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Is PPC still worth it?
Posted by on May 4, 2026 at 3:04 amI know a bit of clickbait title. But I just want to see you opinions on this topic. In my career I had multiple small business clients. Most of them were not e-shops but service providers – electricians, financial advisors, make-up artists etc.
Now I know it totally depends on so many factors but past 2 years I feel like the costs or at least getting a decent results are just too high.
Imagine you are an electrician in Sydney and you have to spend at least 1500$/month to get few calls and even those calls are relevant there was no successful conversion (meaning payed job). I that's just the ad spend without the fee.
So since you are paying for a call around $250 isn't it more worth it to just print flyers for $1500 and just dropped them around the local area?
On the other hand don't even get me started with Meta leads to get clients, most of them sounds like spams, completely out of touch rubbish leads and the increase in price can be felt either.
What is your experience with small business and PPC?
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1 Reply
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Small business is tough coz if small budget. But if you really know what you are doing, you can make it work.
I help out with one small business as a side gig. We started with 600 $ media spend per month last year with the goal of making 100 sales. Blew past that, we are currently past last year’s revenue with 1k ish media spend.
It’s in an ecom vertical with $34 aov
Not saying it’s not hard, but you can make it work
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Hey, I’m in your niche and country if you’re talking Sparkies or home services generally.
Definitely worth it. Pay per click is more acceptable of a cost model than CPM. Google ads and meta print money as job leads sources for all our tradies
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I don’t know about small businesses but we run a Google Ads account that is 95% of our entire conversions and we spend approximately $200-$400,000 a month and without PPC out business would be gone. We have 0 SEO visibility and PPC is worth for us.
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It’s definitely become more difficult to have it make business sense for sure, as most of your competitors will now fight for the same local traffic. Every lead you don’t close becomes more painful as they arrive at higher CPLs, so a tight sales process in the service providers niche is critical.
As long as there’s no other faster channel with a similar or higher intent than PPC, and pairing it with the right tools and proceses, yes it’s still worth it.
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This group is hilarious it’s ppc people that are trying to promote your niche to each other
Yet none of you own a real business, interesting 🤔 -
if you are an expert who can earn expert results, then yes. If your an amateur or undertrained pretending you’re an expert, then no.
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Flyers aren’t crazy for local trades, but PPC isn’t dead… bad economics are. For smaller service businesses, I’d only run it with tight suburb targeting, call tracking, job-value feedback, negatives, and landing pages that pre-qualify. On larger service accounts, the money is in booked revenue and close rate, not cheap calls.
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If PPC is dead, what’s working?
A lot of smaller businesses are living off their investments on PPC because nothing else works that well. It’s dangerous in my opinion because diversity is better, but that’s just how powerful the channel still is.
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Only if you know how to work it
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Some areas are just too oversaturated with similar businesses, so no matter what you do, it’s hard to achieve a decent CPA. Unfortunately, that’s just the reality. It doesn’t mean PPC doesn’t work in general, just not for all niches and locations
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