Are Google Ads Worth It? How Contractors Can Run the Numbers

Google Ads is worth it for some contractors and a waste for others. Here is the arithmetic that tells you which one you are, plus when to say no.

By Gavin Sevastian · Updated August 4, 2026 · 10 min read

Are Google Ads worth it? The question has no general answer. It has an answer for your business, and that answer comes out of four numbers you either already have or can put together this week. Everything else, the case studies, the horror stories, the guy at the supply counter who says he burned through a few thousand dollars and got nothing, is somebody else's arithmetic.

Here are the four: what an average job is worth, what your gross margin is inside it, what share of your quotes get signed, and what a lead costs in your trade and your area. Run those and the answer falls out. Sometimes it falls out as no. There are four situations where the honest advice is not to bother, and they get named further down this page.

Are Google Ads worth it for you? Start with these four numbers

Step 1: your average job value, and the margin inside it

Revenue is not the number that pays for advertising. Gross margin is.

A $22,000 job at 18% margin leaves less room to buy customers than a $6,000 job at 45%. The big-ticket job feels like it can absorb anything. Often it cannot.

So the first number is not your average invoice. It is what survives an average job after materials, labour, subs, and the truck. If you have never separated that out by service type, do it roughly. High, medium, low is enough to make this decision, and it is a great deal better than reasoning from ticket size, which is what almost everybody does.

One more thing about job value: on its own it means nothing without frequency. A $40,000 job type that eight people a month search for in your service area is not a business case. It is a lottery ticket with a monthly fee.

Step 2: your close rate on quoted work

Of the jobs you actually quote, what share get signed.

Be precise about which share. Not leads that eventually turned into customers, and not a general impression of how things are going. Specifically: quotes out, contracts signed. That ratio is what moves the answer most, and it is the one number in this calculation that no benchmark, no agency, and no article can hand you.

There is a whole section below on why the figures circulating online are invented, and how to pull your own out of a recent quarter. If you already know yours, hold onto it. If you do not, put a rough figure in for now and treat everything this page tells you as provisional until you go and check.

Step 3: cost per lead, and the number it turns into

Now the chain, in the right direction. A click becomes a lead. A lead becomes a quote. A quote becomes a signed job. Every arrow loses people.

Cost per lead is what gets quoted at you and where most of the arguing happens. It decides nothing on its own. Cost per booked job does. Roughly, that is cost per lead divided by close rate. Close one quote in three and you are paying for three leads per signed job, plus whatever share of leads never became a quote at all.

Then you set cost per booked job against gross margin per job, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion. If you want more detail on the click side of that chain, we go through it in what Google Ads cost for contractors.

1. 1

   Start with the job, not the click

   Say your average job is $8,000 and your gross margin on it is 35 percent. That leaves $2,800 per job. That $2,800, not the $8,000, is the pot advertising has to come out of.

2. 2

   Add your close rate

   Say you sign one quote in three. Every booked job therefore costs you three leads, before you count the leads that never turned into a quote at all.

3. 3

   Turn cost per lead into cost per job

   Say a lead in your trade and your area costs $150. Three leads per signed job puts you at roughly $450 of ad spend per booked job. If only half your leads become quotes, it is closer to $900.

4. 4

   Set it against margin

   $450 against $2,800 of gross margin is about 16 percent of the margin on that job. $900 is about a third of it. Whether that is comfortable or fatal depends on what your overhead and your profit need from the rest, which only you know.

What a lead actually costs, trade by trade

The published numbers, by trade

Somebody has to supply a cost-per-lead figure for the arithmetic above. The best public dataset we found for home services, and the only one with a stated sample size and methodology, comes from LocaliQ. Here is the whole thing rather than the convenient rows.

The most useful thing on that table is not any single row. It is the spread. Roofing's cost per lead is about five times the pool and spa figure. That is the strongest public evidence going that "are Google Ads worth it" cannot have one answer. Two competent advertisers on the same platform in the same country land five times apart before either one has opened their books.

