Google Ads for Contractors: What It Costs, and Is It Worth It?

Google charges for the click whether that person calls you or not. So this guide puts a number on each step: what a lead costs in your trade, the share of leads you'd need to book to earn back the ad spend, what to track, and when to wait.

Every market figure below comes from Google's own help pages or LocaliQ's published benchmarks, checked between 24 and 30 September 2026. None of it is a result from one of our clients.

How much does Google Ads cost?

Google Ads has no minimum spend. Google says so in its own FAQ: you set a daily or monthly cap that works for your business. Search ads charge per click, so you pay when someone clicks your ad, not when it shows.

The budget works like this. You set an average daily budget. On a busy day Google can spend up to twice that, but in a month it won't charge more than 30.4 times the daily figure, the average number of days in a month. So a $10 daily budget is a $304 month.

The price of a click is not fixed. It's set in an auction against every other business bidding on the same search. Google ranks the ads using your bid and the quality of your ad, including the page it sends people to, and you pay only what it takes to beat the ad ranked below yours. Google calls that your actual cost per click. So the ad and the page help set the price, alongside your bid.

What a lead costs in your trade

LocaliQ, an advertising company that runs search campaigns for local businesses, publishes what its home services campaigns cost. Its 2025 report covers 3,211 US search campaigns on Google and Microsoft that ran from April 2024 to March 2025, with at least 103 campaigns in each trade. LocaliQ labels the figures averages. Its note on the data says they are technically medians, the middle campaign, so a few extreme accounts don't skew them.

A lead here is a conversion, whatever each advertiser counted as one. Cost per lead is the ad spend divided by those leads.

Trade	Cost per Click	Clicks That Became Leads	Cost per Lead
All home services	$7.85 a click	7.33% became leads	$90.92 a lead
Roofing & gutters	$10.70 a click	3.70% became leads	$228.15 a lead
Construction & contractors	$5.31 a click	2.61% became leads	$165.67 a lead
Painting	$13.74 a click	10.80% became leads	$138.38 a lead
Plumbing	$10.49 a click	7.63% became leads	$129.02 a lead
Heating & furnaces	$9.30 a click	7.48% became leads	$129.02 a lead
Air conditioning	$9.68 a click	6.56% became leads	$127.74 a lead
Landscaping	$8.76 a click	6.42% became leads	$117.92 a lead
Electricians	$12.18 a click	9.08% became leads	$93.69 a lead
Window cleaning	$9.12 a click	13.58% became leads	$66.69 a lead
Handyman	$7.10 a click	13.45% became leads	$54.05 a lead
House cleaning	$8.50 a click	17.65% became leads	$46.99 a lead
Pools & spas	$5.81 a click	10.89% became leads	$45.15 a lead

Roofing and gutters has the most expensive leads, $228.15, even though its clicks cost less than painting's or electricians'. Only 3.70% of its clicks became leads. And a click price tells you little on its own: construction and contractor campaigns paid the lowest price per click in the whole report, $5.31, and still paid $165.67 a lead. Only 2.61% of their clicks became leads. If you're a roofer weighing ads against the other places calls come from, here is what a roofing lead costs from each source. Run a plumbing company? Here's how that plumbing figure compares with every other source of calls.

One note if you check the math yourself: each column is its own median, so a trade's cost per click divided by its share of clicks that became leads won't land exactly on its cost per lead.

What one lead costs in ad spend, by trade

Cost per Lead

Roofing & Gutters$228.15

Construction & Contractors$165.67

Plumbing$129.02

Air Conditioning$127.74

Electricians$93.69

All Home Services$90.92

House Cleaning$46.99

Pools & Spas$45.15

What management costs

If someone runs the ads for you, there is a second bill: the management fee. Before you compare agencies, ask two questions. Is the fee published, or does it only come out on a sales call? And does your ad spend go straight to Google, or through the agency, where a markup is hard to see? Here's the full list of questions to ask any agency.

Ours is published. Acquisition is $1,249 a month plus your ad spend, with at least $2,000 a month in ad spend, paid straight to the ad platform and never marked up. The fee stays flat until your ad spend passes $5,000 a month. Above that, it is 10% of only the spend over $5,000, so $7,500 of ad spend means a $1,499 fee. It includes everything in Foundation too: your website, your Google listing and the monthly work to get you found. The calculator at the end of this guide works out any month.

