Google Ads is the fastest way to buy leads in home services, and also the easiest to burn through without noticing. The difference between a profitable campaign and a money leak is not the budget: it is the CPC you pay, how many clicks your landing page converts, and how many leads turn into invoiced jobs. This calculator chains those four variables together so you can see the return before you spend a dollar.
Adjust your figures above and watch, in real time, how many leads and jobs your budget generates, what each one costs, and how much you keep as profit.
How it computes
The model is deliberately transparent, with no black boxes:
- Clicks/month = monthly budget divided by average CPC.
- Leads/month = clicks times landing conversion (what share of clicks leave details or call).
- Jobs/month = leads times close rate (what share of leads become invoiced jobs).
- Revenue/month = jobs times your average job value.
From there come the three numbers that matter: the cost per lead (budget divided by leads), the cost per job (budget divided by jobs), and the net profit (revenue minus budget).
How to read ROAS
The headline figure is ROAS: how many dollars of revenue you generate for every dollar spent on ads. A ROAS of 5x means the campaign bills five dollars for every dollar of Google Ads. It is the single metric that best sums up whether the campaign is breathing or drowning.
One important warning: ROAS is not profit. ROAS measures revenue over ad spend, not margin. If your margin per job is 30%, a 5x ROAS leaves a much more modest real return on ad spend once you subtract materials, labor and overhead. For mid-to-high-ticket home services a healthy ROAS usually sits above 3x-4x, but the exact threshold depends on your margin: the thinner it is, the higher the ROAS you need for the campaign to be worth running.
The lever almost nobody uses: negative keywords
If your cost per lead came out high, the first adjustment is not to raise the budget. It is to clean the campaign. Negative keywords block searches that pull clicks that will never close: people looking for jobs in your trade, training courses, DIY tutorials, or a competitor's name. Each of those clicks is paid for exactly like a real lead, but it never invoices.
Filtering out that useless traffic cuts wasted spend and lowers cost per lead without touching the budget. After that come service-specific landing pages, call extensions and, above all, responding fast to the lead that comes in. Raise landing conversion a couple of points in the calculator and watch cost per job collapse: that is the effect you are after.
When ads beat SEO (and when they don't)
Google Ads and local SEO are not rivals; they are tools for different time horizons. Ads buy immediate visibility: switch the campaign on and leads come in today. That makes them irreplaceable for emergencies, for entering a new market, or for covering a seasonal peak. The price is that the moment you stop paying, the flow cuts off cold.
Local SEO takes months to mature, but once ranked it brings in leads with no per-click cost, month after month. It is an asset that compounds. The practical rule for a contractor that wants to grow: use Google Ads to cover the short term and urgent demand, and build visibility and conversion in parallel so your cost per lead falls over time. Most businesses that truly scale run both channels rather than choosing.
What to do with the number
If your ROAS came out low, it does not necessarily mean Google Ads will not work for you: it usually means there is a specific leak (high CPC, a weak landing page, or leads lost without a response). The Google Ads for home services guide explains how to tune each lever, and the Google Ads vs Meta Ads comparison helps you pick the channel before you invest. Explore the other tools or, to review your campaign with real data on the table, talk to us.