The overall home services medians in the same report are $7.85 per click, a 7.33% conversion rate, and $90.92 per lead, all in USD.

If roofing is your trade, that top row is worth sitting with, and how to get roofing leads covers where they actually come from. The plumbing and heating rows both land near $129, and how to get plumbing leads works through the same question from the service side.

The methodology matters as much as the numbers, so here it is in the publisher's own words.

"This report is based on a sample of 3,211 US-based search advertising campaigns from home services businesses running between April 1, 2024, and March 21, 2025. Each category includes at minimum 103 unique active campaigns. 'Averages' are technically median figures to account for outliers. All currency values are posted in USD." (LocaliQ)

Four reasons that table is not your number

Three obvious ones, and then a fourth that matters more than the other three combined.

It is US only. Different auction, different competitors, different demand.

It is USD, so every figure in that column converts to a bigger number in Canadian dollars. Ontario click prices also run below American ones, which we get to next. Put those together and the column is a high bar rather than a target. A Canadian contractor who reads it as CAD is working from a number that is well out of position.

They are medians, which the report says plainly. Half the advertisers in that sample paid more than the figure in their row.

And a national median tells you almost nothing about who is bidding against you in your city, which is the thing that actually sets your price.

How home improvement compares to everything else

Across all industries, the same publisher reports a median cost per click of $5.42, a conversion rate of 8.18%, and a cost per lead of $66.69. Home and home improvement sits at $8.33 per click, 8.05%, and $90.92 per lead (WordStream, US campaigns, USD).

That $90.92 is the identical figure LocaliQ publishes as its home services median, off a different click price, a different conversion rate, and a different twelve months of campaigns. Which is your cue not to read it as two sources agreeing. WordStream is a LocaliQ property. It is one dataset wearing two names.

Both are also drawn from businesses that had already hired a marketing company, which is a self-selected group rather than a cross-section of contractors.

What the comparison is genuinely good for: home improvement clicks cost meaningfully more than the all-industry median while converting at about the same rate. That is precisely why job value and close rate decide this question and the click price does not.

What a click costs in Ontario, and why the American figures overstate it

Ontario top of page bid ranges for real trade searches

Every benchmark above is American, and there is no Canadian equivalent worth citing. What we can do instead is read Google's own bid data for Ontario, in Canadian dollars, for searches an actual homeowner types. The pull settings are in the caption so you can run it yourself.

Inside one province, on one platform, the low end of the range runs from about $3 to about $12, which is close to four times. The high end runs from about $14 to $50. A click price that would sink a low-ticket service is trivial against a window or furnace job, and that is the whole point of doing this trade by trade rather than reading a national average.

Note the geo target ID in that caption. Ontario is 20121 and Quebec is 20123, one digit apart, and picking the wrong one returns a full set of plausible numbers about the wrong province. This is a very easy mistake to make and an almost impossible one to spot afterwards.

What these numbers are and are not

While you are in there, ignore the competition column. A rating of Low or Medium is not a price signal. The same documentation defines it as the number of ad slots filled divided by the total slots available, which is a measure of how full the auction is, not how cheap it is. Reading it as cheapness is a well-worn way to be wrong.

Canada is not America, and neither is Toronto

Run those same searches against a US geography and the gap is not subtle. "Plumber" averages 27,100 searches a month in Ontario against 550,000 in the United States. "House painters" runs 390 here and 8,100 there. Top of page bids come back higher in the US as well.

Both halves matter. American cost content overstates what an Ontario contractor is likely to pay, and American volume content overstates the size of the market he is buying into by more than a factor of ten on some terms.

The second half is the one that does real damage. A Toronto contractor reading an American guide about a trade with half a million monthly searches is reading about a market that does not exist here at that size, and every budget recommendation in that guide inherits the error.

Our cost guide and the Toronto page both work from Canadian conditions rather than translated American ones.

