Solar is one of the few Australian categories where Google Ads still produces leads at a defensible cost and still loses money for most of the companies running it. Across the Australian lead-generation accounts we audit, residential solar enquiries come in at roughly $60–180 AUD each, and somewhere between 8% and 15% of them end in a signed install. The gap between those two numbers is where the margin goes. The accounts that work are not the ones with the cheapest clicks; they are the ones that stop paying for enquiries they were never going to convert.
Quick reference:
- Residential solar CPC in Australia: $6–18 AUD, rising above $20 on battery and commercial terms
- Cost per enquiry: $60–180 AUD residential, $150–400 AUD commercial
- Enquiry-to-install rate: 8–15% for standard residential; below 5% means a qualification problem, not a traffic problem
- Realistic monthly budget floor: $3,000–5,000 AUD per metro area before Smart Bidding has enough data
- Battery-attached enquiries now dominate the high-value end of the market since the federal battery rebate opened on 1 July 2025
- The decisive metric is cost per signed install, not cost per lead — they move in opposite directions more often than they move together
Does Google Ads work for solar companies in Australia?
Yes, and it works better than in most lead-gen categories, because solar buyers search before they buy and the average job value absorbs a high cost per lead. A $9,000 AUD residential system at a 20–25% gross margin can carry a $150 AUD enquiry comfortably if one in eight enquiries installs. The same maths collapses at one in twenty.
What makes solar difficult is not competition for clicks — it is that the category attracts a large volume of people collecting quotes for a decision they will not make for eighteen months, or who are not the decision maker, or who are renting the roof they are asking you to quote on. None of that is visible at the click. It surfaces at the appointment, which is exactly where your cost sits. So the channel question is settled: Google Search captures the intent. The real question is what you do with the enquiries after they arrive.
What do solar leads actually cost?
Residential solar clicks run $6–18 AUD in the capital cities, with Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane at the top of that range and regional Queensland and South Australia noticeably cheaper. Battery-specific terms sit above them, commonly $12–25 AUD, because the buyers are further along and the job values are higher. Commercial solar terms reach $20–40 AUD but convert at a far lower rate over a much longer cycle.
Those clicks turn into enquiries at 6–12% on a landing page built for the purpose, which puts residential cost per enquiry at $60–180 AUD and commercial at $150–400 AUD. If your account sits far below those ranges, that is not usually a win — it normally means broad match is buying “solar panel prices” research traffic, and the cheap enquiries will show up as a bad install rate two months later.
Why the battery rebate changed the account in 2026
The federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program, which opened on 1 July 2025 and discounts installed battery storage through the same small-scale certificate mechanism the Clean Energy Regulator administers for panels, moved the centre of the market. Search demand shifted from first-time panel installs toward battery retrofits on systems installed five to ten years ago — a different buyer, a higher job value, and a shorter deliberation window.
Practically, that means three things for the account. Battery and retrofit terms deserve their own campaign rather than living inside a generic solar campaign, because their CPCs and conversion rates are different enough to distort a shared bid strategy. Rebate-related queries such as “battery rebate” or “how much is the battery rebate” pull heavy research traffic and belong on an informational page, not a quote form. And any ad copy quoting a rebate figure needs to match what you can actually deliver, since the ACCC treats solar savings and rebate claims as a standing enforcement priority.
How should a solar company structure its Google Ads account?
Four campaigns cover almost every installer. Brand, to defend your name against competitors and the comparison sites bidding on it — cheap, high converting, and the first thing to protect. Core residential solar, built on “solar panels [city]”, “solar installers near me” and system-size terms. Battery and retrofit, separated for the reasons above. And commercial, if you genuinely service it, kept apart because its cycle and CPCs will otherwise wreck the residential numbers.
Location targeting does more work here than keyword strategy. Set your service radius to where your crews actually go, exclude the rest explicitly, and use the “presence” setting rather than “presence or interest” so you stop paying for people in Perth researching a Sydney install. The same discipline that keeps tradie accounts profitable applies directly: tight geography, high intent, fast response.
Performance Max is worth testing only once Search is producing consistent, qualified volume. Run before that, it spends into the cheapest available inventory and enquiry quality drops sharply — the pattern described in our Performance Max guide.
Which negative keywords matter most in solar?
Solar has one of the highest wasted-spend rates of any Australian vertical, and it is concentrated in predictable places. Four clusters are worth blocking on day one: DIY and equipment shopping (“solar panels for sale”, “solar kit”, “12v”, “camping”, “caravan”), employment (“solar installer jobs”, “solar course”, “CEC accreditation”), rental and second-hand (“solar hire”, “used solar panels”), and pure research with no purchase intent (“how do solar panels work”, “solar panel diagram”).
Add the comparison-site and lead-reseller brand names. They bid aggressively on installer terms, and if you bid on theirs you are paying to enter an auction against a business whose product is selling your competitor the same enquiry. Build the list properly once — our negative keyword lists by industry covers the structure — and review search terms weekly for the first two months.
