phone ringing. Given the choice we would take the second period's picture: 88,044 impressions and 15 phone calls.

Do commercial data jobs and residential call-outs need different advertising?

They behave differently, which is the whole difficulty. In this account one of the three campaigns produced 16 enquiries at $108.04 each while the blended figure across both periods was $246.89 — a wide spread between parts of the same account over exactly the same stretch of trading. Treating all electrical demand as one undifferentiated pool is what makes a blended number look the way that one does.

How long before a rebuilt account shows anything?

Here the movement was visible inside the second month: the first period to the next, enquiry rate 0.8% to 3.13%, calls 5 to 15. That is one account over two short periods, and it is not a promise about yours.

Talk to us

If you run an electrical or data business in Sydney and you are paying for plenty of clicks and not enough call-outs, that gap is fixable. Send us the account and we will tell you honestly what is happening inside it — which searches are earning, which are quietly expensive, and whether the impression count you have been shown means anything at all.