How much should a home services business spend on Google Ads?
A practical way to set a Google Ads budget for HVAC, plumbing, roofing and electrical businesses, starting from the jobs you want, not from what you can afford.
The most common budget question is “what can I afford?”. The better question is “what does a booked job cost in my market, and how many do I want?”.
Start from the job
Say you want 40 extra booked jobs a month. In most US metros an HVAC booked job from search costs between $60 and $150 once the account is properly built, depending on competition and season. At $100 a job, 40 jobs is $4,000 a month in ad spend. At $150 it is $6,000.
Roofing and restoration cost more per job and pay more per job. Plumbing and garage doors cost less and pay less. The math is the same.
The floor
Below about $100 a day, a search account in a competitive metro cannot buy enough clicks to learn. You get a handful of leads, no pattern, and no way to tell what is working. That is why we ask for at least $100 a day, and recommend $3,000 or more a month.
Seasonality is a budget decision
HVAC budgets should roughly double in the first hot and first cold weeks. Roofing follows storms. Pest control follows spring. A fixed monthly budget wastes money in the slow weeks and starves the account in the busy ones, so we plan budgets by week, not by month.
Try the projector
The Budget & Results Projector does this math for your industry and lets you compare your current numbers with what the same budget produces after a proper rebuild.