Live benchmarks from remodeling accounts we manage, the honest conversion rate nobody in this space will print, and the math from click to signed contract.
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Across the remodeling, design-build, addition, and ADU accounts we manage, February through July 2026:
That last bit is the entire argument for Google Ads as a channel. Five hundred dollars of ad spend against a seventy-thousand-dollar contract. Everything below explains how those numbers happen and why they fall apart when the account is built wrong.
These benchmarks come from live accounts, anonymized to state and trade type. They update quarterly alongside our State of Remodeler Marketing report.
Yes, and the accounts we manage prove it month after month after month. But the question underneath the question is usually about volume, and you deserves a straight answer.
Remodeling forums are full of owners asking whether Google Ads can deliver twenty or thirty leads a day. It cannot, and why on earth would you want it to. That expectation comes from home services math, where a plumber closes a $400 repair the same afternoon. A design-build remodeler selling $150,000+ projects operates in a different economy. Across the accounts we manage, a healthy month on a $3,000–$5,000 budget produces six to twelve qualified leads. Not per day. Per month.
The other objection worth taking seriously: Meta ads are cheaper, so why not run Meta instead? Meta clicks cost less because Meta interrupts people who were not looking for a remodeler. Google Search captures the homeowner at the moment they type "home addition contractor near me" with a project, a budget, and a timeline already in mind. On our accounts, those addition and remodel searches click through at 6–16% depending on the term, which is intent you cannot buy on a social feed. Meta has a real role for remodelers, but it is a nurture channel for the 3–12 month decision cycle, not the demand-capture engine. The remodelers doing this well run Google first and add Meta remarketing once search is producing consistently.
Fewer leads, higher cost per lead, dramatically higher value per close. (not to mention less of your sales team's time chasing crap leads) If your business model needs volume, Google Ads for remodeling will frustrate you. If it needs six signed $70,000 contracts a quarter, it is the most direct path there is.
Lets think this through because I want to talk about volume for a second: A remodeler closing 30% of qualified leads needs ten leads to book three projects. At $70,000 average project value, that is $210,000 in contracts from roughly $1,600 in ad spend. Chasing daily lead volume optimizes for a business you do not run.
A remodeler should budget $8–$20 per click and $110–$210 per qualified lead on non-brand search. Here is the account-level data behind those ranges, February through July 2026:
Where these numbers come from. Benchmarks are pulled from remodeling, addition, and ADU accounts managed by B&G, non-brand Search campaigns only. A lead is a submitted form or a tracked phone call, never a click, a pageview, or an impression. Figures are blended across accounts and anonymized to state and trade type. Current cohort: February through July 2026, three accounts, roughly $20,000 in combined non-brand Search spend. Updated quarterly.
Citing this data: reference as "B&G Collective, Remodeler Google Ads Benchmarks (Feb-Jul 2026), bgcollective.com." Attribution appreciated, no permission needed.
At the keyword level, the spread is wider and it maps to project intent. "Home addition contractor near me" averaged $8.15 per click on one account. "Kitchen renovation contractor" ran $15.79. "Bathroom remodel contractor" ran $19.14. ADU terms ran $10-$20 and pulled click-through rates as high as 16%, because a homeowner searching "adu contractors" has usually already priced the project. Low-volume whole-home terms occasionally spiked past $30 per click. Expensive clicks on high-intent terms are not a problem. That's the filter working.
Now the number the industry will not print. Most guides in this space, ours included until this update, claimed 15–25% landing page conversion. Sustained click-to-lead conversion across our portfolio runs 5–8.5% on non-brand search. Individual campaigns have touched 12.5%. Nothing holds 20% over six months of cold search traffic, and any account audit will tell you the same. The inflated figure survives because agencies quote their best month and every article copies the last one.
Here is why the honest number does not hurt: at $10 clicks and a 6.4% click-to-lead rate, a lead costs about $160. Divide by close rate and the project math still works by a wide margin. A benchmark you can verify in your own account beats a benchmark that flatters the person selling it.
Read the CPC Right A $19 click on "bathroom remodel contractor" is a homeowner evaluating contractors. A $2 click on a broad remodeling term is often a DIY searcher or a price shopper. The expensive click is usually the cheaper lead.
Cost per lead / by close rate = cost per booked project. That single division is the Booked Project Math, and it is the only calculation that should decide whether your Google Ads are working.
