How to Get Garage Door Leads: Repair, Installs, and Trust
Where garage door repair and install leads actually come from, why trust is the real conversion problem in this trade, and how to stop repair eating installs.
By Gavin Sevastian · Updated August 4, 2026 · 12 min read
Nobody schedules a broken spring. The door comes down on a Tuesday morning, a car is trapped, and a homeowner who has never once thought about your trade is on their phone comparing whoever appears first. That urgency is the best thing about this business.
The worst thing is what else is sitting in those search results. Garage door repair is a documented target for fake local listings and bait and switch pricing, which means the person calling you has already been told to be careful. You are selling a repair and proving you are real at the same time.
Underneath both of those sits the problem that quietly costs the most money. The same channels that fill your day with service calls will bury your installation work, and installation is where the margin lives. How to get garage door leads is the easy half of the question. Which ones you get is the half that decides whether the year was any good.
How to get garage door leads, in order of what actually works
One gate before the list. Local Services Ads only exists for the trades on Google's category list for your country, and the lists are not the same country to country. Garage doors is absent from Google's Canadian category list even though the Canadian screening page carries a full requirements block for it. The signup flow is the authority. If the category is closed to you, this list starts at number two.
The five channels, ranked
Local Services Ads, where the category is open to you
You pay per lead instead of per click, and your profile carries a verification badge. In a market where you can actually get it, that is the fastest route to a ringing phone for repair work, and the badge speaks directly to the suspicion this category has to overcome. In the United States, garage door services is a restricted category and verification has to complete before any ads run.
Google Search ads
The only channel you can actually aim. You choose the keywords, the copy and the page, which makes it the one lane that can be pointed at door replacements rather than service calls. It also demands more ongoing attention than everything else on this list combined.
Google Business Profile and reviews
Free, slow, and compounding. Your profile and review count decide your position in the map pack, and they are what a suspicious homeowner opens in a second tab before deciding whether to dial. Where Local Services Ads is available to you, rating and review count feed your rank there as well.
Your existing repair customers
Every repair visit is a replacement conversation you did not pay a media cost to start. It gets its own section further down, because it is a process rather than a channel and almost nobody runs it as one.
Referrals and neighbour facing follow up
Installs are visible from the street. A new door changes the whole front of a house, so the neighbours either side of a completed job are warmer prospects than any list you could buy.
Why the ranking is different for repair than for install
Same five channels, different order.
Repair is intercepted at the moment of failure. Being close, being visible and answering the phone decide it, because the homeowner is picking from whoever is available right now. Ad copy matters far less than presence.
Installation is a considered purchase. Nobody replaces a door in a panic. The page, the photo gallery and the follow up decide it, and the buyer will usually look at you more than once, often with somebody else, before they contact anybody. That is a different job for your marketing, and it is the subject of most of this guide.
What is not worth your time
Demand generation aimed at people whose door works fine. You cannot nurture somebody into needing a spring. Social feeds and display banners have a role in some trades, but for break and fix work they are spending money on an audience that has no reason to act.
Shared lead marketplaces treated as a foundation. You are buying the same lead as three competitors and competing on who dials first and who discounts hardest. As filler on a slow week, fine. As the base of your business, it puts a third party between you and every customer you have.
Generic quality claims. In a category where fake listings are a documented problem, telling people you are the best is noise. Every operator says it.
If you have never run ads before and want the general shape of the thing before you get into the trade specifics, start with our guide to Google Ads for small business owners.
Repair and install are two businesses sharing a van
Budget, bidding, reporting and page design are all decided by whether you accept this.
