The click isn't the expensive part.The 42 minutes after it is.
MIT's Lead Response Management Study found 78% of customers buy from whoever responds first — not the cheapest, not the best reviewed. ServiceTitan's data across 100,000+ home service businesses puts the average response at 42 minutes, where companies book 28% of leads. Answer inside two minutes and that figure is 62%. Same leads. Same ad spend. More than double the jobs.
Sources: SearchLight Digital Local Services Ads benchmark, February 2026 — $6.72M in tracked spend, 888 contractors, 126,650 leads, $1,826 average ticket, 43.9% book rate. Google Ads cost per lead from LocaliQ's home services benchmark across 3,211 campaigns. National averages: a $53 blended figure hides roughly $30 in smaller markets and $90+ in competitive metros, so benchmark against your own trade and geography rather than the headline.
What are the three paid surfaces a contractor can buy?
Local Services Ads at the very top, charging per lead. Standard search ads below them, charging per click. And Performance Max, which spends across everything Google owns and tells you the least about where it went. They price differently, convert differently and fail differently, and running all three without separating the reporting is how contractors end up unable to say which one produced last month's work.
Local Services Ads
Pay per lead, not per click, and the listing sits above everything including the map pack. Carries the Google Verified badge after licence and insurance checks. Cheapest contractor channel in the published data by a wide margin — and adoption has gone from roughly 28% of contractors in 2021 to about 70% by late 2025, so it is table stakes now rather than an edge.
Search campaigns
Pay per click, full control of keywords, geography, schedule and landing page. More expensive per lead than LSA but it reaches intent LSA categories do not cover, and it is the only surface where your negative keyword list can do real work. At $8–$45 a click the traffic you block matters as much as the traffic you buy.
Performance Max
Google spends across search, display, YouTube and Maps on its own judgement. Reported around $72 per lead, which looks like a win until you check the book rate — 32.2% against 37.6% for non-branded search. It also spends happily on your own brand name, taking credit for traffic you were getting free.
Which paid channel is actually cheapest per booked job?
Not the one with the lowest cost per lead, which is the entire problem with how contractors compare channels. Divide cost per lead by the rate at which those leads book and the order changes. The final column is the only one worth managing to, and it is the one almost nobody calculates.
Sources: SearchLight Digital LSA benchmark, February 2026 ($6.72M spend, 888 contractors, 126,650 leads) and HVAC/plumbing Google Ads benchmark ($14.9M spend, 816 contractors); Groas 2026 campaign analysis for Performance Max and non-branded search book rates; LocaliQ home services benchmark across 3,211 campaigns. Cost per booked job for Performance Max and non-branded search is derived by dividing published cost per lead by published book rate, so treat those two as arithmetic rather than measurement. The LSA figure is published directly.
Read the table honestly and two things follow. Performance Max and Local Services Ads land in roughly the same place per booked job despite a $19 gap per lead — so the channel that looks 36% cheaper isn't. And non-branded search costs nearly twice as much per job as either, which is an argument for running it deliberately rather than an argument for switching it off.
How much of your ad budget goes to whoever answered first?
You pay for the lead either way. Whether it becomes a job is decided largely in the minutes afterward, and 78% of the time it goes to whoever responded first. Drag the slider to your real response time and this prices the gap — against your own spend, using published home services booking rates rather than anything we made up.
The Response Time Ledger
AFC · No. 017
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is stored or transmitted. Booking rates are interpolated between two published anchor points from ServiceTitan's home services benchmark — 62% at a two-minute response and 28% at 42 minutes — on a logarithmic curve, which matches the shape every study of this finds. It is a model between two real measurements, not a measurement of your business. Your close rate, trade and lead source all move it. What the model cannot overstate is the direction: every study on this points the same way.
How do you actually run contractor Google Ads properly?
Response first, because it multiplies everything downstream and costs less than a week of ad spend. Then the cheapest surface. Then the expensive one, deliberately. Most inherited contractor accounts we take over can be improved in the first fortnight without touching the budget at all.
Fix what happens after the click
Who answers at 6pm. What happens to a form at the weekend. Whether missed calls get a text back within seconds. Doubling your booking rate costs less than doubling your budget and it improves every channel at once — including the organic leads you are not paying for.
Turn on Local Services Ads, properly
Licence and insurance verification for the Google Verified badge, correct job types, sensible weekly budget. At $53 blended against $90.92 for standard search it is the cheapest entry point in the published data — but roughly 70% of contractors are now in it, so it is a baseline rather than an advantage.
Dispute the junk leads, every week
Wrong number, wrong service, wrong area, spam. Google refunds them and almost no contractor files. Every unclaimed dispute silently inflates your real cost per lead above the benchmark you think you are beating, and the process takes minutes.
Build the negative keyword list
DIY intent, job seekers, training courses, "free", supplier and wholesale terms. At $8 to $45 a click, the traffic you prevent is worth as much as the traffic you buy, and this is routinely the fastest improvement available on an inherited account.
Separate campaigns by job value
An emergency call-out and a full replacement are different budgets wearing the same keyword. Bidding one number across both means overpaying for small jobs and underbidding on the ones that pay for the year. Branded search gets its own campaign too, so you can see what Performance Max is quietly claiming credit for.