Your close rate is the number nobody will give you

Why no credible source publishes one

Search for a contractor close rate and you will be handed half a dozen confident figures spanning single digits to well over fifty percent, none of which agree with each other. Most carry no source at all. The rest cite each other. Nearly all of them sit on vendor blogs and SEO content sites.

Several attribute their number to a real piece of research: a survey of more than 1,000 HVACR contractors run by a genuine trade association. That study exists. We read the association's own writeup of it. It does not publish an absolute close rate anywhere in its findings. It reports relative lift only.

What that study does say, and it is useful

The association partnered with a consulting group to survey more than 1,000 HVACR contractors about business practices, profitability, and operations.

What it publishes is not what a close rate is, but what moves one. Presenting four or more proposal options raises close rates by 10% and shifts premium equipment sales from 26% to 42%. Offering financing raises close rates by 11%.

It also found that only 28% of contractors lead with a monthly payment rather than a total price (ACCA).

That is US data and it is HVAC specific. Directionally useful for a roofer or a painter, and not a promise to either of them.

How to get your own number this week

Count the quotes you sent in a recent full quarter, then count how many got signed. A full quarter, not last month, because seasonality will hand you a flattering or a brutal answer depending on which month you happen to pick.

Then notice where that number sits in the calculation. It is in the denominator. It moves the answer harder than any decision anyone can make inside an ads account, which is worth saying plainly given who is writing this: fixing your quote-to-close process changes the economics of advertising more than the advertising can.

One Ontario wrinkle almost nobody mentions. A contract signed at a customer's home is cancellable for 10 days for any reason and with no cancellation fee, and deposits must be refunded within 15 days of that notice (Government of Ontario).

A signature is not a booked job for a week and a half. That matters to your close-rate maths, and it matters again to how quickly you can judge whether any of this is working.

Four situations where Google Ads are not worth it

Most pages on this subject cannot name a business they would turn down, which is what makes them unconvincing to anybody who has already been pitched by six agencies. So here are four, with the check you run to find out whether one of them is you.

Your service area is too small

Demand is finite and it has a map. Only so many people in your area go looking for your service in a given month, and no amount of budget or skill manufactures a search that nobody made. This is a hard ceiling and it does not move.

It is also the no that gets papered over most often. The papering looks like widening the targeting radius until the lead count improves, which works right up to the moment you are quoting jobs ninety minutes away that you would never have driven to.

Look back at the Ontario table. "House painters" returns 390 searches a month across the entire province, every city in it. Divide that down to one service area and you are looking at a genuinely small number of people, which any painter reading this will recognise as about right.

One caveat before you decide your market is dead: a single search term always understates real demand, because people phrase the same need a dozen different ways and some of those phrasings are far more common than the one you thought of. Volume for one keyword is a sample, not a total.

So pull monthly volume for your main service in your actual service area rather than your province, across the handful of phrasings a customer would plausibly type. Then ask what share of that you would have to win to cover the spend, and whether a human being could realistically win it.

Your job value is too low against the click price

The auction prices the click, not the job.

When somebody types "window replacement," Google has no idea whether that person wants eleven windows done or one sash repaired, and everybody bidding on that search pays the same kind of money to find out.

So a contractor selling a small job inside an expensive category is competing for clicks against companies selling a large one. The click price is set by the biggest wallet in the auction, and your $400 repair is paying it too.

The published figures show the shape of it. Doors and windows sales carries the second-highest cost per lead on the LocaliQ table at $200.34 USD, against a home services median of $90.92 USD. In Ontario, top of page bids for "window replacement" run from $12.09 to $50.29 CAD, the most expensive line in the table above.

Against a five figure replacement, that is a completely workable cost of doing business. Against a $400 repair, the arithmetic is finished before close rate even enters the conversation.

The line to hold is this. If one signed job costs more in clicks than the gross margin on that job, no account structure, no bidding strategy and no landing page fixes it. That is a service mix problem rather than an advertising problem.

