Home / Google Ads for steel fabrication & engineering
Google Ads for steel fabrication & engineering — B2B search, run by seniors.
Manufacturing PPC is the opposite of consumer PPC: a handful of searches a month, but the person typing is often an estimator or buyer with a package to place. You are not chasing hundreds of leads — you are competing for fewer, bigger enquiries. One coded contract through our steel fabrication client's account has been worth £80k+ (client-reported). We build accounts that win those few searches, and we measure them to jobs won, not click counts.
Retainers from £950/month · no contracts past month three
At £2,800 a month in clicks, a typical ~£35 lead buys about 80. Get the same 80 at £20 and roughly £1,200 a month comes free — more than the fee. Worked in full on the pricing page (LocaliQ 2026 framing).
No call required · read-only access · in writing within 48 hours
When one enquiry can be worth £80k, you cannot afford to waste any
A consumer account that leaks 20% of its budget still produces leads. A fabrication account that leaks 20% may have just spent the clicks that would have reached the one buyer who mattered this month. B2B manufacturing search is low volume and high stakes, and the waste nearly always comes from the same six places:
- Retail and DIY traffic. "Steel suppliers near me", "buy box section", someone who wants a single gate welded. Real clicks, charged at full price, with no contract behind any of them.
- Job hunters. "Welder jobs", "fabricator vacancies", "coded welder salary" — recruitment searches sit right next to commercial ones, and a loose account pays for all of them.
- Informational searches. "What is CNC machining", students and design engineers doing research. They click, they read, they were never going to send a drawing.
- Capability mismatch. Budget bidding on structural steelwork when you do precision sheet metal, or the reverse. The click is charged whether or not you could ever quote the job.
- Every click sent to the homepage. An estimator checking capabilities, accreditations and capacity finds a generic homepage, leaves, and asks the next firm on the results page instead.
- Untracked enquiries. RFQs arrive by phone and email, nothing is wired back to the keyword, and the account is judged on lead counts in a sector where one contract dwarfs a year of leads.
£120K/MO BOOKED, INCL. AN £80K CONTRACT — STEEL FABRICATION, CLIENT-REPORTED · PLUS ONE AUTOMOTIVE TAKEOVER, LIVE ACCOUNT DATA, ANONYMISED — THE RESULTS SECTION BELOW HAS THE FULL SET
Do the maths at B2B volumes. Your market may only produce a few dozen qualified searches a month. A broad-match account left to roam spends the budget on the other kind — and you will not see it in the top-line numbers, because the clicks still arrive. That is why the first thing we produce is the 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit: your live account, read-only access, findings in writing within 48 hours.
Context: LocaliQ's 2026 cross-industry search averages put cost per lead near £50 at an 8.18% conversion rate. In fabrication the average matters less than the single enquiry that becomes a contract — the discipline is the same, the stakes per enquiry are higher.
What we run for fabrication and engineering firms
B2B PPC is not a different discipline. It is the same discipline with less traffic to hide behind — every search-term line matters, because there are not many of them. Three things carry the account:
Capability-level campaign structure
One campaign per capability you actually want more of — structural steelwork, sheet metal, CNC machining, coded welding, architectural metalwork — with tight match types and negative lists for retail, DIY and recruitment searches, reviewed weekly. You approve the capability list before anything goes live.
A page per capability
An estimator searching "sheet metal fabrication" lands on your sheet metal page, not your homepage. Each page answers what a buyer actually checks — capabilities, capacity, accreditations, lead times — and gives them a way to send drawings. Message-matched pages lift conversion rates and Quality Score, which cuts what you pay per click.
Tracking to jobs won, not clicks
RFQ forms, drawing uploads and calls are tracked back to the keyword that produced them, then reconciled against your quote log as jobs land. Fabrication sales cycles run weeks or months, so we hold attribution over the cycle — budget follows the searches that become contracts, not the ones that produce cheap enquiries.
Run by seniors, start to finish. Your account is handled by one of three senior marketers. No juniors, no hand-offs, no account manager between you and the person doing the work.
William Thomas · David Peters · Amalie LinesThree senior marketers. Every account is one of ours.