How do you stop paying for enquiries that never install?
By making the conversion you optimise toward the one that matters. Most solar accounts send a single “form submitted” conversion to Google, which tells Smart Bidding that every enquiry is worth the same. It then does exactly what you asked and finds more of the cheapest ones.
The fix is to feed real outcomes back. Import the qualified-appointment and signed-contract stages from your CRM as offline conversions, keyed on GCLID, and bid toward those instead. Accounts that make this change typically see reported conversions fall by half while cost per install drops, because the bidding finally distinguishes between a homeowner in your service area with a north-facing roof and someone comparing prices from a rental in another state. The mechanics are the same loop we describe for conversion tracking and for B2B accounts with long cycles, and it is the highest-leverage change available to a solar account.
Two supporting controls matter. Ask for the postcode and the ownership status on the form — two fields, not ten — because they disqualify the two largest categories of dead enquiry before your sales team spends an hour on them. And track calls separately: a meaningful share of solar enquiries arrive by phone, and an account that only counts forms is optimising against half its data.
What does the landing page need to do?
It needs to price the job, or at least bracket it. Solar buyers arrive with a specific question — what a system this size costs on a house like mine — and a page that answers it with a range converts materially better than one asking them to book a consultation to find out. Show indicative pricing by system size, state the rebate treatment plainly, and use a real photo of an install your crew did rather than a stock render.
Accreditation belongs above the fold. Clean Energy Council approved-retailer and accredited-installer status is the trust signal this category actually trades on, alongside reviews with suburb names in them. Everything else follows the general rules in our landing page optimisation guide: one page per campaign theme, fast load, no navigation competing with the form.
What budget does it take to work?
Around $3,000–5,000 AUD per month per metro area is the practical floor. Below that you cannot reach the conversion volume Smart Bidding needs — roughly 30 conversions in 30 days — and the account spends its life in learning mode. If that is out of reach, narrow the geography rather than thinning the budget across a whole state: one well-funded city beats three underfunded ones every time.
Expect six to ten weeks before the numbers mean anything, because the lag between enquiry and signed contract in solar runs three to eight weeks on its own. Judging the account at four weeks on cost per lead is how installers end up switching off campaigns that were about to become profitable. The bidding logic behind that patience is covered in our Smart Bidding guide.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Google Ads cost for a solar company in Australia? Budget $3,000–5,000 AUD per month in media spend for a single metro area, producing roughly 25–60 enquiries at $60–180 AUD each depending on the city and how tightly the account is qualified. Battery-focused campaigns cost more per click but usually less per signed job. Management fees sit on top of that; our Google Ads management cost guide covers the typical Australian pricing models.
Are solar leads from Google Ads better than bought leads? Generally yes, because they are exclusive. A purchased lead from a comparison platform is typically sold to three or four installers at once, which means you compete on price from the first phone call. A Google Ads enquiry comes to you alone, converts at a higher rate, and lets you sell on quality rather than undercutting. The trade-off is that you carry the acquisition risk instead of paying per lead.
Should solar companies run Performance Max? Not as a starting point. Performance Max needs a reliable conversion signal to work with, and most solar accounts do not have one until offline conversion import is in place. Start with Search, get the CRM feedback loop running, then test Performance Max with a real exclusion list and brand terms carved out. Run in the wrong order it produces cheap, unqualified enquiry volume that looks like success in the dashboard.
What is a good conversion rate for a solar landing page? Six to twelve per cent of clicks becoming enquiries on a purpose-built page. Below six per cent usually points at a page that refuses to discuss price, a form asking for too much, or traffic that was never qualified in the first place. Above twelve per cent, check what you are counting — if brochure downloads sit in the same conversion action as quote requests, the number is not measuring what you think it is.
How do I keep the federal battery rebate out of my quote-form campaigns? Split it by intent. People searching “battery rebate amount” or “am I eligible for the battery rebate” want information, so send them to an explainer page with a soft call to action and let remarketing do the work afterwards. Keep the quote form for “battery installation [city]” and “add battery to existing solar” style queries. Mixing the two inflates your conversion rate with enquiries that have no install behind them.
Does Google Ads work for commercial solar? It does, but treat it as a separate business. Commercial terms cost $20–40 AUD per click, enquiries run $150–400 AUD, and the sales cycle stretches across months and multiple stakeholders, so it needs its own campaign, its own landing page and its own patience. Running it inside the residential account means one bid strategy serving two very different economics, and it usually starves the one that was working.
Solar is not a hard category to buy traffic in. It is a hard category to buy the right traffic in, and almost every underperforming solar account we look at is optimising toward form fills while the business is measured on installs. Close that loop — offline conversions from the CRM, two qualifying fields on the form, honest geography — and the same spend produces a different business.
If you are running solar campaigns and cannot say what a signed install costs you in media spend, that is the number to fix first. Get in touch and we will work it out from your account data.