Nobody is answering the phone

An unanswered lead is a click you already paid for with nothing left to salvage. That makes this failure worse than neutral. The money has already gone, and the homeowner is now on the phone with whoever picked up second.

Google treats this as a live ranking input rather than a soft nicety. Its documentation on Local Services ad rankings lists your responsiveness to enquiries as a factor and states plainly that "missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness" (Google).

For scale, a call tracking vendor reports that 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered (Invoca). Read that as a direction rather than as your number. The surrounding article describes franchises and multi-location businesses taking thousands of calls a day, not a two-truck operation.

If the calls are coming in and nothing is happening with them, why your Google Ads are not getting calls works through the difference between a lead problem and an answering problem.

For one week, log how many enquiries got a human response inside an hour during your advertised hours. If you cannot answer that question at all, you are not ready to buy leads.

Your quote-to-close process is broken

Ads amplify a business. They do not repair one. If quotes are going out and not coming back signed, buying more quotes at a price is simply a faster way to run the same loss.

This is where the close rate from the last section earns its keep. If you went and pulled it and it came back low against what you expected, the ads decision is premature. The fix is upstream, in what happens between the estimate and the signature, and it is worth more money than any change anyone can make inside an ads account.

Speed is part of that, and there is one solid piece of research on it, published in Harvard Business Review. It reports two separate studies, and they are worth keeping separate.

The first audited 2,241 US companies responding to a web-generated test lead. Of those, 37% responded within an hour, 24% took more than a day, and 23% never responded at all.

The second looked at 1.25 million sales leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. Firms attempting contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those trying an hour later, and more than sixty times as likely as those who waited a day or more (Harvard Business Review).

Neither study covered contractors. They covered financial services, automotive, education and software. Take them as evidence that response speed matters in general, and ignore the faster, more dramatic version of that statistic that circulates with Harvard's name on it, because it comes from a different piece of research entirely.

Fix the close rate first, then advertise. Not because advertising is fragile, but because every point of close rate you recover makes every lead you buy afterwards cheaper.

Why month one will lie to you

Spend books immediately, conversions book late

The most common reason a contractor decides this does not work is that he judged it on a window that structurally could not show him the answer.

Google says so itself, and this is worth reading twice.

"If you compare recent performance with past performance, your recent performance might not look as strong, because some of the people who clicked your ad haven't converted yet. Since you're missing these conversions that will come later on but your spend is fully reported, it may appear that you have fewer conversions, a higher cost per conversion, and so on" (Google Ads Help).

Read what that means for your dashboard. Every dollar shows up the day it leaves. The leads those dollars produced show up whenever the homeowner gets around to it.

So the most recent stretch of any report always looks like the worst stretch, and the most recent stretch is exactly what a nervous advertiser refreshes.

The default click-through conversion window is 30 days, and it can be set anywhere from 1 to 90 depending on the conversion source (Google Ads Help). A click in week one can legitimately book as a lead in week five.

Then add your own sales cycle on top

Now stack your trade on top of the platform's lag. Somebody clicks in March, books an estimate for April, gets the quote, thinks about it, talks to a spouse, and signs in May.

And in Ontario, as covered earlier, that signature is still cancellable for ten days. Three separate delays, none of which anybody quoting you a thirty-day verdict has accounted for. A furnace replacement and an emergency drain clearing do not run on the same clock, and evaluating them on the same calendar is a mistake.

The platform also needs time to calibrate

There is a third delay, and it is on Google's side. Its own documentation on the learning period states that "it can take up to 3 weeks or 1-2 conversion cycles for the bid strategy to calibrate to the new objective, although it can be faster depending on the amount of conversion data present" (Google Ads Help).

Changing the objective or the bid strategy starts that clock over again. Which produces the most self-defeating pattern in this whole business: a contractor who adjusts something every four days, on the reasonable theory that he is being attentive, and never once gets a clean read on anything he did.

Our bid strategy guide covers what each strategy is actually optimising for.

