Commercial Cleaning Melbourne: 26 Leads at $109.06 in a 20-Day Period

Commercial cleaning is not a volume game

Robust Facility Solutions does not need a thousand enquiries a month. It needs the facility manager, the strata manager, the operations lead who has quietly had enough of the current contractor and decided to do something about it this week.

There are only so many of those people in Melbourne on any given day, and they do not search often. That single fact governs everything about how this category has to be advertised.

Chase reach and the inbox fills with end-of-lease requests, one-off carpet jobs and householders after a quote for their own place — every one of whom costs exactly the same per click as the person running a four-level office in Docklands. Chase precision too hard and you risk being invisible on the day the real buyer looks.

What you are actually buying when you win one

A commercial cleaning contract is not a job. It is a relationship with a term on it, usually renewed rather than re-tendered, and often decided after a site walk-through rather than off a price on a website.

Two things follow from that. A single enquiry is worth far more than the click price suggests, because the thing being bought recurs. And the buyer is a professional comparing reliability and coverage rather than hunting the cheapest hourly rate, so an enquiry from a pure price shopper is usually a wasted drive.

Melbourne adds its own pressure

The market here runs from single-operator outfits to national facilities groups with procurement teams and tender desks. Bid on the obvious searches and you are up against companies whose contracts run for years and who price a click accordingly.

What the business needed was small and specific: a handful of the right enquiries, arriving reliably, at a cost that made sense against a contract measured in years rather than an afternoon.

What we took on

One campaign, run tight. The brief was not to make the account bigger. It was to make almost every click count. The stretch reported below is a single measured window out of the account, left undated so the client's trading calendar stays its own business.

Which searches get bought and which get ignored is our own work and stays that way. The honest summary is that the account was built around the enquiries that turn into booked cleaning contracts, and everything else was treated as a cost to be removed.

The scale is worth stating plainly, because it is unusual. Taken over the whole account rather than one period, it was shown 2,436 times and clicked 149 times. One hundred and forty-nine clicks, each one paid for on purpose.

What 149 clicks did

In the measured period the account delivered 26 enquiries at $109.06 each across 20 days, from 133 clicks and 2,203 impressions. Just under one click in five became an enquiry: 19.55%.

• 26 enquiries at $109.06 each — across a 20-day period in 2026
• 19.55% of clicks became an enquiry — same period
• 31 enquiries in total from 149 clicks — across the account's wider run
• 20.81% enquiry rate and a 6.12% click-through rate — account-wide
• $102.27 per enquiry, taken over the whole account rather than one period
• 24.09% impression share, with a top-of-page position 14.31% of the time — on the account's broader average

20.81% of clicks became an enquiry across the account's wider run. One in five people who clicked went on to make contact.

In a category where two or three per cent is common and largely accepted, that is a different order of relevance, and bidding cannot buy it. It happens when the person clicking has already recognised themselves in the ad.

Over the wider account it was seen 2,436 times, clicked 149 times, and produced 31 enquiries including 4 phone calls, at $102.27 each. Small numbers by the standards of a consumer account, which is rather the point — 149 clicks here did work that most commercial cleaning accounts need thousands of clicks to do.

The buyer sits at a desk

Split the measured period by device and you can see exactly who was enquiring. Desktop served 1,007 impressions, took 50 clicks and produced 17 of the month's 26 enquiries. Mobile served more impressions at 1,191 and took considerably more clicks at 83, but produced 9. Tablet contributed 5 impressions and no clicks at all.

That is close to the reverse of a residential cleaning account, and it is a useful tell. Two thirds of the enquiries came from somebody at work, on a work machine, during work hours, sorting out a problem that belongs to a building rather than a home.

Mobile drew nearly twice the clicks for roughly half the enquiries. That is the signature of curiosity, not a buyer.

What we are not claiming

This is one strong month of trading, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

A short 2-day stretch after it added 5 enquiries from 16 clicks. Consistent with the period before it, and far too thin to lean on. Nobody should build an argument on a couple of days, ourselves included.

What it meant for the business

31 enquiries is a genuine sales pipeline for a facility cleaning business — enough site walk-throughs to keep a quoting schedule full without burying the team in requests that were never going anywhere.

The value is not really in the count, though. It is in who was on the other end of it. When one in five clicks becomes an enquiry, and two thirds of those arrive from a desktop during business hours, whoever answers the phone stops screening and starts quoting.

For a business whose sales process means physically attending a site, that distinction has a price on it. Every walk-through for a job that was never going to happen is half a day and a tank of fuel.

There is a planning benefit too. A cleaner who knows an enquiry cost $109.06 in the period we are reporting can work backwards from the number of contracts they want to win to what the advertising has to supply. Very different from setting a monthly budget and waiting to see what the phone does.

Room left on the table

The campaign held 24.09% impression share across the account's wider run and appeared in a top-of-page position 14.31% of the time. Around three quarters of the relevant Melbourne demand in that window happened without this business in it.

In a market where every win is a recurring contract, that is a lot of room.

Questions Melbourne cleaning businesses ask

What does a commercial cleaning lead cost in Melbourne?

In this account, $109.06 in the measured period and $102.27 across the account's wider run. That is one Melbourne commercial cleaning account, not a benchmark. What makes the figure usable is the contract sitting behind it — commercial cleaning revenue recurs, so the cost of an enquiry has to be judged against the life of an account rather than the value of a single clean.

Do I need a big budget to advertise commercial cleaning?

Not necessarily. This account produced 31 enquiries from 149 clicks and 2,436 impressions. Small accounts can work in this category precisely because the buyer is rare. You are not trying to be everywhere; you are trying to be there on the few days the right person looks.

Why do I keep getting residential enquiries when I only do commercial work?

Because the words overlap almost completely and the searcher neither knows nor cares how you segment your business. Sorting that out is the actual job. In this account 19.55% of clicks in the selected period became an enquiry, which is what the figures look like once the residential and one-off traffic is no longer being paid for.

Is a single month enough to judge an account?

No, and we would say that even where the month is a good one. This is one selected period, with a short later stretch that added 5 enquiries from 16 clicks. It is what happened, in the window it happened in. Anyone extrapolating a year from it is guessing.

Bring the numbers

If you run a commercial or facility cleaning business in Melbourne and most of your enquiries are the wrong kind — householders, one-off cleans, price shoppers who will never sign a contract — that is a solvable problem and one we solve often.

Book a conversation and bring twelve months of figures with you. We will tell you which part of the spend is buying contracts and which part is buying walk-throughs you should never have driven to.