The two jobs have almost nothing in common
| What differs | Repair | Installation |
|---|---|---|
| Typical ticket | Angi puts the average US repair near $263, with spring replacement commonly $150 to $350 | Angi puts the average US replacement near $1,223 |
| Urgency | Immediate. The car is stuck behind the door | Considered. Weeks or months of thinking about it |
| Who decides | One person, alone, on a phone | Usually two people, and it is partly an aesthetic decision about the front of the house |
| What proves you | Availability, proximity, a real address, a stated diagnostic fee | A photo gallery, style guidance, a written quote, warranty terms |
| How the lead arrives | A phone call, almost always | A form or a quote request, often after several visits to your site |
| First click to booked job | Same day, sometimes the same hour | Days to months |
Those ticket figures come from Angi's garage door repair cost data and its spring replacement cost guide. They are US consumer averages in US dollars, as is every published benchmark in this guide, so convert at whatever the rate is on the day and read them as the shape of the gap rather than as your numbers. Your own average invoice, in Canadian dollars, is what governs, and you already have it.
The gap is nearly five times. Hold that thought, because every measurement mistake in this trade comes from averaging across it.
Repair searches vastly outnumber install searches, and that is the trap
For every homeowner searching to replace a door, a great many more are searching to fix one. That direction is not controversial.
Do not take it on faith. Check it for your own city, because it takes five minutes and the answer is yours rather than a national average.
Open Google Keyword Planner and set the location to your service area rather than the whole country. Then pull monthly search volumes for two lists.
- Repair side: garage door repair, garage door opener repair, broken garage door spring, garage door will not close, emergency garage door repair
- Install side: garage door installation, garage door replacement, new garage door, new garage door cost, garage door installers near me
Google Trends will show you the same comparison as a twelve month curve if you would rather see a picture than a table.
Two columns matter for each list. Monthly searches tells you how many people are looking. The top of page bid estimate tells you what your competitors are willing to pay to stand in front of them. Put your own average invoice for each job type beside those two numbers and the whole strategic problem of this trade is on one screen, generated by you rather than quoted at you.
What this means for every decision that follows
Anything measured on lead count drifts toward the cheapest lead, and a service call is always cheaper to generate than a door quote.
It is arithmetic, and it applies across your business. A marketing dashboard that reports leads and cost per lead shows its best months when the mix tilts hardest toward repair. A technician bonus paid on jobs booked rather than on revenue booked does the same thing on the ground.
None of those systems are broken. They are all doing exactly what they were told. The fix is structural, and it shows up in three places later in this guide: how you separate the campaigns, how you turn repair visits into replacement work, and what you actually put on the scoreboard.
Roofing owners will recognize the whole pattern, because a roof repair and a roof replacement create the same trap for the same reasons. If you also run a roofing arm, the roofing lead guide covers the same structure from that side.
Local Services Ads, and the eligibility question that comes first
Check whether the category is even open to you
Before anything else, find out whether Google offers this product for garage doors where you operate. Availability is set by country and category together, and the American and Canadian lists are not close.
Garage doors is absent from Google's Canadian category list while the Canadian screening page carries a full requirements block for it, which is exactly the kind of contradiction that produces confident wrong advice. The signup flow is the authority. Open it, run the eligibility check, and believe what it tells you rather than any published list, including this one.
If you want the full treatment of the product and the Canadian category question, our Local Services Ads guide for contractors goes through it properly. Everything below applies where the category is open to you.
Why the product fits this trade
You pay per lead rather than per click, and your profile carries a verification badge next to your name. In a category where the buyer's first question is whether you are a real company, that badge is doing more work for you than any headline you could write.
The ranking inputs are worth knowing precisely, because the reflex most operators bring to this product is the wrong one. Google's ranking page names your bid, how likely your ad is to produce a lead (which covers your responsiveness, with an explicit note that missed calls may hurt you), and your profile quality: rating, review count, average response time, images, and the verification checks you have completed. Serious or repeatedly negative customer feedback can lower your ranking too, which Google states on its reviews and complaints page.
Read that list again and notice what it is made of. Answering the phone. Collecting reviews. Responding quickly. Keeping documents current. Bid is on the list, and it is the only input you can change in ten seconds, which is exactly why people reach for it. But two shops in the same carousel are usually separated on the profile side, so raising the bid when you are losing there buys more expensive leads rather than better position.
