A roofer looks at a Google Ads report and sees $228 a lead. A house cleaner sees $47. The roofer winces and the cleaner relaxes, and both of them are reading the number wrong.
The price of a lead says almost nothing on its own. What matters is what happens after it: how many leads turn into booked jobs, what those jobs pay, and whether the customer comes back. A $228 lead that becomes a roof replacement is cheap. A $47 lead that cancels after one visit is expensive.
This chapter follows the money from the click to the customer, with real numbers for each kind of local business in this guide. Chapter 2 pointed the budget at ready-to-hire searches, which cost more than research searches. This is the math that decides whether you can afford them, and how much to spend while you find out.
A note on sources before the numbers. The cost-per-lead figures come from LocaliQ's benchmark reports, which publish the medians of its own customers' campaigns. The booking rates come from Invoca, a call analytics company whose customers lean toward larger, multi-location businesses. The job prices come from HomeAdvisor's national cost guides. None of them is your account. They are a starting point for the math, and your own numbers replace them as soon as you have any.
Google Bills You for the Click. You Get Paid for the Job, Three Steps Later.
Every local account runs on the same chain. You pay for a click. Some share of clicks turn into a lead, a call or a form. Some share of leads turn into a booked job. Each booked customer is worth something, once or over years.
Roofing shows the chain plainly. LocaliQ's 2025 home services report has its median roofing campaign at $10.70 per click, 3.70% of clicks becoming leads, and $228.15 per lead. The median cleaning campaign paid $8.50 a click, converted 17.65% of clicks and paid $46.99 a lead. Plumbing came in at $10.49 a click, 7.63% and $129.02 a lead. Electricians paid $93.69 a lead and landscapers $117.92.
The click prices are close. The lead prices are not, and almost all of the gap comes from the conversion rate: a cleaning visitor is far more likely to call or book than a roofing visitor, who is shopping for a job that costs thousands. These are medians reported separately, so they don't multiply into each other exactly, but the direction is clear.
The conversion rate is also the step a business controls most directly. A landing page built for the service someone searched, with the phone number in reach, converts better than a home page that makes them hunt. Chapter 4 covers how the page affects what you pay.
Booking One Plumbing Job Takes at Least $222 in Ad Spend. The Average $341 Job Barely Pays That Back.
Take the chain one step further. Invoca reports that among its home services customers, 58% of plumbing leads from paid search booked a job on the call. Invoca counts only answered calls it judged to be real job opportunities, while LocaliQ's $129 counts every tracked call and form, so the real booking rate on those $129 leads is lower. Divide $129 by 58% and you get a floor: each booked job costs at least $222 in advertising, and likely more.
HomeAdvisor puts the national average plumbing job at about $341. Set the two side by side and the first job barely pays for the ad, before labor, parts or the truck. On those numbers alone, Google Ads for a plumber looks like a bad deal.
It isn't, because the first job is rarely the last. The same household calls again for the next clog, and some of those calls are bigger work: HomeAdvisor puts a water heater replacement at about $1,348. A plumber who judges ads by the first invoice will cut the campaigns that are quietly building the customer list.
That is also why the tracking from Chapter 1 matters so much. If the booked job goes back to Google Ads with its value, the account can tell a small service call from a water heater, and the reporting stops judging every lead by the cheapest job it produced.
A Pest Plan Pays Every Quarter. A Roof Pays Once Every Couple of Decades. That Changes What a Lead Is Worth.
How long a customer stays, and how often they pay, is different for each kind of local business, and it changes how much a lead is worth:
- Recurring service: a pest control customer is usually a plan, not a visit. The National Pest Management Association reports that 85.4% of residential pest control revenue in its 2025 survey was recurring. HomeAdvisor lists quarterly pest plans at $100 to $300 per visit. A house cleaner on a recurring schedule collects about $176 a visit by HomeAdvisor's average, again and again.