Run it on the blended portfolio numbers. A $160 cost per lead at a 30% lead-to-booked rate is roughly $535 in ad spend per signed project. Across our account range, $110–$210 CPL at the same close rate lands between $370 and $700 per booked project. Against an average project value around $70,000, ad spend is well under 1% of contract value. (Thats a 2-5% of profit for those paying attention)
Now run it on the "cheap lead" alternative. A $40 shared lead from a pay-per-lead marketplace at a 5–10% close rate costs $400–$800 per booked project, you competed against three other contractors to win it, and it is usually a smaller project than the work you built your firm to do. The expensive lead is the cheap one. The math is not close, but you have to do the division to see it.
This is also the test to run on whoever manages your account. Ask for your cost per booked project, not your cost per lead. Producing that number requires knowing your close rate, which requires the account and your sales pipeline to be talking to each other. If the answer is a cost-per-lead figure and a shrug, you have learned what is actually being managed.
For the budget side of this equation, our breakdown of how much contractors should spend on Google Ads covers the revenue-based framework. https://www.bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/contractor-google-ads-budget
The Only Metric A $75 lead that never closes is infinitely expensive. A $210 lead that books a $70,000 addition cost 0.3% of the contract. Judge every campaign, every agency, and every channel by cost per booked project.
One campaign per service line, each with its own keywords, ad copy, and landing page. That structure decision does more for performance than any bid strategy or budget change.
Kitchens, bathrooms, additions, ADUs, and whole-home renovations are different searches by different homeowners with different budgets. Mixed together in one campaign, Google cannot learn which searches produce your projects, and your reporting cannot tell you which service line your budget is actually buying. Separated, each campaign optimizes against its own economics. On the accounts above, addition and ADU campaigns run as separate builds for exactly this reason, and the CPL difference between them ($109 on one account's additions work versus $397 on a garage-conversion test) is information that a blended campaign would have buried.
Negative keywords are the other half of structure. DIY, cheap, free, jobs, salary, tub liner, refinishing, plus every service you do not offer. Review the search terms report weekly and add to the list. This is fifteen minutes a week that routinely saves 20–30% of spend.
Then there is the keyword-count tell. Open your account and count the keywords. For any remodeler spending $3,000–$8,000 a month
YOU DON'T NEED HUNDREDS OF KEYWORDS. They need a tight cluster of 20-40 terms that describe the work they actually want, matched at phrase and exact. Hundreds of keywords means the account was built to look thorough, not to convert. Our guide to precision keyword strategy for remodelers goes deeper on building that out. [ bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/stop-wasting-100-day-the-remodelers-guide-to-precision-google-ads-keywords]
A note on campaign types: everything in this article is standard Search. Performance Max and Smart campaigns hand Google control that most remodeling accounts should not surrender early. We cover when Performance Max earns a place and when manual bidding is worth the control elsewhere in the Solutions Lab. [bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/performance-max-campaigns-when-to-use-them-and-when-to-avoid-them ; /solutions-lab/the-case-for-manual-bidding-in-google-ads-if-you-want-control]
Structure Before Spend Budget amplifies whatever structure it hits. A $3,000 budget in a service-separated account with tight negatives outperforms $8,000 in one blended campaign, because the algorithm can only optimize what the structure lets it see.
The landing page's job is to convert the right homeowner and repel the wrong one, in that order. Every click already cost $8–$20. The page decides whether that money became a lead.
Sending paid traffic to a homepage wastes most of it. A dedicated page per service line, matching the ad the homeowner clicked, with real project photography at the scope you want to attract, visible reviews, and one clear action, is what produces the conversion rates in the table above. The 4.9% account in that table converts against $500,000 whole-home work on California's Central Coast. The 8.5% account converts against additions in Virginia. Both are healthy, because the pages are filtering for project size, not maximizing form fills.
Which is why the standard advice to plaster "Get a Free Estimate" everywhere is wrong for design-build work. Free-estimate CTAs maximize inquiries, including every price shopper in the service area. A discovery questionnaire that asks about scope, timeline, and budget range adds friction on purpose. The homeowner planning a $70,000 addition fills it out. The one collecting five bids for a $4,000 refresh does not. Friction as a Feature: fewer leads, meaningfully higher close rates, and a sales calendar that stops filling with estimates you dread. Our breakdown of remodeler landing pages covers the full anatomy. [bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/remodeler-landing-pages-for-google-ads-the-3-non-negotiable-elements-for-15-conversion]
The Conversion Layer Ads bring the click. The brand converts it. A page with stock photos and a generic estimate button turns $15 clicks into bounces. The same click on a page with real projects and a discovery questionnaire becomes a qualified lead. Same spend, different system.