The badge changed in October 2025, and most advice online has not caught up
If you are reading anything about this product written before late 2025, check its date before you act on it. The badge everybody knows by name no longer exists.
Verification, and why the rules differ in the US and Canada
Two different programs get confused here, and the confusion produces wrong advice about which documents you need.
The first is Local Services Ads screening itself: business registration, licence and insurance documents, background checks. Every provider on the product goes through some version of it, and the exact requirements are set by category and by country.
The second is Advanced Verification, a separate Google Ads policy that gates whole business categories. In the United States, ads for garage door repair services are restricted and you must apply for Advanced Verification before they can run. In Canada, Google's policy applies that restriction to locksmith services only. Read the rule for your own country on Google's site before you plan around it, because these lists change and a guide written for a US audience will confidently tell a Canadian contractor to do work they do not need to do.
American operators should treat verification as a calendar item rather than a form. Google's Local Services documentation notes that pre badge ads are not available for garage door services, so there is no running while you wait. Verification completes, then you advertise.
Google's own verification documentation sets the sequence. From the outside it looks like this.
Confirm the rules for your country and your service
Check Google's live category list and policy documentation rather than any published summary. Garage door services and locksmith services are treated differently in different countries, and the difference decides which of the two programs you are actually facing.
Get the business registration in order
Your legal business name, address and registration details need to match what the province or state has on file and what your Business Profile says. A mismatch is much cheaper to find before you apply than after.
Assemble licensing and insurance documents
Current general liability insurance, plus any licences your jurisdiction requires for your scope of work. Renewals are part of the recurring work of running this channel, so put the expiry dates somewhere you will actually see them.
Complete the background review
The screening looks at the business and at the people running it, not only at the paperwork. Plan for real calendar time and put it in front of whoever can answer questions about the company.
Sit the video interview where Advanced Verification applies
A live verification call is part of the Advanced Verification process. It is not a test of your marketing. It is a check that the business and the person running it exist as described.
Then build the profile
Set your categories, your service area and your published hours honestly. Responsiveness is a named ranking input, so hours you cannot staff will cost you position rather than win you leads.
That sequence is a filter, and the filter is working in your favour. It is slow and it is irritating, and it blocks anyone who cannot produce a registration, a valid licence and a clean background review.
Google Search ads, structured so repair does not eat installs
Local Services takes what arrives. Search is the only channel you can aim
Local Services Ads gives you one setting that really steers what you get, and it is the category. Whatever the homeowners near you happened to search for this week is what lands in your inbox, and in this trade that means service calls. There is no keyword list to edit, no headline to write, no page to point the click at.
Search ads are the opposite in every respect. You choose the words that trigger the ad, the copy that answers them, and the page the click lands on. That control arrives with a maintenance bill attached, which is the honest trade off. But it is the only channel on the list where the sentence we want more door replacements turns into something you can actually configure.
The two are not substitutes. Local Services fills the van. Search is how you change what the van spends its day doing. And if the category is closed to you, Search is not one option among several. It is the only aimable channel you have.
Separate the two jobs at every level
Separate campaigns. Separate budgets. Separate landing pages. Separate conversion actions.
Not because it is tidier, but because a shared budget only ever resolves one way. Repair terms are searched far more often, they convert inside minutes rather than weeks, and a conversion counter cannot tell a spring call from a full replacement. Put both jobs in one campaign and the money walks toward repair every single month. That is not a tuning problem you can bid your way out of.
What you genuinely can split at the keyword level is job type, because the searcher named it. Somebody typing garage door spring repair and somebody typing garage door replacement have told you which of your two businesses they are contacting. Those belong in different campaigns with different pages behind them, and that split is most of the work.
What no keyword tells you is job size. Whatever the searcher typed, the scope of the work gets established on the page and on the phone, not in the keyword list.
