Field Report No. 01
What acquisition costs. On the record.
The 2026 acquisition-cost data, line by line: what a lead costs by trade, what a paying customer costs, and where the break-even line sits.
Contractor marketing runs on numbers nobody puts on the record. This report puts them on the record.
The receipt
The market
Across 3,211 US contractor search campaigns, the direction is one way: leads cost more and convert less.
Source: LocaliQ 2025 Home Services Search Advertising Benchmark, 3,211 US contractor campaigns; figures are medians.
The market prices a stranger the same for everyone. The advantage is in what you own before the search happens.
The line items
By trade
What one Local Services Ads lead costs, by trade, and what a stranger costs in non-branded search.
LSA cost per lead
Non-branded search
True acquisition, a homeowner typing the trade and not your name, runs an order of magnitude above LSA pricing: $183 per lead and $333 per paying customer in the deepest published 2026 dataset.
Sources: SearchLight LSA Benchmark, February 2026, 888 contractors, $6.72M observed spend, figures gross before Google lead credits; non-branded search dataset, 524 contractors. Full tables and reading notes remain in the registry.
The Ledger
Continue in the registry
The framework that judges these costs, and the doctrine that escapes them.
What does a lead cost you?
One page of findings: what you pay per lead today, where it sits against the published benchmarks, and what we’d fix first. Free, no meeting required.
Or call (419) 575-9023