CAPSTONE MARKETING — FIELD REPORT NO. 01
What acquisition costs.
On the record.
Contractor marketing runs on numbers nobody publishes. Vendors quote anecdotes, agencies quote averages without samples, and owners benchmark against rumor. This report is the alternative: the 2026 acquisition-cost data, line by line, with the sample sizes attached — plus one ledger from our own operating history, published in full.
Exhibit A — Local Services Ads, cost per lead by trade
The cheapest paid lead in the trades
Google Local Services Ads remain the lowest-cost paid acquisition channel for home services — pay-per-lead, no creative, position determined largely by reviews and answer rate. The spread between trades is the story: electrical leads cost 32% less than plumbing leads and convert into comparable tickets.
| Trade | Cost / Lead | ROAS | Avg. Ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical43.4% booking rate — best in dataset | $39 | 8.52× | $1,434 |
| HVACHighest return per dollar in dataset | $51 | 9.55× | $2,110 |
| PlumbingWeakest ROAS — answer-speed dependent | $57 | — | — |
| Blended, all trades | $53 | 888 contractors · $6.72M observed spend | |
Source: SearchLight LSA Benchmark, February 2026. Figures are gross, before Google lead credits. Spend-weighted averages dominated by contested metros — see reading notes below.
Exhibit B — Non-branded paid search, plumbing
What a stranger actually costs
True acquisition — “plumber near me,” not your company name — runs an order of magnitude above LSA pricing. The deepest published 2026 dataset covers plumbing. On a $350 drain call these numbers are a loss before labor; on a five-figure sewer line they earn. The benchmark isn’t a verdict on the channel. It’s an instruction about which services belong in it.
This is the number the vendor dashboard hides — blended branded traffic makes it look half this size.
Source: SearchLight Plumbing Advertising Benchmark, Q1 2026.
Exhibit C — The break-even chain
The only calculation that matters
A cost per lead means nothing on its own. Work it through to a customer, then to profit, and you get the ceiling your business can actually pay. At the dataset’s conversion rates, a typical service shop breaks even near $85 per lead on first-job economics — before any repeat business or referral value.
Conversion rates from the SearchLight LSA dataset; ticket and margin shown as a worked example. Run it with your own numbers — the structure holds, the ceiling moves.
Anything a vendor quotes you without a sample size is a sales number, not a benchmark.
Exhibit D — From our own books
One channel, fully loaded, published
Benchmarks are other people’s numbers. These are ours: the complete 2021 ledger of a door-to-door canvassing program we built and ran — every cost counted, including payroll, management, materials, and the van. We publish it because a 15.5% fully-loaded cost of marketing is what disciplined looks like, and because nobody should take channel advice from someone who won’t show a ledger.
Payroll included. The flattering version of this number excludes it. We don’t run the flattering version.
Internal operating data, door-to-door program, fiscal 2021. The full story behind this ledger: The Best Channel I Ever Ran Had No Dashboard.
Reading notes — how to use these figures without fooling yourself
Compiled by
Austin Rohleder
Founder, Capstone Marketing Group · Wauseon, Ohio
Every figure in this report traces to a cited source or to our own operating records. If you find an error, flag it — corrections are made and logged in the revision line above. This page is built to be printed.
Your numbers, on the same ledger.
The free audit puts your cost per lead and cost per booked job next to these benchmarks, channel by channel — sample sizes, sources, and your intake math included. No vendor numbers. Yours.