What a lead is actually worth before you spend on ads
Most home services businesses run ads without knowing their real number. Here is how to work it out before you spend.
Before spending a pound or a dollar on ads, work out one number: what an average job is actually worth to you after materials and labour, and what percentage of enquiries turn into a booked job. Without both of those, any ad spend is a guess dressed up as a strategy.
Take your average job value, multiply by your enquiry-to-booking rate, and you get what a single enquiry is actually worth to the business. If a job is worth £1,200 profit and one in five enquiries books, an enquiry is worth roughly £240 to you. That's the ceiling for what you can sensibly pay to generate one.
Most trade businesses skip this and instead judge ad performance by cost-per-click or impressions, numbers that feel measurable but don't actually tell you whether the spend is profitable.
This number also tells you where to focus first. If your enquiry-to-booking rate is low, the problem usually isn't the ads, it's the website or the follow-up process losing enquiries after they arrive. Fixing that is often cheaper than spending more to generate additional traffic into the same leaky process.
Once you know what a lead is genuinely worth, every marketing decision gets simpler: a channel is either producing leads under that number, which is worth scaling, or above it, which needs fixing or stopping.
Want help with something like this? See how we approach this work or get in touch.
