Every dollar you put into marketing should come back as booked jobs. This free marketing ROI calculator shows your real return, your return on ad spend, your cost per lead, and what each new customer actually costs you.
Use a typical month. Estimates are fine to start.
Your marketing ROI
$6,000 profit on $3,000 spent
No signup. The math runs in your browser.
Marketing ROI is the profit your marketing produced divided by what you spent to produce it, shown as a percentage. Take the revenue your marketing booked, multiply by your profit margin to get the profit, subtract your marketing spend, then divide by that spend. If $3,000 in spend books $22,500 of work at a 40 percent margin, that is $9,000 of profit. Subtract the $3,000 you spent and you cleared $6,000, which is a 200 percent return on your marketing.
Most contractors also want the simpler number: return on ad spend, or ROAS, which is just revenue divided by spend. In the example above that is 7.5x. ROAS tells you the top-line return; marketing ROI tells you what you actually kept after margin. The calculator above shows both so you are never guessing.
Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is what it costs you to turn marketing into one booked job. Divide your marketing spend by the number of jobs it actually booked, not the number of leads. Fifty leads at a 30 percent close rate is 15 booked jobs, so $3,000 of spend is a $200 customer acquisition cost. That is the number that belongs next to your average job value, because it tells you what each new customer really costs before you have swung a hammer.
Cost per lead is a softer version of the same idea and it can fool you. Two channels can share the same cost per lead and have completely different acquisition costs, because one closes far better than the other. If you want the full breakdown of what a booked job costs across channels, run our cost per booked job calculator next.
A healthy rule of thumb for most home service trades is to keep total marketing under 10 to 15 percent of the revenue it produces, which lines up with a return on ad spend of roughly 5x or better. High-intent channels like Local Service Ads and Google Ads tend to deliver the strongest return because the customer is already searching for the work. Published advertising benchmarks vary widely by trade, so the honest answer is that your own numbers, plugged into the tool above, beat any industry average.
The fastest way to move your ROI is not a cheaper lead, it is a better close rate and more exclusive, high-intent leads. That is exactly what we build for the contractors we work with, from tree service to window and door companies. If you want a second set of eyes on your numbers, see how our home service marketing works or book a call below.
The tool above uses a single job. In real life a happy customer calls you again and refers neighbors, so their customer lifetime value is often two or three times one sale. When you know your customer lifetime value, you can afford a higher customer acquisition cost and still come out ahead, which is why the contractors who track lifetime value can outbid the ones who only look at a single sale. If most of your work is one and done, lean on the single-job numbers above. If you get repeat and referral work, your true marketing ROI is even higher than the calculator shows.
The same logic applies channel by channel. A Google Ads ROI that looks thin on the first job can be excellent once repeat work is counted, while a cheap lead that never rebooks stays cheap for a reason. We track return on ad spend and cost per booked job for every channel we run, then weight your budget toward the ones with the best long-term return.
We run the ads, track every booked job, and move your budget to what actually returns the most. Exclusive leads, month to month, no long-term contracts.
Book a Strategy Call
Full-service marketing agency exclusively serving home service contractors. Generating 50-300 exclusive leads per month since 2018.