How you tell the platform what a good outcome looks like sits underneath all of this, and it matters more than which strategy you pick off the menu. Our guide to Google Ads bid strategies covers that choice properly.
The defaults are set in Google's favour, not yours
None of those are hidden and none of them are accidents. They are defaults, and defaults are written by the party selling the inventory. Overriding them is day one work, and it is where a large share of wasted spend comes from.
Google does not show you every search that triggered your ads, and says so in its own documentation. You still review the search terms report every week, because it is the best signal you have and it is where your negative keyword list comes from. You just cannot treat it as a complete accounting of where the money went.
Structure is invisible and unglamorous, and it is where this account is won or lost.
The trust problem, and why it is worse in this trade than in yours
The category is a documented target, and that is your problem even if you are honest
In May 2026 the US Department of Justice, acting for the Federal Trade Commission, and the State of Illinois filed suit against a company they allege created thousands of fake local home repair business listings. Garage door repair is one of four keyword categories named in the complaint.
The complaint also alleges that the local addresses on those listings belonged to unrelated third parties or did not exist, that calls to local numbers were routed to representatives overseas, and that some technicians sent to jobs were neither licensed nor qualified. These are allegations rather than proven findings. The FTC's announcement is worth reading in full.
Canada has a version aimed directly at you rather than at the homeowner. In 2019 the Better Business Bureau said it was investigating complaints from several Calgary garage door companies whose business names were being used by other operators.
One customer told a company that their technician had called ahead, then added that somebody else was already in the garage working under their name. Global News reported it at the time. That is not a consumer problem you can shrug at. That is your brand being worn by somebody else in a driveway.
The pattern is old enough to have been filmed. A CBC Marketplace hidden camera test in Toronto, broadcast in 2012, created a known fault on an opener and called in five technicians. Two diagnosed and fixed it correctly for under a hundred dollars. Three recommended parts the door did not need.
The caveats make that finding stronger rather than weaker. The program said on the record that it chose two of the five companies because it had already seen many online complaints about them, so three of five is not a base rate for the trade. Set those two aside, and one of the three remaining companies still recommended parts that were not needed. The episode is fourteen years old, and it and the 2026 filing above are separate documented instances of the same category attracting deceptive operators. The industry association's summary is the fullest write up available.
The effect on you is a conversion rate tax. Your traffic is as good as anyone else's and a slice of it will still hesitate, because the homeowner has been told to hesitate. Louder quality claims do not fix that. Checkable specifics do.
Mirror the homeowner's checklist back at them
Answering it item by item is what separates you from the operators the homeowner is afraid of. Proof of licensing and insurance means the actual numbers, not a graphic that says licensed and insured. A written estimate detailing scope and materials means saying on the page that no work starts until an estimate is approved. Refusing to be rushed means a stated diagnostic fee, so nobody has to wonder what the visit costs before they call. And a company name that survives being searched means photographs of your own trucks and crew, and technicians named, rather than stock images of a door.
Generic badges and a line about being family owned do nothing here, because anybody can write them and the fake listings do. Verifiability is the differentiator, and in this category it beats the offer.
The honest operator has a legal edge, and should say so
If you work in Ontario, some of that proof is already written for you in provincial law. Under the Consumer Protection Act, 2002, a contractor cannot charge more than 10% above an estimate included in a contract, unless the customer asks for additional or different work and signs a change to the contract. A future performance agreement worth more than $50 has to be in writing. Ontario publishes a plain language guide for contractors that states both rules directly. The guide is framed for renovation and roofing businesses, and the estimate rule sits in consumer protection law generally rather than in a trade specific regulation.
Read what that rule actually describes. It is a legal cap on the exact manoeuvre the bait and switch operators run, and the exception written into it is the honest path: a change order the customer asked for and signed. You already work this way. Almost nobody says so in an ad, and saying so is free.
