Electrical work in New Zealand comes from three places: people searching your trade plus their town, your Google Business Profile, and the customers already in your database. Start with the database, because it is free. Then buy search traffic, which runs from $900 a month in ad spend, plus a management fee on top if someone else runs the account.
Electricians have one advantage over most trades and one disadvantage. The advantage is that your work is compulsory, certified and repeat: switchboards age, houses get renovated, tenancies need checks. The disadvantage is that you look identical to every other sparky in town on a search results page. Most of the marketing job is fixing that second problem.
How electricians get found in Tauranga and the Bay
Almost entirely through Google, and in three different moods. Someone with no power at 7am is not the same buyer as someone pricing a full rewire, and if you run them through one campaign the urgent searches will eat the budget before the big jobs get a look in.
Here is how those three split, and where you catch each one. All figures are NZD.
| Type of work | What they search | Where you catch them | What it costs to run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency and fault finding | ”electrician near me”, “no power tauranga”, “24 hour electrician” | Local pack, Google Search ads on business hours you answer | Ad spend from $900/month, plus a monthly management fee |
| Planned residential | ”switchboard upgrade tauranga”, “house rewire cost nz”, “ev charger installation mount maunganui” | Google Search ads plus a page per service on your site | Same ads budget, plus a one-off site build |
| Commercial and maintenance | Rarely searched. Found through builders, property managers and tenders | Relationships, follow-up, your database | A one-off email and SMS setup, plus a small platform cost |
Two things follow from that table. First, your Google Business Profile does a lot of the work for the top row and costs nothing but attention, so fill it in properly: correct categories, every service listed, real photos of finished switchboards, service area set, and hours that match when somebody answers. That is covered step by step in setting up a Google Business Profile in NZ.
Second, ads only pay when the search has money behind it. Fault finding call-outs are cheap leads and low value jobs. Switchboard upgrades, rewires, EV chargers and heat pump wiring are worth several hundred to several thousand dollars each, so they carry a dearer cost per lead comfortably. What we typically see on local trade accounts is clicks between $2 and $12 and a lead landing somewhere between $25 and $120 depending on the service. Those are ranges from accounts we run, not a published benchmark, and you get your own real number after the first month.
The campaign structure that works is one service and one town per campaign, exact and phrase match keywords, and a negative keyword list from day one blocking “jobs”, “apprenticeship”, “salary”, “course”, “DIY” and every service you do not offer. Skip the negatives and you will pay $8 a click for people looking for electrical apprenticeships. The trade specific version of all of that sits on our Google Ads for tradies page.
An electrician who runs one campaign for everything is funding their cheapest jobs with the budget that should be winning their biggest ones.
Compliance and certification: the trust signals that convert
Put your registration, your certification and your insurance on the page. It costs nothing and it lifts the number of enquiries you get from the traffic you already have, which is cheaper than buying more traffic.
Electrical work carries paperwork the other trades do not. Prescribed electrical work needs a Certificate of Compliance, and an Electrical Safety Certificate where the installation is connected, with the templates published by WorkSafe and the EWRB (worksafe.govt.nz electrical certification templates, as at July 2026). Customers know enough to be nervous about it and almost no electrician’s website mentions it.
So say it plainly, above the fold and again on every service page:
- Your EWRB registration and current practising licence, with the number visible
- “Certificate of Compliance supplied on every job” as a stated standard, not a footnote
- Public liability cover, with the amount
- Reviews that name the suburb the job was in, because a customer in Papamoa trusts a Papamoa job more than a five star average
- Real photos of your own work, ideally a tidy finished switchboard, not a stock image of a man in a hard hat
- A named person and a real phone number, because people ringing an electrician want to know who is coming to their house
That list is the whole difference between a site that converts one visitor in twenty-five and one that converts one in ten. Reviews are the strongest single item on it, and they make every other channel cheaper, because the same ad and the same page convert better with recent five star reviews behind them. The asking part is covered in how to get more Google reviews.
One thing to avoid: do not imply a certification you do not hold, and do not put a price on a rewire you have not seen. Electricians lose trust faster than they build it, and a “from $199 switchboard upgrade” ad that turns into $1,800 on site costs you the review as well as the job.
