Benchmarks
Contractor Acquisition Benchmarks, and How to Use Them Honestly
Benchmarks are useful as a sanity check and dangerous as a target. Here is how to read them without fooling yourself.
A warning before any number
Every benchmark you have ever seen hides enormous variation. Cost per lead for "roofing" spans a range so wide that the average is nearly meaningless — it depends on your market’s competitiveness, your channel, your offer, the season and your reviews. Use ranges to sanity-check your own numbers, never as a goal to hit. Your real data beats any benchmark.
The metrics that actually matter
Cost per lead is the headline number and the least useful one on its own. What matters is the chain: cost per lead, booking rate, cost per booked job, average job value and return on ad spend. A "high" cost per lead with a strong booking rate and job value can be far more profitable than a cheap lead that rarely closes. Always read the whole chain, not one link.
Directional ranges by intent
High-intent search and Local Services Ads generally produce more expensive but more ready-to-book leads than social demand generation, which is cheaper per lead but earlier in the buying cycle. Emergency service trades tend toward faster, lower-value transactions; high-ticket project trades toward slower, higher-value, multi-bid decisions. Match the channel to the behaviour, and expect the numbers to differ accordingly.
How to build your own benchmarks
The benchmark that matters is your own trailing data. Track cost per lead, booking rate, cost per booked job and job value by channel, and you will quickly have numbers more useful than any industry average. From there, improvement is simple to see: move the booking rate and the job value, and the whole economics shift in your favour.
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Questions
Why won’t you publish exact benchmark numbers?
Because a single number implies a precision that does not exist. Ranges vary so much by market, channel and offer that a hard figure would mislead more than it helps. We’d rather teach you to read your own numbers.
What’s the most important metric to track?
Cost per booked job against profit per job. It combines lead cost and booking rate into the number that actually decides whether advertising is working.