Google has its own version of the same principle, and uses a garage door example to explain it. Advertised prices must include applicable fees and taxes, services that vary in price need a range rather than a teaser number, and a flat rate offer has to describe what it includes and excludes. Google's own example is a claim like new garage doors installed for $499, which it says would need details on what type of door that covers and what limits apply. Those rules sit inside Google's Advanced Verification policy, so they bind US garage door advertisers directly. A Canadian advertiser is not currently gated on them and should hold to them anyway, because the very low headline price is a trust problem in this trade before it is anything else.
On licensing, check your own scope of work against Skilled Trades Ontario's guidance on the compulsory trades rather than taking any article's word for what applies to you. Whatever you find, and whatever certifications and insurance you hold, put the specifics on the page. If you work the GTA, our Toronto page covers the local side of this.
Google Business Profile and reviews, the asset that pays into more than one channel
One review pool, more than one payoff
Clear up the most common misconception first. There is no separate Local Services Ads review pool. Google Business Profile reviews are the asset, and a review your technician asked for in the driveway counts exactly the same as one requested through a dashboard.
That single pool pays you more than once. It moves your position in the map pack, where a good share of urgent local demand resolves before anybody scrolls. Where Local Services Ads is open to you, rating and review count are named ranking inputs there as well. And a homeowner in this category opens your profile in another tab before they dial, so your reviews are part of what closes a click you have already paid for.
Count is not the whole story either. Recency and pace carry weight, which is why a steady flow of recent reviews usually reads better than a larger number that stopped arriving two years ago.
What the research says about how buyers actually use them
BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2025, a survey of 1,026 US adult consumers, is the most useful public data on this. Only 4% of consumers say they never read reviews for local businesses. 84% use Google to find them, and 74% consult two or more sources before deciding.
Two findings matter more than the headline numbers. The first is that 63% expect a business to respond to a review within somewhere between two or three days and a week, which makes responding a visible signal rather than a courtesy. The second is that only 42% now say they trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation, down from 79% in 2020.
That decline argues against the strategy most owners default to. A small handful of glowing five star reviews is the shape of profile that buyers have been warned about, which is a reason to expect a thin and perfect one to read as curated rather than reassuring. Volume, recency, ordinary language and visible replies do more.
The only review process that survives a busy week
Ask at the truck, before you drive away
The gap between finishing the job and asking is the whole ballgame. An email three days later arrives when the door works again and the customer has stopped thinking about you.
Make the link one tap
A short link or a QR code on the invoice, going straight to the review form rather than to your profile. Asking a homeowner to search for you is an extra step, and every extra step costs you reviews.
Give one person the job
If review requests belong to everybody they belong to nobody, and the count flatlines in the first busy week of the season. One named person owns the number and chases the techs who forgot.
Reply to every review inside the window buyers expect
Especially the bad ones. A calm, specific, non defensive reply to a two star review is read by far more prospects than the review itself.
Do not filter who you ask
Asking only the customers you expect to be happy produces a profile that reads as curated, and it is obvious from the outside. A few ordinary four star reviews among the fives is what a real business looks like.
None of this needs an agency, a subscription or a dashboard. It needs one person to own it and a habit that survives March.
How to win install work without drowning in spring calls
The install page has a different job than the repair page
You have already read the case for separating the budget. Here is what the install side needs once it has its own line.
Your repair page needs a phone number, a service area and a reason to trust you inside four seconds. Your install page needs photographs of doors you have actually hung, guidance on styles and materials for somebody who has never thought about either, a realistic sense of price, and a quote request rather than a call button. The buyer is going to visit it more than once, often with somebody else, before they contact anybody.
The conversion action has to be different too. Nobody fills in an install form from the driveway in a panic, and nobody phones a contractor about a door they are still discussing at the kitchen table.
Your best install lead source is already in your CRM
A technician standing in front of a failed spring on an old door is having a replacement conversation you did not pay a media cost to start. The homeowner has just been reminded that the door is a machine, they are already spending money on it today, and somebody they are watching work is qualified to tell them what is worth fixing.
