What a click actually costs in your trade
Google Search Ads charge you per click (CPC), and the price is an auction. You are bidding against every other shop that wants the same homeowner at the moment they search. Emergency, high-ticket trades cost the most per click because a single job is worth the most. Cheaper-ticket work costs less. These are working ranges for 2026 in US metros, not a rate card, and small towns run lower while contested cities run higher.
| Trade | Typical CPC range | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Plumbing (emergency terms) | $15 to $45 | High urgency, high ticket, heavy competition on "emergency plumber near me." |
| HVAC (repair and install) | $12 to $40 | Seasonal spikes push clicks up in heat waves and cold snaps. |
| Roofing | $10 to $35 | Big-ticket jobs, storm-driven demand, aggressive bidders. |
| Electrical | $8 to $30 | Steady demand, urgent for outages, mid-to-high ticket. |
| Water damage / restoration | $25 to $75 | Some of the priciest clicks in home services. |
| Landscaping / lawn | $4 to $12 | Lower ticket, less urgency, softer competition. |
| Garage door, fencing, pressure washing | $4 to $15 | Mid-ticket, moderate competition. |
Two things set your spot in those ranges. First, the exact search. "Emergency plumber" costs far more than "how to fix a running toilet," because the person typing the first one is holding a phone over a flood. Second, your Quality Score. Google rewards ads and landing pages that actually match the search with lower costs, so a tight campaign pays less per click than a sloppy one bidding on the same word. That is why two plumbers in the same city can pay very different CPCs for the same term.
The CPC is only the meter running. It is not the number that decides whether Ads is worth it. For that you have to walk one click all the way to a booked job.
Cost per click is not cost per lead (and neither is cost per job)
Here is where most contractors get the math wrong and where most agencies stay quiet. A click is not a lead. A lead is not a booked job. The number that matters is what it costs you to put a paid job on the board, and it is always bigger than the CPC.
Walk it through with round numbers. Say your CPC is $20. Not every click calls. In home services, a good landing page turns roughly 5 to 15 percent of clicks into leads (a call or a form). At 10 percent, ten clicks make one lead, so that lead cost you $200 in ad spend. Then not every lead books. If you close half your paid leads, two leads make one job, so your cost to acquire that paid job is around $400 in ad spend.
| Step | Example | Running cost |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per click | $20 CPC | $20 |
| Cost per lead (10% of clicks call) | 10 clicks per lead | $200 |
| Cost per booked job (50% of leads close) | 2 leads per job | $400 |
Now the number means something. If your average ticket is $600 and it cost $400 in ad spend to win it, that is a thin job. If your average ticket is $9,000 on a system install, that same $400 is a rounding error. This is why the honest question is never "what does a click cost." It is "what does a booked job cost, and does my ticket cover it with room left over." A shop with a $300 ticket and a shop with a $12,000 ticket should run Google Ads completely differently, and any provider who quotes you a click cost without asking your ticket size is selling clicks, not jobs.
The two levers that move cost-per-job most are conversion rate on the landing page and close rate on the phone. Double your landing-page conversion and you cut cost-per-lead in half without touching your bid. That is where real management earns its fee: not lower clicks, more booked jobs per dollar.
Local Services Ads price completely differently
Local Services Ads (LSA), the ones that show above the regular results with the green Google Guaranteed checkmark, do not charge per click. You pay per lead. Google decides a call or message is a valid lead for your trade and service area, and you get billed for it, roughly $25 to $90 a lead in most home-service trades, higher in restoration and legal-adjacent work.
That flips the risk. With Search Ads you pay for the click and hope it calls. With LSA you only pay when someone actually reaches out. That sounds strictly better, and for many trades it is a strong first dollar, but there are catches worth knowing before you assume LSA is cheaper.
- You dispute the junk. Google bills you for spam calls, wrong-number calls, and out-of-area calls too, and you have to flag them to get credited. Miss the dispute window and you eat the cost.
- Ranking is not just money. LSA position leans on your review count, how fast you answer the phone, your proximity to the searcher, and your Google Guaranteed screening. You cannot simply outbid your way to the top the way you can on Search.
- You pay to get screened. Google Guaranteed requires a background and license check to earn the badge. That gate is real work, and it lives in the paid lane, not in your regular map-pack listing.
For a lot of contractors the right answer is not Search or LSA, it is LSA first for the pay-per-lead safety, then Search Ads underneath to catch the searches LSA does not cover and to run remarketing. Which one leads depends on your trade, your review count, and how fast your team answers the phone. That comparison is its own decision, and we walk through it in depth in the Local Services Ads versus Search guide.
The one-line version: budget LSA as a cost-per-lead line and Search as a cost-per-click line, and never compare the two on CPC alone, because LSA has no click cost at all.
