- Count cost per closed job, not cost per lead. Shared leads at 5–15% close can cost more per job than “expensive” exclusive channels.
- LSA is the best paid starting point for most remodeling companies: pay-per-lead (~$53/lead (cross-trade avg)), ~44% reported close, powered by reviews you should build anyway.
- Referrals and reviews are a system, not luck. The ask has to be consistent and compliant.
- Owned visibility (Maps, rankings, AI answers) is the only channel that compounds. Slowest to start, cheapest per job by year two.
Channel-by-channel: the honest math
Numbers are published ranges, checked July 2026, full sourcing on the Cost page:
| CHANNEL | THE MATH | VERDICT |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplaces | Leads sold to multiple contractors; 5–15% typical close (project leads commonly run high on shared platforms). A shared lead at 10% close costs 10× its sticker per job, before the race-to-the-phone tax. | Fine as filler capacity. Fatal as a foundation, the platform owns the customer. |
| Local Services Ads | no published trade-level figure, cross-trade average ~$53/lead; expect the high side for project trades; pay-per-lead, ~44% reported close. Ranking driven by reviews + response speed. | Start here for paid. Every review earned makes it cheaper. |
| Google Ads | no published trade-level figure, cross-trade average ~$91/lead (LocaliQ blended). Exclusive, instant, off the moment you stop paying. | A dial for gaps and new areas, not a foundation. Demands real tracking. |
| Referrals & reviews | Near-zero cash cost; the constraint is consistency. Every finished job is a review ask and a neighbor who watched the crew. | Your highest-close channel. Systematize the ask, same-day, sentiment-neutral, every job. |
| Owned visibility | Investment up front, compounding after: map positions, service pages, and AI presence keep producing without per-lead fees. | The only channel where this year’s work makes next year cheaper. |
Escaping the marketplace treadmill, in order
First 30 days: stop the bleeding. Complete the Business Profile, start the compliant review cadence, fix the booking path (tappable number, short form, fast reply). These raise every channel’s close rate at once.
Days 30–90: shift budget to LSA. As reviews build, LSA gets cheaper and steadier. Cap marketplace spend at whatever closes profitably by your own math.
Months 2–6: build the owned layer. Service-area pages for towns you actually cover, honest pages for kitchen remodel costs, design-build vs GC, permits, timelines, financing, geo-grid tracking to watch the map change.
Quarter 2 onward: let the asset take share. As Maps, rankings, and AI answers produce, paid becomes a choice instead of a dependency. Project demand follows life events and equity, not weather — the pipeline is long, so the visibility has to be persistent.
What this playbook won’t do
It won’t fill next week’s schedule, nothing organic does. It won’t work without follow-up discipline: visibility can’t close a booking request that waits two days for a callback. And it won’t run itself, which is either your evenings, or a program with a ledger you can audit.
No lead-count guarantees here, because honest people don’t make them. What’s measurable: qualified project inquiries against a dated baseline, month over month.
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