Assign conversion values, because Google's algorithm optimizes for whatever you count as a conversion. Left unweighted, a form fill about a $4,000 repair and a form fill about a $120,000 renovation look identical, and the algorithm cheerfully finds you more of whichever converts most easily. Usually the small one.
On the Tennessee account in the table above, a submitted form carries an estimated pipeline value of $4,000 and a tracked call carries $2,000, based on what those actions historically turn into. Over the six-month window, $4,990 in spend produced 35 leads carrying roughly $128,000 in estimated pipeline value. That is pipeline, not closed revenue, and the distinction matters. But it gives the algorithm a value signal instead of a lead count, and it gives the owner a dashboard that speaks in dollars instead of form fills.
The next maturity level is importing actual outcomes. When a lead becomes a signed $70,000 contract, that result can flow back into the account attached to the original click. Google then learns which keywords, zip codes, and times of day produce contracts rather than inquiries, and bids accordingly. Our guides to conversion value rules for contractors and offline conversion imports walk through both setups. [ → bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/contractor-conversion-value-rules ; /solutions-lab/offline-conversion-imports]
Skip this layer and every optimization decision upstream of it, bidding, budget, even the honest conversion rates above, is being made against partial information.
Value In, Value Out An account optimizing toward lead count learns to find cheap inquiries. An account optimizing toward project value learns to find renovations. The algorithm is obedient. Tell it the right thing.
No. At $600 a month against $8-$20 clicks, $20 a day buys one to two clicks daily, which at a 5-8.5% click-to-lead rate produces two to four leads a month on a good month. The account never accumulates enough conversion data to optimize, so it never improves. It just quietly spends.
The practical floor for a remodeler is $2,000–$3,000 a month in ad spend. At the blended numbers above, that range produces roughly 12–19 leads and, at a 30% close rate, three to six booked projects per quarter. Enough for the algorithm to learn, enough for you to judge the channel on real data, and scaled from there based on capacity, not appetite. A remodeler who cannot absorb more than two new projects a month should not buy leads for ten.
Set the budget from revenue goals, not from what feels affordable. [bgcollective.com/google-ads-budget-calculator-contractors]
The Data Floor Below about $2,000 a month, the problem is not lead volume. It is that the account generates too few conversions for anyone, human or algorithm, to learn from. Underfunded accounts do not underperform slowly. They never start performing.
Google Ads captures demand. It does not create it, nurture it, or close it. The remodelers with the strongest pipelines run search as the engine inside a larger build: Local Services Ads as a trust supplement [INTERNAL LINK → LSA guide, confirm final slug], Meta remarketing for the long decision cycle [ Check Out - bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/facebook-ads-for-remodelers], SEO compounding underneath the paid traffic, and a brand that converts at every touchpoint. Custom home builders run a modified version of this playbook, with longer cycles and inverted lead math, which we cover separately. [https://www.bgcollective.com/solutions-lab/marketing-for-custom-home-builders-2026]
Homeowner demand supports all of it. Remodeling spend is projected to reach $522 billion by the end of 2026¹, and remodelers now make up more than half of all residential building construction firms², which means more firms competing for the same searches. The owners winning that competition are showing up at the moment of search with a system behind the click.
If your Google Ads produce inquiries/leads but your calendar fills with estimates for work you would rather not do, the account is optimizing for the wrong thing, and now you know how to check. Count the keywords. Ask for the cost per booked project. Run the Booked Project Math on your last quarter.
At B&G, we build Google Ads systems for remodelers, design-build firms, and custom home builders doing $2M+ in revenue, measured on cost per booked project from day one. If you want your numbers to look like the table above, start the discovery questionnaire and we will show you the math for your market.
¹ Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University. "Remodeling Growth Set to Downshift in Late 2026." Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA), January 2026. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/remodeling-growth-set-downshift-late-2026
² National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). "NAHB Expects Remodeling Growth in 2026 and Beyond" and "Remodeling Gaining Larger Share of Residential Construction Market." NAHB, February & November 2025. https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/press-releases/2026/02/nahb-expects-remodeling-growth-2026
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