- Storefront and appointment: a dental patient comes back. The federal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey put average annual dental spending at $887 per person with a dental visit in 2021. In the Health & Fitness Association's 2025 benchmarking report, gyms kept two-thirds of their members through 2024.
- Planned project: a roof replacement averages about $9,609 by HomeAdvisor's figures, and HomeAdvisor says asphalt roofs last 20 to 30 years. The same customer rarely needs a second roof. The value beyond the one job comes from reviews and referrals: a happy roofing customer sends neighbors.
- Emergency service: the first call is often small, and the value comes from being the company the household calls next time, for the next repair or the bigger replacement.
Reviews and word of mouth belong in the math even though they're hard to count. A customer who leaves a review on your Google Business Profile helps the next searchers choose you, and some of the jobs that look like referrals started with an ad.
What You Can Pay for a Customer Comes From Your Margin, Not the Invoice Total.
The useful number isn't what a job sells for. It's what you keep. A roof that sells for $9,600 might leave a fraction of that after materials and crew; a cleaning visit leaves its own margin. That kept amount, added up across every job one customer gives you, sets your ceiling for winning a new customer.
The math fits on an index card:
- Most you can pay for a customer = the profit you keep per job x the number of jobs you expect from that customer. Pay less than that, and the difference is your profit.
- Most you can pay for a lead = that number x the share of leads that book.
- Most you can pay for a click = the lead number x your website's conversion rate.
Fill it in with your own numbers, not ours. Your margin, your repeat rate and the share of your calls that book are the inputs that matter, and no benchmark can supply them. If you don't know your booking rate yet, the call tracking and booked-job reporting from Chapter 1 will tell you once enough calls have come in to read.
One caution. Keyword Planner's click estimates are ranges based on past top-of-page bids. They are useful for seeing which searches are pricey, but they aren't a quote for your account, and a budget built on them alone is a guess.
We Start Most Local Accounts Near $1,500 a Month. A Small Town Can Run Out of Searches Before That.
When we take on a local business, we usually start the ad budget at about $1,500 a month. Below that, a business in a competitive trade often can't buy the traffic it needs to learn what works, and the money is better spent narrowing the campaign than spreading it thin. A smaller budget shrinks the target, not the bid: fewer services, a tighter area, the searches most likely to book.
The opposite problem happens too. In a small town, there may simply not be enough searches to spend the budget. We've seen accounts where the daily budget sits partly unspent because the town only produces so many searches for the service each day. Raising the budget changes nothing there; the fix is a wider area or more services, covered in the location chapters.
Seasonal trades spread the budget unevenly. In the Keyword Planner data from our research, furnace repair searches swing about sevenfold between their busiest and slowest months in the US. A heating company that keeps one flat budget all year will be short in January and overspent in June.
Google also flexes spend day to day. Google's pacing lets one day run as high as two times the daily setting, while the month as a whole is held to the daily setting multiplied by 30.4. Set the daily budget from the monthly number you can live with.
The Booking Rate Is Set at Your Front Desk, Not in Google Ads.
The step between a lead and a booked job doesn't happen in Google Ads at all. It happens when someone answers the phone.
Only about half the calls Invoca tracked for home services clients, 52%, reached a live person. CallRail, another call tracking company, reported that its home services customers missed 14% of calls. Whatever the exact share for your business, every unanswered call is a lead you paid for and couldn't book.
That makes the front desk part of the ad budget. A faster answer, a callback within minutes, or an answering service after hours raises the booking rate, and every number in the chain above improves without spending another dollar on clicks. The calls chapter at the end of this guide covers answering and missed calls in full.
Next: City Pages Help Your Ads Only When They Match the Search.
With the money math in place, the next step is making each click more likely to book. Chapter 4 covers Ad Rank and Quality Score: why tight ad groups and a page that matches the search lower what you pay, and why a city page written for the wrong town costs more than it saves.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you'd rather have someone do the math for you, our Google Ads management sets each local account's targets from the client's own margins and booking rates, not from a benchmark.
