Most pest control owners can tell you what a new customer pays on day one. Fewer can tell you what that customer pays over the next five years. The second number is the one that should set your Google Ads budget, and in pest control it's usually several times the first.
Chapter 2 made the case for starting where people hire, on searches like "pest control near me" that Keyword Planner prices at up to $42.80 a click in the US. That price only looks scary if you compare it to the first visit. Compare it to the plan, and a lot of accounts turn out to be underspending.
The First Visit Is the Smallest Check a Plan Customer Writes
Residential pest control runs on repeat visits. In the 2025 industry survey Specialty Consultants runs for the National Pest Management Association, recurring service made up 85.4% of residential revenue. Rollins, which owns Orkin, writes in its annual report that customers usually start on a one-year contract and that many stay for several years after that.
The big chains price like they know it. In our example market, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Aptive's $49 first-treatment offer (the one Chapter 2 looked at) shows why: it comes with a 12-month service agreement, and the standard initial treatment it discounts is $399. Nobody gives away $350 on the first visit unless the next eleven months pay it back.
So when a lead costs, say, $150 and the first service brings in $185, the account isn't losing money. It's buying the start of a relationship. The question is how long that relationship lasts and what it's worth.
A Big Chain Keeps Four in Five Customers a Year. Run That Math on Your Own Route.
Rentokil, which owns Terminix, reported that its North America customer retention was 80.5% in 2025. That's one company's number, not an industry rule, but it's a published one, and it gives us something real to work with.
If a company kept 80.5% of its customers every year, the average customer would stay a little over five years. (That's a simplifying assumption. Real retention is usually lowest in year one and steadier after.) Put a price on those years:
- The visits: Angi's cost guide puts a quarterly pest control visit at $100 to $300. Take $150 a visit as the example: a plan customer pays $600 a year.
- The start: an initial service, which Angi puts at $150 to $300.
- The years: at 80.5% retention, the expected total works out to about $3,280 in revenue from one plan customer, starting with a $200 initial service.
- The add-ons: mosquito programs, termite work and rodent exclusion sold to existing customers. Rollins reports that about 10% of its business is ancillary services, so plan customers buy more than the plan.
Now make it yours. Pull your own customer list and count how many plan customers from two years ago are still active; that's your retention. Use your own plan price. And use gross profit, not revenue: what's left after the technician's time, the product and the truck. That's the number you can spend against.
This also settles a question from Chapter 1: what value to attach when you upload a sold plan. Use the plan's first-year value, not the first invoice. A plan that brings in $800 in its first year should count for $800 in Google Ads, and a $49 intro treatment that locks in the same plan should count for the same $800. Google's bidding reads those values literally. Feed it the first invoice, and it will conclude a plan customer and a one-time ant spray are worth about the same.
A $40 Click Can Be Cheap or Ruinous. Your Close Rate Decides Which.
Lifetime value is only half the math. The other half is what it costs to win one plan customer, and that comes from a chain of five numbers:
- Cost per click. Keyword Planner estimates $9.24 to $42.80 for a top-of-page click on "pest control near me" in the US. Your market and your Quality Score will move it.
- Conversion rate. The share of clicks that call, fill out the form or check out.
- Cost per lead. Cost per click divided by conversion rate.
- Close rate. The share of those leads, usually booked inspections, that become a signed plan.
- Cost per customer. Cost per lead divided by close rate.
We looked for a neutral benchmark for pest control conversion rates and inspection close rates and didn't find one. So here is an example with made-up inputs, clearly labeled, to show how the math behaves. Put your own numbers in their place.
Say a click costs $25 and 10% of clicks become a lead. That's $250 per lead. If half of those leads sign a plan, each plan customer costs $500. If only a quarter sign, the same clicks cost $1,000 per customer.
Against the example plan customer above, using an illustrative 50% gross margin on $3,280 of revenue, a plan customer is worth about $1,640 in gross profit. At $500 per customer, the account is printing money. At $1,000, it still works, with less room for error. Now run the same $1,000 against a one-time job that Angi prices at $300 to $550, and it loses money every time.