Most shops leave that to the personality of whoever happened to take the call. Make it a process instead. A documented condition assessment on every repair visit, covering the door sections, the springs, the rollers, the opener and the weather seal. A written quote left behind rather than promised later. One follow up, a few days after, from a person rather than an automated sequence.
The other free channel is geographic. A new door changes the entire front of a house, which makes your work visible to every neighbour on the street in a way that a furnace or a roof simply is not. A card in twenty doors either side of a completed install, while the truck is still parked out front, is a real install channel in this trade and it costs almost nothing.
Do not judge install on a repair scoreboard
Install advertising produces fewer leads, more slowly, worth several times more each. Score it the way you score repair and you will conclude, wrongly, that it does not work, usually about three weeks in and usually right before it starts producing.
Give it a longer window, judge it on booked revenue rather than lead count, and accept that a month with four install enquiries and two signed doors beats a month with thirty spring calls.
The one statistic that sells a new door
Answering the phone is half of your marketing
A missed call is not a deferred lead
There is no callback window on an emergency repair. The homeowner hangs up and dials the next result, and by the time you return the voicemail somebody else has been booked for two hours.
That is the obvious cost. The second one is less visible. Responsiveness is a named ranking input on the pay per lead product, and Google says outright that missed calls may hurt you, so the calls you drop cost you the job and your position at the same time.
What the numbers say about how calls are actually handled
Roughly half of the people phoning home services businesses do not reach a human being. If your own answer rate is anywhere near that, no amount of ad spending fixes it, because you are buying calls into a system that drops one in two.
The ring duration finding is the cheap one to act on. Calls that ring longer get answered more often, which means where the phone rings, who it rolls to, and how long it tries before giving up are all marketing decisions wearing an operations costume.
If your ads are producing clicks but the phone is not ringing at all, the problem is usually further up. We cover the diagnosis in why your Google Ads are not getting calls.
Do not advertise hours you do not staff
Publishing 24/7 availability you cannot answer is worse than publishing honest hours, because the unanswered calls land inside your own stated window and responsiveness is one of the things you are ranked on.
The same logic runs in reverse when you are booked solid. Pay per lead channels charge you whether or not you have a truck free, and an urgent lead you cannot service becomes a competitor's job and sometimes a one star review about nobody calling back. Throttling that channel during your busiest weeks is frequently the highest return change available to you, and it costs nothing to make.
The same impatience applies before the call. Google has cited for years that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. That figure comes from Google's own research and is long standing evidence rather than fresh data, but the direction has never been in doubt, and your traffic here is almost entirely people standing in a driveway on a phone.
Seasonality, weather, and the budget that is wrong by January
Cold snaps break springs, and the demand arrives all at once
Cold makes spring steel more brittle, freeze and thaw cycling accelerates metal fatigue, and a spring that was going to fail in March fails on the first hard morning instead. Add the doors already at the end of a normal service life and you get a week where every second call is the same job.
Nobody spreads that demand out for you. It arrives together, and a flat daily budget makes you invisible on precisely the days the phone should be ringing off the hook.
Check your own market instead of trusting a national figure
Any seasonality percentage you find in a contractor blog is worth very little to you, because you do not operate in the national average. Pull your own instead. It takes ten minutes.
Open Google Trends, set the region to your province and the window to the past twelve months, and put a repair head term in. Do the same in Keyword Planner with your city as the location, which will give you monthly volumes rather than a relative curve. Then lay your own booked job calendar for last year beside it.
A shop in Windsor and a shop in Thunder Bay get different curves and neither matches the country. Yours is the only one that decides anything.
What to do with the answer
Move the money to the months that produce work, and move the hours with it. Budget, staffing, on call coverage and which of your two campaigns gets the headroom all follow the same curve, and all four are usually set once and then left alone for a year.
The trough matters as much as the peak. Quiet months are when installation work is worth funding, because the install buyer is not weather driven and your repair competition is spending less.
