Three times the calls in a year.
Safeguard Electric is an electrical contractor, and we ran its Google ads. In its last full year of ads, the phone rang three times as often as the year before, on a budget that barely moved. This Safeguard Electric case study is an older one, from 2020 and 2021, and we say that up front. Here are the numbers, where they come from, and what they can and can't tell you.
Longer calls grew faster still.
Calls of 30 seconds or longer went from 29 to 130 over the same two years.
Ad spend
CA$6,238
in the final year, against CA$5,293 the year before.
That's 18% more money for three times the calls.
Over the whole account, 2018 to 2021
324
phone calls from the ads, 175 of them past the half-minute mark, on CA$15,231.
These are calls, not booked jobs. The account holds no job data, so we don't claim jobs we can't count.
Results depend on your market, your budget and how fast you answer the phone.
Most electrical work starts with a phone call. A breaker that keeps tripping, a panel that needs replacing, a renovation that needs a permit and a licensed hand. The person searching usually wants to talk to someone now, not fill in a form and wait.
In the year before this result, Safeguard's ads were bringing in calls, just not many of them, and fewer than half lasted long enough to be a real conversation. For an electrician, a short call is often a wrong number, a price check, or someone who hung up on hold.
We ran Safeguard's Google ads as call-only ads. On a phone, the ad is the business name and a number. One tap and the homeowner is talking to the shop. No website to load, no form, no waiting for a call back.
That suits the way people hire an electrician. They search when something is wrong or a job is about to start, and they want a person on the line.
Every call from the ads went through Google's own call log, with how long it lasted. The account also counted a few "contact us" visits from the website. Those are soft, so we left them out. What's on this page are phone calls, nothing else.
details to come
For how we market electricians today, see electrician marketing. For where calls come from and what they cost compared with buying them, read Electrician Leads, and for what to expect from an agency, Electrician Marketing Agency. The ads side for any business is on Google Ads management.
The budget barely changed between the two years. The calls did. Each call in the final year cost less than half what it had the year before, and more of them were real conversations.
Here's the honest part. The account doesn't tell us which change made the difference, so we won't pick one and call it the reason. And this is a result from 2020 and 2021. Google ads have changed since then, and so have costs. What hasn't changed is the idea: when someone needs an electrician, make it one tap to reach you.
quote to come
They let it run.
Three years of ads gave us enough calls to see what worked and cut what didn't.
They didn't try to buy the result.
The extra calls came without a much bigger budget.
They took the calls.
Call-only ads only work if someone picks up, and the longer calls show people were getting through to a person.
Every number on this page has a source and a date. We count real calls from Google's own call log, not taps on a phone number, and we left out the website visits the account called "contacts". We never put a client's name on a number that isn't theirs.
Source: the Safeguard Electric Google Ads account (Google's call log and the account's spend), pulled October 3, 2026.
From other trades, same homeowners, same phones:
An Ottawa fence and deck company with more than twice the calls in one season.
An East York heating and cooling shop whose new website got it found in the towns next door.
Wondering what a call would cost you today?
Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll look at where your calls come from now and tell you what we'd fix first.
We look at four things: whether your calls get answered, how your Google listing stacks up, whether your website books work or just sits there, and whether you can tell which ads bring in customers. You get what we find in plain words.
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