Not every one-time job is small, though. Angi puts the average bed bug treatment at about $2,500, and a termite tenting job usually lands around $3,000. Those searches can carry high bids on the job alone, even when the customer never signs a plan. The mistake is treating every lead the same: a "roach exterminator" click that might become a $600-a-year plan, a "bed bug treatment" click that might become a single $2,500 job and an "ant spray" click that will never become anything deserve three different prices. Chapter 7 turns that into bids. For now, write down what each kind of job is worth to you, so the budget has something to aim at.
The fastest way to improve that chain usually isn't the bid. It's the page. Someone who searched for termite treatment and landed on a page about termite treatment, with your termite guarantee and your service area, converts better than someone dropped on a home page that lists every bug you've ever met. The keyword chapters later in this guide build the campaigns; build the pages now.
An Unanswered Phone Cuts Your Close Rate Before Google Sees a Thing
Close rate isn't only about the technician's pitch. It starts at the phone. Go back to the office complaints from Chapter 1: of 71 in our review sample, 60 described a phone that rang out, a voicemail left hanging or a promised callback that never happened.
Whenever a call like that came from an ad, it was a paid click. The ad did its job, the lead existed, and the business lost it at the desk.
Answering speed, after-hours coverage and a callback rule belong in the budget conversation, because they change the close rate more cheaply than any bid increase. If your office can't answer during peak season, the cheapest fix may be an answering service, not more ad spend.
Pest Season Doesn't Spend Evenly, and Your Budget Shouldn't Either
Pest control is seasonal, and the numbers show it even for a company that operates nationwide. Rollins' 2025 revenue ran from 21.9% of the year in the first quarter to 27.3% in the third. Search demand swings harder. US searches for "termites" ran 823,000 in May and 165,000 in December and January.
A flat monthly budget sleeps through the busy months and overspends in the quiet ones. Plan the year by month instead: more in the months your own market's calls climb, less when they fall. Nationally, searches for termites peak in May, "mosquito control" in July and August, and "mice exterminator" in October. Your market's calendar will differ, so use your own call logs from last year as the guide. If last May brought twice the calls of last February, a budget that treats both months the same is either starving May or wasting February. Shift the money toward the months that answer the phone, and pull it back when they go quiet.
Google's budget rules help with this. A heavy day is allowed to run as high as double the daily figure you set, while the monthly bill tops out at 30.4 days' worth of it. So a daily budget set in April doesn't cap your spend at that number on a heavy May morning, but the month stays inside its limit.
Referrals and Yard Signs Bring Customers the Click Never Gets Credit For
A customer won by an ad keeps paying off after the ad. The reviews we read are full of it: "We asked our realtor for a recommendation." "I was then recommended Hughes by a friend." "I started seeing several of their signs in my community and now I know why." Long-time customers are the loudest referrers, and some have been around a long time: "We have been using Chets for over 21 years!"
None of that shows up in Google Ads as a conversion. It still counts. A plan customer who tells two neighbors is worth more than the number in your spreadsheet, and that's a reason to be a little braver on bids, not a reason to guess. It also works in reverse: the customer who never gets a callback tells people too. Track where new customers say they heard of you, so you can see the effect instead of assuming it.
Next: The Auction Behind Every Click
With a plan customer's value on paper, the next question is the click price. Chapter 4 opens up Google's Ad Rank, the score that places each ad and sets its cost, and shows why an ad that speaks to the searcher's exact bug can hold the same spot for less.
If you're just arriving, start with Chapter 1, because none of this math works unless sold plans are being counted, and Chapter 2, for where the first budget goes. Every chapter in the series is mapped on the pest control guide's home page.
When a pest company brings us in for Google Ads management, we set budgets from their own retention and plan prices, not from an industry average, because theirs is the only number that pays their bills.