If you cannot measure it, you cannot answer the question

Broken tracking and genuine failure look identical

From the outside, these two situations produce exactly the same evidence: money going out, nothing visibly coming back. One is a configuration problem that takes an afternoon to fix. The other is a real answer about your market. You cannot tell them apart without conversion measurement that was working before the spend started.

That is why "I tried Google Ads and it didn't work for me" is so often an unanswerable claim rather than a finding. There is nothing left to examine. The money is gone and the record of what it did was never kept.

Measurement is not a reporting nicety you add once things are going well. It is the thing that has to exist first.

Counting leads is not the same as counting jobs

There is a version of this that is worse, because everything on the screen improves while the business gets worse.

Cheaper leads that close at a lower rate look like progress on every metric anyone looks at. Cost per lead falls, lead volume rises, the report is a pleasure to read, and revenue does not move. If nothing connects a lead back to whether it became a signed job, every optimisation decision after that is being made on the wrong number, confidently, in the wrong direction.

You will never see the whole picture, and that is by design

Google withholds a portion of search terms for privacy reasons, so the report of what people actually typed to reach your ads is permanently incomplete (Google Ads Help).

That is not a bug and it is not going away. It means this work is judgment applied to partial information rather than rules applied to complete information, which matters for the last question on this page: who should be doing it.

What you are really choosing between

You are not choosing between Google Ads and nothing. You are choosing between Google Ads and whatever you are already spending to get in front of people, including the spending that does not look like spending.

Lead marketplaces you are probably already paying

Most contractors reading this already buy leads somewhere. A directory site, a quote-matching service, a lead vendor who calls twice a year to sell a bigger package.

The structural difference is not the price. It is exclusivity. On most marketplaces the enquiry is sold to more than one contractor at once, so the homeowner has other quotes coming and you are one of several names in an inbox. A lead from your own ad is yours alone.

That difference does not show up in cost per lead. It shows up in close rate, which moves the answer harder than anything else in the calculation. A cheap shared lead you rarely sign and a dearer exclusive lead you often sign are not the same purchase, and only one of those numbers ever appears on an invoice.

Neither model is dishonest. Marketplaces solve a real problem for a contractor with no website, no reviews, and no time. They just price the convenience into your close rate rather than into the bill, which makes them look cheaper than they are on the only comparison most people run.

Work out your cost per booked job from each source rather than your cost per lead. If you have never tracked which source a signed job came from, that is the first thing to fix, and it is the same fix the measurement section described.

Local Services Ads, which are often the better answer

Sometimes the honest recommendation is not Search at all.

Local Services Ads run on a different commercial model, and Google's Canadian documentation puts it in one line: "Pay only for leads related to your business and the services you offer" (Google).

Pay per lead rather than pay per click changes the arithmetic in exactly the place this page has been hammering. A contractor whose job value cannot absorb a $30 click in a competitive category may find that paying per enquiry works out entirely differently, because he stops paying for everybody who clicked and left.

The same Google page carries a line that loops straight back to the third disqualifier above: "If you regularly fail to answer calls or respond to messages, your ad ranking may be affected." The platform ranks you partly on whether you pick up.

We cover the tradeoff in Local Services Ads versus Google Ads, and what setting them up involves in Local Services Ads for contractors.

SEO, referrals, and social

The referral comparison has to be made in both directions or it is not worth making.

Direction one: referrals are not free. They cost you the years of work, the follow-up calls, the jobs you went back and fixed for nothing, and the relationships you maintain with three other trades. That cost is real and it never appears on a statement, which is exactly why paid leads feel expensive next to it.

Direction two, which cuts the other way: referral leads close better than cold ad leads, because the trust arrived before you did. So the two are not interchangeable units and you should not compare them one for one. Ten referrals and ten ad leads are not the same ten jobs.

SEO and ads are the comparison people most often frame as either-or, and it is usually the wrong frame. They differ in time horizon and in failure mode, not in quality of lead. We work through it properly in Google Ads versus SEO for contractors.

