For most home service companies, the working floor is $1,500 to $3,000 a month in ad spend on one platform, and where you land inside that range should come from two numbers: what a booked job is worth to you and how much more work your crews can take. Revenue percentages can't see either one, which is why they produce budgets that feel responsible and buy nothing. I walked through the general version of this math in how much a small service business should spend on ads; this is the trades version, because an HVAC company and a painting company shouldn't budget the same way even at identical revenue. A furnace replacement forgives an expensive lead. A $150 service call doesn't. Every number below follows from that difference.
Why does ticket size decide your marketing budget?
Ticket size decides your marketing budget because it sets the ceiling on what you can pay to win a job, and everything else in the budget hangs off that ceiling. The math fits on a napkin: average job value times gross margin is the most you can spend to book one job and still come out ahead.
Divide that by how many leads it takes to book one, and you've got your target cost per lead. An $8,000 to $15,000 HVAC replacement at a 40 percent margin leaves $3,000 or more of room per job. Close one lead in four and you can pay a couple hundred dollars a lead and still win comfortably, which is a big part of why replacement-focused HVAC companies can fight in expensive ad auctions without flinching. A shop built on $150 service calls has a ceiling closer to $60 per customer, so it can't buy the same clicks. It needs cheaper leads and repeat business stacked behind the first visit before heavy ad spend makes sense.
How does the budget math change from one trade to the next?
The budget math changes with each trade's ticket size and how often the customer calls back. Plumbing and electrical budget against the big jobs and the customer's lifetime, painting has to fund weeks of follow-up because nobody's walls fail at 2am, and landscaping splits into recurring maintenance and design-build work that forgives real lead costs.
Run that formula across the trades and the budgets separate fast.
Plumbing splits in two. A $200 drain call can't carry a real cost per lead on its own, but the customer behind it can, because the house that calls about a clog calls again for the water heater and eventually the repipe. Budget against the big jobs and the whole lifetime of the customer, because the first invoice can't carry it alone. I break that down further on the plumbers page.
Electrical works the same way. Panel upgrades and EV charger installs in the $2,000 to $6,000 range justify the spend, and the $200 outlet call fills the gaps between them. The page for electricians covers which jobs the ads should aim at.
Painting has respectable tickets, $3,000 to $6,000 for a typical interior repaint, but no emergencies and a long decision window, since nobody's walls fail at 2am. Your budget has to fund weeks of follow-up after the click, and that changes what a fair cost per booked job looks like for painting companies.
Landscaping is two businesses wearing one shirt. Maintenance is small-ticket but recurring, so you budget against what a full season of cuts is worth. Design-build work at $10,000 and up behaves like an HVAC replacement and forgives real lead costs. Which half you feed decides the whole plan for landscapers.
What's the minimum ad spend that works?
The minimum ad spend that works is around $35 a day on Meta, which is where useful data starts (search needs closer to $100 a day). For the bigger-ticket trades I'd plan closer to $50 to $100 a day on Meta, because each lead costs more and the platform needs enough of them every week to learn who your buyer is.
Google and Meta optimize off conversions. Feed them a lead every few days and they never build a pattern, so you pay full price for guesses the whole month. That's the learning floor, and it's why $10 a day mostly funds the platform's education instead of yours. It's also why hedging a small budget across two platforms backfires: $1,500 on one platform buys a signal you can act on, while $750 on each of two buys two half-signals and twice the confusion. Own one platform until the numbers prove out. Add the second later with new money on top of the old budget.
How long should you run ads before judging the results?
Run ads steadily for about 90 days before you judge them, because ad platforms learn on a steady diet and every big-ticket trade has a quote cycle longer than two weeks. Those jobs close two to six weeks after the first click, so a two-week burst of spend ends before its own results show up.
A furnace replacement gets a second opinion. An exterior repaint gets compared against two other bids and slept on. Stop the spend at two weeks and whoever reads that report concludes ads don't work. The same money spread across 90 days does something different: the platform settles into a stable cost per lead, the quote cycle catches up, and by the third month you're looking at a cost per booked job you can trust. That's why I'd rather see an owner run $1,500 a month for three months than $4,500 for one. It's the same $4,500 either way, but the three-month version buys a number you can plan a year around and the one-month version buys a spike and a bad conclusion.
How does crew capacity limit your marketing budget?
Crew capacity decides how many jobs you're allowed to buy, while ticket size tells you what you can afford per job. Capacity is the half that gets ignored because being too busy feels like a win. If your crews are booked out five weeks, another $2,000 a month in ads buys you slower callbacks and a reputation problem.
A lead you can't get to for days is a paid-for phone call ringing at your competitor's shop. So work in this order. Get the follow-up system in place first, so every lead gets answered in minutes and chased when it goes quiet. Fill the calendar you already have. Then raise prices or add capacity, and only after that raise the budget. And underneath all of it, know your numbers cold: if you can't say today what a booked job costs you, any budget you set is a guess with a comma in it.
When should you increase your marketing budget?
Increase your marketing budget when the numbers have been boring for a full 90 days. Boring means your cost per booked job held inside a range you like for three straight months, your crews have room to take more work, and nothing is leaking to slow follow-up.
Hit all three and raise spend 20 to 30 percent at a time rather than doubling, because a doubled budget can throw the platform back into learning mode and spike your costs for weeks. Time it ahead of your season too. Ads bought in a slow-month panic cost the most and close the worst, since everyone else in your trade hit the same panic the same week. The owners who win treat the budget like a utility bill: a set number, paid steadily, sized to the jobs they want and the crews they've got.
Every trade's number comes out of its own ticket size and its own calendar, and the range only narrows once your real numbers go into it. If you want the figure for your business instead of the range, start here and I'll run the math with you straight.