The number that matters: cost per booked job

Cost per click and cost per lead are steps along the way. Cost per lead is your ad spend divided by the leads it brought in: $1,500 and 12 calls is $125 a lead. The number that tells you whether ads work is cost per booked job: your ad spend divided by the jobs the ads actually booked. Getting there takes one number only you have, your close rate, the share of leads you book. The same math works on Thumbtack and Angi leads.

Cost per booked job is your cost per lead divided by your close rate. Here it is at the two LocaliQ figures above:

If You Book	All Home Services ($90.92 a Lead)	Roofing & Gutters ($228.15 a Lead)
1 in 2 leads	$181.84 per booked job	$456.30 per booked job
1 in 3 leads	$272.76 per booked job	$684.45 per booked job
1 in 4 leads	$363.68 per booked job	$912.60 per booked job
1 in 5 leads	$454.60 per booked job	$1,140.75 per booked job

Now hold that next to your average job. If your average job brings in less than your cost per booked job, every job from the ads loses money before you pay for materials or labor. More budget won't fix that. It only loses more.

Are Google Ads worth it? Do the napkin math

Google Ads pay for themselves when a month of booked jobs from the ads brings in more revenue than that month cost you. You can check that before you spend a dollar: your cost per lead divided by your average job is the share of leads you have to book just to earn back the ad spend. Then compare it with your close rate, the share of your leads you book today.

Three lines on a napkin

Take the roofing and gutters median from the table, $228.15 a lead, and say your average job is $1,000. That is your average invoice, not your best one. $2,000 of ad spend buys about 8.8 leads. With our $1,249 fee, the month costs $3,249, so it takes about 3.25 jobs at $1,000 to cover it. And 3.25 out of 8.8 is about 37%: you would need to book a bit more than 1 in 3 leads.

$2,000in ad spend, the Acquisition minimum8.8leads at $228.15 each$3,249the month, with the $1,249 fee3.25jobs at $1,000 each to cover it37%of leads must book, a bit over 1 in 3

At exactly 1 in 3, you'd get about 2.92 jobs, or $2,922: close, and still $327 short of the month.

The share you need to book, at three job sizes

At $2,000 a month in ad spend and LocaliQ's two medians. The first number is ad spend only. The second adds a $1,249 management fee, which multiplies the first by $3,249 divided by $2,000, about 1.62.

Your Average Job	Home Services Lead ($90.92)	Roofing & Gutters Lead ($228.15)
$500	18%, or 30% with a fee	46%, or 74% with a fee
$1,000	9%, or 15% with a fee	23%, or 37% with a fee
$2,500	4%, or 6% with a fee	9%, or 15% with a fee

With a fee, a $2,500 job clears the bar at about 1 in 7 even at roofing and gutters prices, the highest cost per lead in LocaliQ's report. A $500 job at those prices needs 3 in 4 leads to book once a fee is in the month. If your row needs a share you've never hit, ads aren't the next step yet, and we'll say so.

Two checks before you trust the math

Covering the month is not the same as profit. That $3,249 in booked jobs is revenue, before materials, labor and your own overhead. Your margin decides whether a covered month is a good one, and break-even ROAS turns that margin into the return your ads have to clear.

Two more habits keep the math honest. Judge whole months, never a few days: at $2,000 a month and $228.15 a lead, a roofer gets about two leads a week, so one good or bad week swings the picture. And count only the jobs you can tie to a lead from the ads, which takes tracking.

LocaliQ's figures are the middle campaign in each trade, not yours. After a few full months, swap in your own cost per lead and close rate.

What to track

Three things decide whether your ads work: the calls and forms they bring, which of those became jobs, and what people actually searched.

Every call, counted right

Google Ads can count calls in several ways, including:

• Calls from your ad, through a call asset: your phone number added to the ad.
• Calls to a Google forwarding number, which replaces your number on your website for people who clicked an ad.
• Taps on the phone number on your mobile website.
• Calls you track in another tool and import.

For calls from your ad and calls to the forwarding number, you set a minimum call length, and only calls that last at least that long count. Set it, so a 5-second hang-up never counts as a lead.

A tap is not a call. For taps on your number, Google's own help page says it can only track these clicks, not the phone calls themselves. Count them, but never read them as calls.

If your account still runs call ads, the ads that only place a phone call, they are going away. Google removed the option to create new ones in February 2026, and existing ones stop showing in February 2027. The replacement is a call asset on a regular search ad.

For the tools that log every call and where it came from, see how to track phone calls from your website.

