Most marketing benchmarks published for the trades are guesses dressed up as data: survey averages, vendor claims, numbers with no sample size attached. These are not. Everything on this page comes out of the accounts we manage: 551,605 tracked phone calls across the 255 businesses that generated calls over the last twelve months, and $6,149,675 in managed Google Ads spend across 87 accounts over the same period. We have published the sample size next to every figure so you can judge how much weight it deserves.
The four numbers that tell you if your marketing is working
Before you compare yourself to anything below, make sure you are measuring the right things.
No client names, no cherry-picked accounts. Where a segment was too small to be meaningful (electrical, for one, at three accounts), we left it out rather than publish a number built on nothing.
What contractors pay for a lead from paid search
This is the number everyone wants and almost nobody publishes honestly. Across 87 accounts and twelve months, the blended cost per conversion was $74.61. The blend hides the useful part, which is the spread.
Read this first: a "lead" here is a tracked call or form from paid search, not a booked job. Every figure in the table below counts conversions, not revenue. Your own cost per booked job will be higher, by whatever your booking rate happens to be.
| Measure | Top 25% | Median | Bottom 25% | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $65.44 | $95.90 | $144.90 | 83 accounts |
| Ad spend / month | $2,178 | $4,224 | $7,763 | 87 accounts |
Top 25% = the quarter of accounts paying least per lead. Paid search only.
Two things are worth sitting with. First, the gap between the top and bottom quartile is more than 2x. Same trade, same platform, roughly the same budgets, and one contractor is paying twice what another pays for the same phone call. That gap is almost never about bid strategy. It is landing pages, call handling, and whether the account is actually structured around the services that make money.
Second, a "lead" here means a tracked conversion: a call or a form. It is not a booked job. Anyone quoting you a $25 cost per lead is either blending in organic traffic, counting conversions loosely, or advertising in a market with no competition.
Cost per lead moves with the season, and so should your budget
Cost per conversion across the whole managed book, month by month, tells a clearer story than any annual average:
| Month | Cost per lead | Read |
|---|---|---|
| September 2025 | $97.72 | Tail of the cooling season |
| November 2025 | $63.71 | Cheapest leads of the year |
| December 2025 | $64.89 | Still well below average |
| March 2026 | $66.12 | Shoulder season, low competition |
| May 2026 | $67.89 | Demand climbing, cost stable |
| July 2026 | $84.03 | Peak demand, peak auction pressure |
Leads cost roughly 30% more in peak summer than they do in late autumn. Every contractor in your market raises budgets in July because the phone is ringing and it feels like the time to push. That is exactly why July is the most expensive month to buy a click. The contractors who win on cost are the ones who hold budget through the shoulder seasons instead of chasing the peak.
How many calls a healthy contractor actually gets
Twelve months of call tracking, median monthly calls per business:
| Trade | Bottom 25% | Median | Top 25% | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plumbing | 104 | 148 | 338 | 42 businesses |
| HVAC | 75 | 168 | 363 | 34 businesses |
| Both trades | n/a | 241 | n/a | 30 businesses |
Calls per month, tracked lines only. Electrical is excluded; three accounts is not a benchmark.
Running both trades produces roughly 1.5x the call volume of either one alone, and it does it without 1.5x the marketing cost, because the website, the Google Business Profile and the authority work are largely shared. This is the single most under-appreciated growth lever we see. If you are a plumber who could add HVAC, or the reverse, the marketing math is strongly in favour of it.
Where the calls come from
Source mix across all tracked calls in July, the peak month:
| Source | Share of calls | What it costs per call |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | 43% | Nothing, earned visibility |
| Organic search | 19% | Nothing, earned visibility |
| Local Service Ads | 15% | Paid per lead |
| Everything else | 23% | Mixed: paid search, direct, referral |
Well over half of all contractor phone calls originate from a Google property that costs nothing per click. That is the argument for treating the Google Business Profile as a primary asset rather than a listing you claimed once. It out-produces paid search in raw volume across our entire book.
Seasonality, indexed
Call volume against the annual average, so you can tell a bad month from a normal one:
| Period | Index | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| July | 1.20 | 20% above your annual average |
| October | 1.15 | The second peak most contractors miss |
| June | 1.10 | Season ramping |
| March to April | 0.89 | 11% below average, and entirely normal |
A 20% swing between peak and trough is normal and is not a marketing problem. Contractors panic every spring about a decline that the calendar fully explains. Compare March to last March, not to last July.
Review performance: the benchmark most contractors fail
Pulled from 63 client Google Business Profiles carrying 45,840 lifetime reviews:
| Metric | Bottom 25% | Median | Top 25% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Star rating | 4.70 | 4.80 | 4.90 |
| Lifetime reviews | 82 | 361 | 962 |
| New reviews, 90 days | 1 | 11 | 32 |
| Owner reply rate | 29% | 76% | 96% |
63 Google Business Profiles under active management, pulled August 2026.
Rating is not where contractors separate. Nearly everyone lands between 4.7 and 4.9, so a strong rating buys you parity, not advantage. Velocity and replies are where the gap opens. A quarter of locations added one review or fewer in an entire quarter, and a quarter reply to fewer than three in ten reviews. Both are signals Google reads, and both are entirely within your control this week.
How to use these numbers
Benchmarks are diagnostic, not a scoreboard. Three honest ways to read them:
| If this is true of you | What it usually means | Where to look first |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead above $145 | Bottom quartile, and the cause is usually downstream of the ad account | Landing page and who answers the phone, before you touch bids |
| Fewer than 100 calls a month | A visibility problem, not a conversion problem | Google Business Profile and local search coverage |
| Fewer than 10 reviews last quarter | Behind half the contractors we work with | Review requests at the point of service, the cheapest gap here to close |
On method: figures cover September 2025 through August 2026, with August partial. Ad figures come from 87 Google Ads accounts under active management; call figures from the 255 tracked businesses that generated at least one call in the period (168 with sustained month-over-month activity); review figures from 63 Google Business Profiles. Trade medians use only accounts with sustained call activity, so no individual business is identifiable. Segments with fewer than ten accounts are not published.
Not ready to talk? Read the book first.
Josh Nelson's How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Digital Marketing Right lays out this entire system, written for plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors. Read it online, listen to the audiobook in the truck, or download the PDF.
It comes with the Growth Training Library: 10 recorded workshops, a keyword research tool, the Marketing Plan Builder, a Google Business Profile action plan and the lead-gap calculator. Delivered by email, instantly. No call required.
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Keep going
More frameworks in the contractor resource library, or see what this work produces in the contractor case studies.
