What a Booked Job Really Costs by Channel in Home Services

In US home services, a booked job costs about $233 on Google Local Services Ads but an estimated $300 to $900 through lead marketplaces like Angi, even though the marketplace lead is cheaper to buy. The reason is conversion. Cheap shared leads close far less often, so cost per lead hides your real cost per customer.

What Does a Booked Customer Actually Cost by Marketing Channel?

Ranked by what you pay for one won, paying customer, the cheapest channel is organic search and the most expensive is lead marketplaces. Here is the picture, with each number carrying its evidence grade so you can see what is measured and what is a reasoned estimate.

Read the two money columns side by side and the trap jumps out. A marketplace lead can be the cheapest on the board, as low as $8, while the customer it produces is the most expensive on the board. A Local Services Ads lead costs more up front at about $53, and yet the customer comes out cheaper at $233. Cost per lead runs one direction. Cost per booked job runs the other. The channel with the cheapest raised hands is not the channel with the cheapest jobs.

Explore the full data, the by-trade breakdowns, and the methodology in the interactive benchmark:

This is the deep dive on one specific leak. For the wider view of where a home services budget bleeds, start with the parent piece on where home services marketing money leaks, or the pillar on the three profit leaks every home services business is already paying for.

Why Is My Cost Per Lead Low but My Marketing Still Loses Money?

Because cost per lead ignores the only step that turns a lead into revenue: how many of those leads actually become paying customers. A cheap lead that rarely closes is expensive. The formula that matters is simple: cost per booked job equals cost per lead divided by your lead-to-customer rate.

Run two channels through it and the point lands. On Local Services Ads, a lead costs about $53 and roughly 23 percent of leads become paying customers, so a booked job costs about $233. Buy shared marketplace leads at a low sticker price and only 5 to 15 percent close, and the same math pushes the booked job to several hundred dollars, even though each lead looked like a bargain. The lead price fooled you. The close rate told the truth.

One caution that trips up a lot of owners. The conversion number that matters is lead to paying customer, not the click-to-lead rate your ad dashboard shows. Google Search reports a conversion rate near 7 percent and Facebook near 5 percent, but those measure a click turning into a form fill, a completely different and much earlier step. Do not plug them into the customer math. If your leads look cheap but the business is not more profitable, the leak is almost never the lead price. It is the conversion, the speed of your callback, or attribution that never ties spend to sold jobs. Two sibling pieces go deep on those: how fast you call a fresh lead and why your marketing and sales reports never agree.

Are Angi, HomeAdvisor, and Thumbtack Cheaper for Contractors? The Shared Lead Math

On paper the leads are the cheapest you can buy, but the booked job is usually the most expensive, so the honest answer is that marketplaces are cheap to enter and expensive to win. The mechanism is the shared lead. Marketplaces sell the same homeowner to three to eight contractors at once, so you are racing several businesses for one job before the phone even rings.

That race is why close rates land at just 5 to 15 percent on shared leads, against the 15 to 25 percent a well-run channel can reach. Whoever calls back first usually books the work, which turns marketplace performance into a speed-to-lead problem more than a lead-cost problem. Fold that low close rate into the formula and the estimated cost per booked job climbs to $300 to $900, roughly 1.3 to 3.9 times what a Local Services Ads customer costs.

An honest caveat, because it matters. That $300 to $900 range is an industry estimate, not a measured benchmark, and some of the sources behind it sell services that compete with the marketplaces. Treat it as directional. What is not in doubt is the shape: shared leads sold to many contractors and closing at single-digit to low-double-digit rates will always produce a more expensive customer than the cheap lead price suggests. Marketplaces can still pay off if you answer in seconds and close hard. They punish everyone who does not.

If you are buying from any of these channels and cannot say what a customer actually costs you on each one, that blind spot is exactly what a free Profit Leak Audit is built to remove: your real cost per booked job by channel, from your own numbers.

Local Services Ads vs Google Search: What Does Each Customer Really Cost?

Local Services Ads deliver the cheaper customer of the two, at a measured $233 per booked job, while paid Google Search runs higher, from a measured $333 for plumbing up to a modeled $606 blended across trades. The reason is where each one sits in the homeowner’s decision. Local Services Ads charge per lead, show up at the top of local-intent searches, and book an appointment from roughly 44 percent of leads. Paid Search charges per click, so you pay for a lot of research traffic before a real job appears.

The $233 figure is worth trusting because two independent datasets agree on it. It comes from a benchmark of 888 contractors, and a separate study of 760 home services businesses lands in the same neighborhood by trade: about $288 per customer for HVAC, $263 for plumbing, and $218 for electrical. When two unrelated samples of that size point the same way, the number is not a fluke.

Paid Search still earns its place. It captures demand that Local Services Ads does not, and for some trades it is the only way to reach a searcher comparing options. The point is not to cut it. The point is to know it costs more per customer than the channel sitting right above it in the results, and to budget with that in mind rather than on the click price alone.

Is Organic Search and SEO the Cheapest Way to Get Home Services Customers?

Yes, over time, at an estimated $20 to $50 per booked job once a site matures, because the cost is fixed rather than paid on every lead. You invest in content and technical work once, and each additional customer it produces after that is close to free. That is why a mature organic channel beats every paid option on cost per customer.

The catch is the clock. SEO does not produce jobs next week. It takes months of compounding before it carries real volume, which is exactly why it is the cheapest customer and the slowest one. The right way to read this is not organic instead of paid, but organic as the long game running underneath the paid channels that feed you now. And none of it requires a heavy, expensive build to get started, which is a subject of its own in you probably don’t need the expensive model.

How Do I Calculate My Own Cost Per Booked Job?

You need three numbers you already have, and about twenty minutes. For each channel, pull them and divide.

1. Channel spend for the period. What you paid that source last month, including marketplace fees and ad spend.
2. Leads that source produced. Count the raw leads, form fills and calls, from that channel alone, not the blended total.
3. How many of those leads became paying customers. Match closed and sold jobs back to the source that produced them, then divide customers by leads to get your close rate.

Now compute two things per channel: cost per lead is spend divided by leads, and cost per booked job is cost per lead divided by that close rate. Line the channels up by cost per booked job, not cost per lead, and the channel to feed and the channel to cut usually name themselves. The hard part is step three, because it means your ad accounts, your CRM, and your sales records all have to agree on which job came from where, and most of the time they do not. That reconciliation is the real work, and it is why your reports never agree.

If you would rather not build that by hand, a free Profit Leak Audit does it from data you already have. CDA connects to your CRM and ad accounts, read only, traces booked revenue back to the channel that earned it, and hands you your real cost per booked job by channel. That is the same wiring that helped All States Home Improvement trace the sales its lead budget was actually producing.

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