Which job management software suits an electrical business
For most NZ sparkies it comes down to ServiceM8 or Tradify, and the deciding factor is your phones and your certificates rather than the price. Every figure below was read off each company’s own New Zealand pricing page on 25 July 2026, all in NZD, and vendors change plans without warning.
| Software | NZD per month | Priced by | Why an electrician picks it |
|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceM8 | $0 to $349 | Jobs per month, unlimited logins | Lots of short jobs, iPhone or iPad crews, CoC forms filled in and emailed on site |
| Tradify | $48 to $62 per user | Users, unlimited jobs | Mixed iPhone and Android teams, easiest of the three to learn |
| Fergus | From $53, plus $26 per timesheet user | Account plus user types | Office person plus field staff, purchase orders and site hazards |
The detail behind those numbers, as at July 2026. ServiceM8 is free for 30 jobs a month on one login, then $29, $79, $149 and $349 for 50, 150, 500 and 1,500 or more jobs, all with unlimited staff logins, and its offline mode is the best of the three, which counts in a switchboard cupboard with no signal. It is iOS first, so an Android crew rules it out. Tradify is $48, $52 or $62 per user per month excluding GST and carries compliance certificates on its Pro and Plus plans. Fergus charges separately for certificates, listed at $50 for 1 to 9 staff.
Run the maths on your own job count before you look at a price page, because it swings hard. A two van electrical business getting through 120 service jobs a month pays $79 on ServiceM8. The same three people on Tradify Pro at $52 each pay about $156, and that only makes sense if the extra licences are buying you something, like Android phones or per user quoting.
Honest disclosure: Mitch is a ServiceM8 Certified Partner, so discount our opinion accordingly. We will still tell you when Tradify or Fergus suits you better, because a system nobody uses is worse than the notebook it replaced. The full four way comparison is in the best job management software for NZ tradies, and what setup actually involves is on our job management software page. A standard setup covers your job templates, quote and invoice layouts, Certificate of Compliance forms, Xero sync and training the crew, and data migration is quoted on top once we know how much history is moving. Book a free 15-minute call and you will get a straight number.
Worth saying plainly: software does not get you work. It stops quotes going out late and invoices going out never. If the phone is quiet, that is a marketing problem and no app fixes it.
What to run when the commercial work goes quiet
Run to your own database first, then move ad budget onto residential service work. Both are faster and cheaper than trying to win a new commercial contract inside a quiet month, and one of them costs you no media spend at all.
Every electrician is sitting on a list they have never used: past customers, unsold quotes, and every property they have ever issued a certificate for. Those people already know you and they convert several times better than a stranger who clicked an ad. We have run exactly this play for other trades. One seasonal email and SMS campaign to a dormant list of 2,000 past customers produced 55 bookings and $17.5K of revenue with no extra ad spend, and cleaning up a 3,000 record database for SWISH Property Services lifted rebookings by 150 per cent. Setting that up is a one-off cost plus a small monthly platform fee.
For an electrical business the messages almost write themselves:
- Switchboards and old wiring. Anyone whose place you have worked on that still has a ceramic fuse board or rubber wiring. One message, one photo, one reason to act.
- Rental compliance. Landlords and property managers on your list, ahead of tenancy changeover season.
- Heat pumps, EV chargers and outdoor power. Sell into spring, and go to the customers who already trust you rather than bidding against every other sparky in town.
- Every quote from the last 90 days that went quiet. One polite message each. A good number of them chose nobody at all.
Then adjust the ads rather than switching them off. When commercial work dries up, that is usually a sign the residential searches are still running, so shift the budget across, tighten the towns and put the money on the services with real job value. If you cut your ads entirely for a quiet quarter, you also lose the data and the momentum, and you pay to rebuild both in three months.
Facebook and Instagram fit here too, at a monthly management fee plus ad spend from $500 a month. Not for emergencies, but seasonal offers and before-and-after posts of a tidy new switchboard do work on a local audience who have already met you.
If you want the order we would spend your next dollar in, that is the whole point of our marketing for tradies work: find the part that is actually costing you money, fix that one properly, then move on. Book the free 15-minute call, tell me what your last three months looked like, and I will tell you straight where your next dollar should go, even if the answer is that you do not need me yet.