Social is a different animal again, and the difference is one sentence long. On search, somebody is already looking for what you sell. On social, you are interrupting somebody who was not thinking about their roof. Both can work. They are not doing the same job, and a contractor with limited money to test should generally start where the demand already exists.

Running it yourself, hiring someone, or not running it at all

The defaults are not set in your favour

The platform's default settings are configured to maximise the platform's billable events. Not your return.

That is not a conspiracy, it is just whose product it is. Broader matching, wider networks, automatic additions, helpful-sounding recommendations that widen who sees your ads. Every one of those defaults increases the number of clicks the system can sell you, and some of them are right for your account.

Knowing which ones, and why, is the job. Which is why setup is not the work. A campaign built well on Monday and left alone will decay, because the mix of searches reaching your ads keeps shifting underneath it. People type new things. Competitors change what they bid on. Google adds features that are on by default.

And you are doing all of that with incomplete information. That is what makes this judgment work rather than checklist work, and it is why it does not finish.

When running it yourself is the right call

Plenty of contractors should run this themselves, and we will say so.

If you have a modest budget, one service, one city, and genuine time to learn, you can do a reasonable job of this. Not a great one at first. A reasonable one. And paying a management fee on a small spend is frequently worse arithmetic than running it imperfectly yourself, because the fee is a fixed cost against a small pot.

Name the cost before you decide. It is an ongoing time commitment rather than a weekend project, the learning happens on live money, and the first few months are the expensive part of the education. If you want a starting point rather than a pitch, Google Ads for small business is written for exactly that reader.

What management should actually cost you

If you do hire someone, put the fee where it belongs: inside the same calculation the rest of this page has been running.

A management fee is another input into cost per booked job. It is not a separate line item to be minimised on its own, and treating it as one leads straight to the worst outcome available, which is a cheap manager producing expensive leads. Fee plus ad spend, divided by jobs booked, measured against gross margin. That is the only comparison that means anything.

What you are buying at that price is judgment, attention, and the fact that somebody else absorbs the learning curve on their own time rather than on your money. What Google Ads agencies charge breaks down the common pricing models and what each one incentivises, which is worth understanding before you sign anything.

If the numbers work, what has to be in place before you spend

Say you ran it and the answer came back yes. Three things have to exist before the first dollar moves.

1. 1

   Measurement, before spend rather than after

   Every claim on this page depends on knowing which leads came from where and which of them became jobs. Build that after the money starts moving and the first weeks are unreadable, which is a problem because those are precisely the weeks people render judgment on.

2. 2

   One service, one page, one area

   Starting narrow gives you a readable answer in ninety days. Starting broad gives you a muddle at the same cost, because nothing has enough volume behind it to mean anything. Pick the service with the best margin and the most searches, and expand from a result rather than a hope.

3. 3

   Somebody who answers during the hours you advertise

   If the phone is not covered between eight and six, either fix that or restrict the ads to the hours it is. Paying to ring a phone nobody picks up is the most expensive thing in this entire guide.

Then the decision itself, in order, so you can run it again in six months without rereading any of this:

1. Average job value, by service type.
2. Gross margin inside that job, not revenue.
3. Your close rate on quoted work, pulled from a full recent quarter.
4. Cost per lead in your trade and your area, from published figures or your own history.
5. Cost per booked job, which is roughly cost per lead divided by close rate.
6. Does that clear your gross margin with enough room left to be worth the trouble.

If it clears comfortably, advertise. If it clears narrowly, fix the close rate first and the same spend gets better. If it does not clear at all, you have saved yourself a season of tuition, and that is a genuinely good outcome from a free web page.

The summary of this whole thing: Google Ads is worth it when you have margin, demand in your area, and somebody who answers the phone. It is a reliable way to lose money when any one of those is missing, and no amount of skill inside the account substitutes for them.

Want a second opinion on your four numbers? Book a twenty minute call and we will run them together, with no obligation either way.