What monthly budget actually gets you moving
Owners always ask for the monthly number, so here is a straight one. Below a floor, Google Ads does not work, because the algorithm needs enough conversions to learn who to show your ad to, and a starved budget never gets there. You are better off not running than running underfunded.
Work it backwards from jobs, not forward from a budget you feel comfortable with. Decide how many paid jobs a month you want, multiply by your cost-per-booked-job, and that is your ad budget. Want four extra install jobs a month at a $400 cost-per-job, you need roughly $1,600 in ad spend to get there, and more in the first month or two while the campaign learns.
| Monthly ad budget | What it realistically does |
|---|---|
| Under $1,000 | Too thin for most competitive trades. Fine only for low-CPC work in a small market, or a tight single-service test. |
| $1,500 to $3,000 | A real starting budget for one trade in one metro. Enough conversions to learn and produce steady leads. |
| $3,000 to $8,000 | Serious presence across your core services and service area. Room to test and scale what books. |
| $8,000 and up | Multi-service, multi-market, or a high-CPC trade like restoration going after volume. |
Two costs sit on top of the ad budget and you should never let anyone hide them. Management (the fee to run the account, usually a percentage of spend or a flat monthly) and the landing page the ads point to. Ads sent to your generic homepage waste clicks, so a dedicated, fast, conversion-built page for the campaign is part of the real cost of running Ads, not an upsell. The good news is that page is a one-time build, not a monthly bill.
Ramp matters too. Month one is the most expensive per job because the campaign is learning, and cost-per-lead usually settles down by month two or three as the negatives get tuned and the wasted clicks get cut. Judge Google Ads on a quarter, not a week.
Where the money leaks (and how much you can save)
Most contractors who tried Google Ads and got burned did not have a bad channel. They had a leaky account. The spend was real, the clicks were real, and half of them were worthless. Here is where the money runs out the bottom, and every one of these is fixable.
- No negative keywords. Without a negative list you pay full CPC for "plumber salary," "plumbing jobs," "how to unclog a drain," and "DIY." None of those calls you. Negatives are the single biggest waste in an untuned account, and cleaning them out often cuts spend 20 to 40 percent with no drop in leads.
- Broad match with no leash. Broad match lets Google spend your money on searches you never chose. Used without tight negatives and conversion data, it is a faucet left running.
- Ads pointed at the homepage. Your homepage is built to explain your whole company. A paid click needs one job, one offer, one phone number, one form. Sending paid traffic to a general page tanks your conversion rate and doubles your cost-per-lead.
- No call tracking. If you cannot see which clicks turned into calls, you cannot cut what does not work. You are flying blind and paying for the privilege.
- Ignoring service-area and hours. Paying for clicks outside your radius, or for 2am clicks when nobody answers, burns budget on jobs you will never run. Call-only campaigns and dayparting exist for exactly this.
- Chasing the top spot at any cost. Position one is not always the best cost-per-job. Sometimes position two or three books nearly as well for far less. Bidding to the top out of ego is expensive.
The reason we lead with this is that a fair chunk of contractors do not need to spend more on Google Ads. They need to stop wasting what they already spend. Since 2008 the trade behind this brand has run local-service accounts, and the most common fix is not a bigger budget, it is a tighter one: negatives added, service area locked, ads pointed at a real landing page, call tracking on so you can see what actually books. That work usually pays for itself out of the waste it removes.
How to read a Google Ads quote before you sign
You size up a sub's bid before you cut a check. Do the same with an Ads quote. A fair one survives blunt questions. A padded one gets vague. Ask these before you hand anyone a budget.
- Is my ad budget separate from your management fee? You must know exactly how much goes to Google as clicks and how much goes to the agency as fee. If they blur into one number, you cannot tell if your money is buying leads or overhead.
- What is my estimated cost-per-lead, and how did you get it? A real answer references your trade CPC, a realistic conversion rate, and your market. "It depends" with no math is a dodge; a number pulled from thin air is worse.
- Who owns the account? You should own your Google Ads account and your data, always. If an agency keeps the account in their name and you leave, you can lose your entire history and start from zero. Non-negotiable.
- What am I sending clicks to? If the plan is your homepage, the plan is broken. Ask whether a dedicated landing page is included and what it costs.
- Is a long contract required? Ads needs a quarter to prove out, so a 90-day look is fair. A 12-month lock on day one is the contract doing the work the results should be doing.
- Are you setting up call tracking and negatives? If the answer is no or fuzzy, they are about to run the leaky account described above with your money.
The tell of a padded quote is always the same. They quote you a click cost without asking your ticket size, they hide the ad budget inside their fee, they keep your account in their name, and they push a year-long contract before a single lead comes in. A provider who speaks dispatch, service area, and ticket size, and who hands you the account keys, is running paid the way it should be run: as a cost-per-booked-job line on your P&L, not a mystery retainer.