Which leads became jobs

Google sees the call or the form. It never sees the invoice. So keep a list of every lead from your ads and mark each one booked or not, with the job value when you have it. A spreadsheet works.

That list does two jobs. It gives you your close rate and your cost per booked job. And it can go back to Google. Google Ads can import what happens after the click or call, like a sale made over the phone, and it has two goals built for this: a qualified lead and a converted lead, for leads you qualify or close outside Google Ads.

This matters because of how bidding works. Google's Maximize conversions bidding, which sets each bid for you, only works with conversion tracking set up, and it chases whatever you told Google counts. Count every tap and every short call, and it will find you more taps and short calls. Tell it which leads became jobs, and it has something better to aim at.

What people actually searched

Your keywords are what you bid on. The search terms report shows what people actually typed before your ad showed. Google leaves out searches too rare to show without risking privacy, so it is not the full list. It is still where wasted money shows up: people looking for jobs in your trade, training, parts, or how to do it themselves.

Each of those becomes a negative keyword, a word you tell Google to keep your ad away from. A starter list for most trades: job, jobs, hiring, salary, training, school, certification, DIY, how to. Leave off anything you actually sell or offer, like free estimates.

Where the budget leaks

These four keep costing money until someone changes them. Check them first.

Ads that land on your homepage

Someone searches "water heater replacement" and lands on a homepage about twelve services. Now they have to hunt for the thing they searched for, on a click you already paid for. Send each group of searches to a page about that service, with your phone number and a call button at the top.

Google grades the same thing. Landing page experience, how relevant and useful the page is to the people who click, is one of the three parts of an ad's Quality Score, and Google counts it when it ranks your ad and sets what you pay. What the button on that page says matters too: here are calls to action that get contractors calls.

Broad match, on by default

Every keyword you add is broad match unless you change it. Google's definition: your ad may show on searches related to your keyword, including searches that don't contain its direct meaning. That is wide enough to take in people who will never hire you.

Phrase match shows your ad on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. Exact match shows it on searches with the same meaning or intent, and Google says it gives you the most control. Starting with phrase and exact, and going wider only once you know which searches book jobs, keeps the early budget on searches that look like hiring.

Ads shown outside your area

Google's default location setting reaches people in your area and people who have shown interest in it, and the second group can be somewhere else entirely. Google suggests the stricter setting, called Presence, when you only want people who are in, or regularly in, the places you target. If you drive to every job, check which one you're on. Running more than one location? Here's how to set targeting so each branch gets its own calls.

Ads running when nobody answers

Campaigns show ads all day by default. If nobody picks up after 6 p.m., set an ad schedule so the ads run when someone can answer, or lower your bids for the hours you can't. A click at 11 p.m. that ends in voicemail was still paid for.

One catch Google spells out: with an ad schedule, your campaign still paces toward 30.4 times your daily budget for the month, however few hours it runs. Fewer hours means the same money spent in less time, so set the daily budget for the month you want.

Local Services Ads: paying per lead instead of per click

Local Services Ads charge for each valid lead, like a call you answer or a message, instead of each click, and sit at the top of the results with the Google Verified badge. Google is moving them into Google Ads from August 2026, and you still pay per lead. What a lead costs, what gets credited, and what the move changes are in our guide to Local Services Ads cost. Judge them by the same number as everything else here: cost per booked job.

When you're not ready for ads

More leads only help if you can handle more work. Ads make sense when a booked job is worth more than it costs to get one and your crew has room for it. Wait if any of these is true:

• Your schedule is already full. Every lead you can't take is ad spend handed to the next name on the list.
• Daytime calls go to voicemail. Fix that before paying for more of them.
• A booked job costs more in ads than it brings in. Work it out with the napkin math above and your own close rate. If the share you'd need to book is higher than the share you book today, wait.
• You can't tell which calls came from the ads. Without tracking, you're judging by feel, and that is how a budget leaks for months.
• People can't find you without paying. If your Google listing is bare and your website doesn't show up for your trade and town, every customer costs you a click. Start with getting your website to show up on Google.

That last one is what Foundation is for: your website, your Google Business Profile and monthly work to get you found on Google, with no ad spend. When the phone rings from search and you have room for more, Acquisition adds the ads on top. If the numbers don't work for ads, we'll tell you so and recommend Foundation.

SEO vs Google Ads works out what about $1,000 a month buys in each, if you're weighing the two. Weighing Facebook instead? Here is when Facebook ads work for contractors.

The calculator below works out a month at any ad budget, and how many booked jobs at your average job it takes to cover it.