What to measure, and why cost per lead lies to you in this trade
Cost per booked job, split by job type, is the only number that decides anything
A blended cost per lead across a repair business and an installation business is a weighted average of two unrelated things. Move the mix a little toward repair and the number improves while your revenue falls. That is not a rare edge case in this trade. It is the normal way a good looking month happens.
The number you want is cost per booked job, calculated separately for repair and for installation, with the job value attached. It is the only figure that can tell you which of your two businesses your advertising is actually growing.
Most owners cannot produce it. The ad platform knows about clicks and conversions. The phone system knows who called and for how long. The job management software knows what got booked and what it was worth. Nothing joins them, and joining them is a project rather than a report. That gap is where most of the real work in this job lives, and anybody who tells you it is a checkbox has not done it.
The interim version, if the full join is out of reach this quarter, is a single tagged field on every lead recording which of the two jobs it turned out to be. It is manual, it is dull, and it converts a meaningless blended number into two useful ones.
Automated bidding optimizes what you tell it to optimize
Point an automated bid strategy at conversions and it will go and find you the cheapest conversion available. In this trade that is a service call, every time. This is not a flaw in the system and no amount of bid adjustment changes it, because the system is doing exactly what was asked.
The structural fix is to stop counting events and start reporting outcomes: feeding booked job values back into the platform so a replacement is worth visibly more to it than a spring. That is the difference between a system optimizing for volume and one optimizing for revenue, and it is why the measurement problem above is not an accounting chore. It is the input the bidding runs on. Our guide to Google Ads bid strategies covers how the strategies differ and what each one needs from you.
The dashboard metrics that mislead specifically here
| What the dashboard says | What it might actually mean |
|---|---|
| Lead count is up | The mix shifted toward repair. More jobs, less revenue |
| Cost per lead is down | Same cause. You are buying more of the cheap thing |
| Conversion rate is up | Call tracking is counting wrong numbers and eight second hang ups as leads |
| The install campaign has no leads yet | Wrong scoreboard and wrong window. Install decisions take weeks, not hours |
What this costs, and why it is a job rather than a task
Published benchmarks, and what they are not
Treat that as a sanity check on the order of magnitude, nothing more. If somebody quotes you a cost per lead for your city without having seen your market's click prices, your conversion rate or your job mix, they are quoting an average from somewhere else. For a fuller breakdown of what contractors actually pay, see how much Google Ads cost for contractors.
The work is a loop that decays, not a setup that holds
What recurs: reviewing search terms and adding negatives, chasing review requests, dispositioning leads so you know which ones became jobs, renewing licence and insurance documents before they lapse, moving budget with the season, rebalancing between repair and installation as the mix drifts, and re checking policy and category eligibility whenever Google changes something, as it did with the badge in October 2025.
Every one of those items is individually unremarkable. You could do any of them on a Sunday. Collectively they are continuous, and that is the whole point.
An account nobody touches gets worse on its own. Not because anything breaks. Because your competitors change their bids, the query mix drifts as the season turns, new advertisers arrive, Google ships changes to defaults, and your settings sit exactly where you left them in March. Standing still is a slow decline in a live auction.
What you can genuinely do yourself, and what you cannot
The review process is yours, it is free, and it is the highest return thing on this page. Phone handling is yours. The technician's condition assessment and the written quote left behind are yours, and they will out earn any ad channel you buy. Checking your own seasonality once a year is yours. And in Ontario the written contract over $50 is already required of you by law, with the 10% cap applying to any estimate you put inside it, so that discipline is not optional and you may as well advertise it.
Where owners stall is the rest of it: keeping repair and installation genuinely separate through structure rather than intention, getting booked job value back into the platform so it optimizes for revenue, joining ad data to your job software, and staying current on policy and eligibility in a category whose rules differ by country and change without notice. It never finishes, and it competes with running the actual business.
If you decide to hand that part off, go in knowing what the pricing models are and what each one buys you, so the conversation starts from something real rather than from a number on a slide.
