Home Services Click Prices: What Advertisers Bid in 22 Trades

Every trade thinks its clicks are the most expensive. Plumbers say it, roofers say it, garage door companies say it. Usually nobody has put the trades side by side from the same source on the same day, so the argument runs on anecdotes and whatever a sales rep said last.

So I did it for 22 home service trades. For each one I took the “near me” search a homeowner types, like “plumber near me” or “locksmith near me”, and pulled two things from Google's Keyword Planner. One is the average monthly searches in the US. The other is the range of what advertisers bid to get their ad shown at the top of the page for that search. The method comes before the table, because the bid figures are easy to misread and a lot of published lists treat them as click prices.

What a top-of-page bid range is, and what it is not

Keyword Planner gives two figures for each search, a low end and a high end of the top-of-page bid range. Google describes them as the range of what advertisers have historically bid to have their ad shown at the top of the page, above the organic results, in the location you choose. For this table that location is the whole United States.

Google calls them the lower range and the higher range, not the minimum and the maximum. Some advertisers bid below the low end, and some bid above the high end. The range covers the bulk of what it takes to reach the top, not every bid in the auction.

Why are the ranges so wide? Because one national figure blends thousands of local auctions. A search for a plumber in a dense, expensive metro at seven in the evening and the same search in a small town on a Tuesday morning are different auctions with different bidders. The range also mixes advertisers of every size, from one-truck owners and regional companies to national brands and lead sellers who resell the call to someone else.

So I sort and compare by the low end. That part is my judgment, not something Google says. The high end tends to reflect the most aggressive bidders in the most expensive markets and hours, while the low end sits closer to the entry price for showing at the top in the ordinary auctions. That makes it the steadier number for comparing one trade with another.

The table: 22 trades, sorted by the low end

What the data shows

Everything below comes straight from the table. Where I add a reason, I label it as interpretation, since the table shows what advertisers bid and not why.

Garage door repair has the highest entry price

At about $50, garage door repair has the highest low end of the 22 trades, ahead of plumbing at $37 and AC repair at $34. It isn't the biggest search, though. At 165,000 a month it gets a fifth of what “plumber near me” gets. My interpretation is that a broken garage door is urgent, usually fixed in one visit, and fought over by local companies and lead sellers alike, which is the kind of search advertisers pay to win.

Plumbing combines the most searches with a high floor

“Plumber near me” is the largest search in the table at 823,000 a month, and its low end of $37 is the second highest. No other trade has both. The Google Ads for plumbers guide goes through which plumbing searches are worth paying for and which come from do-it-yourselfers.

AC repair has the highest high end, water damage the widest ratio

“Ac repair near me” has the highest high end at $367, and the biggest dollar gap between its low and high end. The likely reason, and this is interpretation, is that cooling demand is seasonal, so a national figure blends quiet spring auctions with heat-wave auctions. The Google Ads for HVAC page shows how far heating and cooling searches swing across the year.

Water damage restoration has the opposite shape. Its low end is a modest $13, but its high end is $316, about 24 times the low end. For every other trade in the table, the high end is between about 4 and 11 times the low end. I'd read the low end as small local bidders and the high end as advertisers chasing large, often insured jobs, though that's interpretation too. Whatever the reason, “average” means very little for this trade.

Search volume and bids do not move together

“Locksmith near me” draws 673,000 searches a month, the second largest volume in the table, and its low end is about $10. “Appliance repair near me”, “ac repair near me” and “roofer near me” each draw about 201,000 searches, with low ends of $6, $34 and $28. A big search isn't automatically an expensive one, and a small one isn't automatically cheap. “Gutter cleaning near me” has just 49,500 searches and a low end of about $21, level with “electrician near me”.

Roofers sit sixth by low end, at about $28 to $238, and the Google Ads for roofers guide covers why roofing searches need more filtering than most. Electricians are seventh at $21 to $198, on 368,000 searches. The Google Ads for electricians page covers the searches in that trade that come from job hunters, not customers.

The bottom of the table is recurring and smaller work

The lowest low ends belong to carpet cleaning ($8), landscaping ($9), general contractors ($10), locksmiths ($10), handymen and house cleaning (both about $11), and appliance repair, the lowest of all at $6. Most of these are smaller tickets or recurring services (my interpretation), where one click is worth less to the advertiser, so fewer advertisers bid high for it.

General contractors are the odd one in that group. “General contractor near me” draws 135,000 searches with a range of $10 to $77. My guess, again interpretation, is that the search mixes homeowners with small repairs, people planning large projects and people looking for work, so the average searcher is worth less than the large projects suggest. The Google Ads for contractors guide deals with separating those searchers.

How to use these numbers

The table is a starting point for a question about your own account. It won't answer that question by itself. Three ways to use it:

1. 1Compare with your own average click price. In Google Ads, the Avg. CPC column on your keywords or search terms shows what you paid, over a month or more. If yours sits well below the low end here, that can mean a cheaper local market, or that your ads rarely show at the top. The impression share columns tell you which.
2. 2Look up your own city. Run the same search in Keyword Planner with your service area as the location instead of the whole country. The same trade costs different amounts in different cities, because each city is its own auction with its own number of competitors and its own job values.
3. 3Turn it into cost per booked job. A click price on its own tells you nothing about profit. Divide what you spend by the jobs it books, and compare that with gross profit per job.

To make it concrete, with numbers I picked for the example and not as a benchmark. Say your average click costs $25, one click in eight turns into a call, and half the calls book a job. Then a booked job costs $25 × 8 × 2 = $400 in clicks. If the gross profit on that job is $600, the click price was fine. If it's $250, no bid strategy will close the gap. You either book a bigger share of the calls or go after bigger jobs.

None of this applies to Local Services Ads, by the way. They sit above the regular search ads and charge for each valid lead, not each click, so there's no click bid to compare. Our article on what Local Services Ads cost covers how that charging works. For the wider picture across trades, start with the Google Ads for home services page.