Buyers check you from site, on a phone. A page that takes eight seconds to load loses the enquiry as surely as a bad keyword does.
The numbers behind the method
Most agency sector pages borrow proof from somewhere else. This one does not have to: the largest result on our books is a steel fabrication firm. The other two tiles are automotive — included because the method that produced them is the method we run everywhere.
Work booked through the account for a steel fabrication firm.
Client-reported.Cost per lead, vehicle remapping specialist, taken over from a previous agency. 16.44% CVR.
Live account data, 14 days, anonymised.Cost per lead, specialist automotive network. 468 leads in 30 days.
Live account data, 30 days, anonymised.One contract can carry the account. Within that steel client's £120k a month of booked work, one coded contract has been worth £80k+ on its own (client-reported). That is the shape of B2B search: you are not buying hundreds of leads, you are buying the chance to quote for work that moves the order book.
Across all three desks: £191K of managed spend, 10.6K conversions, £17.95 cost per conversion at a 16–17% conversion rate in an average month (live account data, anonymised). For comparison, LocaliQ's 2026 cross-industry search averages sit near £50 per lead at 8.18%.
Pricing for fabrication and engineering firms
From £950 a month on top of your media budget, and you can leave after month three. The fee buys senior hours on a low-volume account where every search-term line gets read: capability campaigns, weekly policing, a proper page per capability, and enquiries reconciled against your quote log.
From £950 /month for fabrication firms
- Capability-level campaign structure, built or rebuilt
- Weekly search-term policing and negative keyword lists
- A landing page per capability, message-matched to the ad
- RFQ, drawing-upload and call tracking wired back to the keyword
- Enquiry-to-quote-to-won reconciliation across the sales cycle
- Written monthly reporting, measured to the pound
- No contracts past month three
Worked maths, B2B version: you do not need 80 leads a month. If the account produces ten qualified RFQs and one becomes a contract, the retainer is being judged against work measured in five figures. Our steel client reports £120k a month booked through the account; one coded contract within it has been worth £80k+.
And it compounds: every pound of waste removed is re-spent on the handful of searches that estimators and buyers actually type, month after month.
Not sure the account needs a retainer? Start with the audit. If your setup is already tight, we will say so in writing and you have lost nothing.
Questions manufacturers ask us
Does Google Ads actually work for steel fabrication and manufacturing?
Yes, but it works differently from consumer PPC. Search volume is low and enquiry value is high, so success is measured in contracts quoted and won, not lead counts. The largest result on our books is a steel fabrication firm reporting £120k a month of work booked through the account (client-reported).
We win most of our work through tenders and relationships. Why advertise?
Search catches the moments relationships miss: a buyer's usual subcontractor is at capacity, a new estimator does not know you, a spec is unusual, a deadline is tight — and they search. A modest budget that owns those moments supplements your business development. It does not replace it, and we will not pretend otherwise.
How many enquiries should we expect?
Fewer than a consumer business, honestly. B2B fabrication terms carry a fraction of consumer volume, so depending on spend, region and capability mix, a well-run account may produce enquiries in the single digits or low double digits each month. The point is what they are worth: one coded contract can be worth £80k+ (client-reported).
Our sales cycle runs weeks or months. How do you measure anything?
Every RFQ, drawing upload and call is tracked to its keyword on day one, then reconciled against your quote log as jobs land. The monthly report names enquiries and their status rather than just counting them, so over a quarter you can see which searches produce contracts — and that is what the budget follows.
Can you keep out DIY jobs, retail steel buyers and job hunters?
Yes — that is most of the early work on a fabrication account. We build negative keyword lists for retail supply, domestic and hobby phrases, and recruitment terms, then tighten them weekly from your actual search-term report. It never reaches zero, but it gets small, and on a low-volume account that difference is the budget.
We already run Google Ads. Is the audit still worth it?
That is the strongest case for it. The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit is built from your live account with read-only access, no call required, findings in writing within 48 hours. If the account is tight, we will tell you so. The findings are yours either way.
Find out what your clicks are worth in contracts, not counts
The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit, built from your live account. Findings in writing within 48 hours, yours either way.
No call required · read-only access · in writing within 48 hours