Where to start this week
Work down the list and stop when you hit something that needs a decision rather than an hour.
- Check whether Local Services Ads is available for garage doors in your country, using Google's signup flow rather than any published list, and start verification if it is open and you are not verified.
- Put one named person in charge of review requests, asked at the truck, and reply to every review inside a week.
- Find out your real answer rate for the past month, then fix whatever it tells you about where calls ring and how long they ring for.
- Add the condition assessment and the written leave behind quote to every repair visit.
- Pull your own twelve month search trend and lay it beside last year's booked jobs, then move budget to match.
- Split repair and installation into separate campaigns with separate budgets and separate pages, or accept that repair will keep taking the money.
- Pick one measurement fix: either job type tagging on every lead, or feeding booked job value back into the ad platform.
If the list is right and the hours are not there, this is the work we do, for contractors only, in Canada and the US.
Common questions about getting garage door leads
Common questions
The only published anchor close to this trade is LocaliQ's home services benchmark data, which puts its Garages category at a cost per lead of $81.45 US across 3,211 US campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025. Garages is their own label and a proxy rather than a garage door cut, so your market will differ. More importantly, cost per lead is not cost per booked job, and with a new door worth nearly five times a repair, only the second number tells you anything.
Fine as filler, dangerous as a foundation. The same enquiry goes out to several companies at once, so you are competing on response speed and on price against people who received the identical email, and these channels bill you whether or not you have a truck free that week. Use them to fill a slow stretch if the math works. Just do not let a third party own the relationship with the people who pay you.
Start with the correction: Google Guaranteed and the money back guarantee behind it were retired on 20 October 2025 and replaced by a single Google Verified badge that signals verification only. You earn it through Local Services Ads, which means you first have to be in a category Google offers in your country. Garage doors is absent from the Canadian category list, and in the United States it is a restricted category needing Advanced Verification before any ads run.
Check availability before you rank them. Garage doors is absent from Google's Canadian Local Services category list, so for many Canadian shops the question never arises and Search is the whole answer. Where the category is open, Local Services is usually the faster route to repair calls, but know the limit that decides everything after: it cannot be aimed at installations. You pick a category and take what arrives.
Both, in that order of speed. Ads produce calls this week, and local ranking in this trade comes mostly from reviews, proximity and profile quality. Reviews move over months and proximity cannot be changed at all, so treat local SEO as a slow compounding asset rather than a rescue plan for a quiet phone.
Enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks at your market's click price, across two campaigns rather than one. Look up the cost per click for your head terms in Keyword Planner with your city selected, then work out what a day's budget actually buys. If splitting the budget between repair and installation leaves neither with enough clicks to produce a lead most days, you are not ready to split it yet.
Five channels do the work, roughly in this order: Local Services Ads where your country offers the category, Google Search ads, Google Business Profile and reviews, your own existing repair customers, and referrals or neighbour follow up around visible installs. The first two cost money and move fast. The last three cost time, compound, and are where most shops leave the most on the table.
Ring-fence the budget and use your own repair base. Installation needs its own campaign, its own page with real photographs and style guidance, and a quote request rather than a phone only call to action, or repair will take the money every month. Then make the condition assessment and the written leave behind quote standard on every repair visit, because that is the cheapest replacement pipeline you will ever have.
Ask at the truck before you drive away, with a one tap link or a QR code on the invoice, and give one named person responsibility for the number. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, within a week, because BrightLocal's 2025 survey found 63% of consumers expect a response in that window. Do not filter who you ask. A wall of perfect fives is the shape of profile that buyers have been warned about.
Different buyer, different decision process, and search is a weaker lever than it is residentially. A property manager is not standing in a driveway with a snapped spring, so the moment of failure interception that drives residential repair does not transfer cleanly. Direct relationships with property management firms, general contractors and industrial park landlords, plus a service agreement offer, do more than a keyword list. Check the volume on commercial terms in your own market before you budget for it.