Report cost per booked job, not cost per lead
Call tracking per channel, and outcomes fed back in. A channel with cheaper leads and a worse book rate is not cheaper — that is exactly the Performance Max trap in the table above, and you cannot see it from a Google Ads dashboard alone.
Sometimes the right advice is spend less, not more.
If you're at 42 minutes and booking 28%, we can double your budget and you'll book twice as many leads badly. Or you can fix who answers the phone and get most of that gain from the spend you already have. The second one is the smaller sale for us and it's usually the right call, so we'll say it on the first phone call rather than after three months of invoices.
Get a free ads auditWhat is included in contractor Google Ads management?
Setup and daily control of the three surfaces, the disputes and negatives that quietly decide your real cost, and the tracking that lets you say which channel produced which customer. Plus the response side, because it changes the return on everything else.
Local Services Ads management
Verification for the Google Verified badge, job type and budget control, review flow, and weekly lead disputes. At $53 per lead and $233 per paying customer it is the strongest published economics in contractor paid search — provided somebody is actually working the disputes.
See the channel table The multiplierSpeed-to-lead systems
Missed-call text-back, after-hours routing, instant form alerts, and follow-up that fires without anyone remembering. This is the work that moves booking from 28% toward 62% on the leads you are already paying for.
Lead generation systems ControlSearch campaign management
Campaigns separated by job value and intent, negative keyword lists that actually get maintained, ad copy written to the search rather than to the brand, and landing pages that match what was clicked. Branded search kept separate so you can see what it is really worth.
See the channel table SupervisionPerformance Max oversight
Useful, and not to be left alone. Brand exclusions so it stops charging you for traffic you already had, asset control, and book rate tracked separately — because at 32.2% against 37.6% for search, the cheap leads are partly an illusion.
Run the numbers Underneath itTracking & attribution
Call tracking per channel installed before spend starts, conversion tracking that records booked work rather than form fills, and reporting in cost per booked job. Without it you are optimising toward the cheapest lead, which is how the Performance Max trap catches people.
Contractor SEO The free surfaceMap pack & profile work
Local Services Ads sit above the map pack, but the map pack costs nothing per lead. Running paid without fixing the profile underneath means renting a position you could partly own.
Local SEO for contractorsWhat can a contractor fix in their ads account this week?
Four things, all free, and any one of them may beat a budget increase. If you do only these and never call us, this page has done its job.
Time your own response, honestly
Have someone submit your form at 4pm on a Friday and note when you actually reply. That number is your real close rate ceiling, and it is usually worse than anyone guesses.
File every Local Services Ads dispute
Go through last month's leads and dispute the junk. Google refunds them. Most contractors never do this, and it is money already spent that you can simply get back.
Read your search terms report
Not your keywords — the actual phrases people typed. You will find DIY searches, job hunters and neighbouring trades you have been paying $8 to $45 a click for.
Turn on missed-call text-back
Most phone systems and CRMs have it built in and switched off. A homeowner who gets an instant text has not moved on to the next contractor yet.
Where can a contractor check these numbers independently?
Every figure on this page comes from somewhere you can go and read. None of these pay us to be listed, and if a claim here contradicts one of them, believe them rather than us.
Local Services Ads Help
Setup, the Google Verified badge, and the lead dispute process. That last one is worth real money and almost nobody uses it.
SearchLight LSA Benchmark
The $6.72M dataset behind the $53 and $233 figures on this page, broken down by trade. The most transparent contractor lead cost data published.
LocaliQ Home Services Benchmarks
Cost per click and cost per lead across 3,211 home services campaigns, split by trade. The source of the $90.92 average and the roofing outlier.
Google Ads Help
Google's own documentation, including how Performance Max allocates spend and how to apply brand exclusions — which most contractor accounts need and do not have.
Harvard Business Review
The replication of Dr James Oldroyd's MIT lead response research. The five-minute finding behind the clock at the top of this page.
Eye To Ad Media
Our parent company, running paid search for local businesses since 2012. Listed with the interest declared.
Contractor Google Ads questions
How much do Google Ads cost for contractors in 2026?
Are Local Services Ads cheaper than Google Ads for contractors?
Why do my Google Ads leads not turn into jobs?
Is Performance Max good for contractors?
What happened to Google Guaranteed?
How much should a contractor spend on Google Ads per month?
Should contractors run Google Ads or SEO?
What negative keywords do contractors need?
More plain-English definitions in the contractor marketing glossary.
We'll tell you if the problem is the ads or the phone
We review your search terms, your negatives, your Local Services Ads disputes and your campaign structure — then we test your response time by submitting your own form and seeing how long it takes to hear back. That second part is usually the more uncomfortable finding.
About a day to turn around. You keep the findings whether you hire us or not. If the biggest gain available to you is fixing who answers the phone rather than hiring us to spend more, we will say so.
Prefer to talk? 1-800-481-8638 — a person answers, which is rather the point. Or email info@eyetoad.com.
Request your free ads audit
No cost, no contract, no pitch deck.
Answer first. Then worry about the budget.
One call. We'll audit the account, time your response, and tell you which of the two is costing you more. If it's the phone, we'll say so and charge you nothing to hear it.