Google Ads for landscapers: budgets, campaigns and the money pits
What a landscaping or lawn care lead costs on Google Ads, which campaigns work for maintenance versus installs, and the settings that burn a spring budget.
Google Ads works in this trade, but it works differently for a route than it does for a patio. A mowing lead is worth $45 a visit and thirty visits a year. A retaining wall lead is worth $14,000 once. Bidding both from the same campaign, at the same budget, in the same months, is the single most common way landscapers lose money on Google, and it is why so many owners say "I tried Google Ads and it did not work."
What a lead actually costs
From accounts we have run and audited in this trade, in ordinary US metros:
- Mowing and recurring maintenance: $15 to $45 per call, $60 to $140 per signed annual account.
- Spring or fall cleanup: $25 to $60 per call.
- Mulch, sod, planting: $40 to $90 per call.
- Irrigation repair: $35 to $80 per call, and it converts fast because it is a broken-thing search.
- Paver patios, retaining walls, outdoor kitchens: $90 to $220 per call, closing at 15% to 30%, which still works at a $12,000 average ticket.
Cost per click in March and April in a competitive metro runs $6 to $14 for maintenance terms and $12 to $30 for hardscape. In January the same clicks are half that, which is the argument for not starting in March.
The campaign structure that works
Three campaigns, separate budgets, so you can read them.
1. Maintenance search. Exact and phrase match only. Keywords: "lawn care service near me", "lawn mowing service [city]", "weekly lawn mowing", "yard maintenance company". Landing page is your maintenance page with a price range on it. Budget $20 to $50 a day, weighted to January through April.
2. Install and hardscape search. Exact and phrase, one ad group per job type. "paver patio installer [city]", "retaining wall contractor", "sod installation cost", "landscape design [city]". Landing page is the matching service page with before and after photos and a real project price range. Budget $30 to $100 a day, weighted May through September.
3. Local Services Ads, if available in your area. Google Guaranteed for landscaping runs on a pay-per-lead basis and sits above the map pack. Leads are cheaper than search in most markets, often $20 to $50 for maintenance. Two catches: you pay for calls that Google decides are valid, so dispute the bad ones inside 30 days, and your review count feeds the rotation, which is another reason to run the reviews process.
Skip Performance Max until search is profitable and you have 30 days of clean conversion data. PMax with no conversion history in a local trade spends most of the budget on display placements that never call.
The money pits
Broad match on "landscaping." That one word matches "landscaping ideas", "landscaping rocks", "landscaping jobs hiring", "landscaping school". You will pay $9 a click to be someone's Pinterest board. If you use broad match at all, do it in a separate campaign with a small cap and a hard negative list.
No ad schedule. A mowing ad running at 11 p.m. gets clicks from insomniacs comparing prices. Run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, and check whether your Sunday clicks ever convert before paying for them. Note that 28.3% of the trade shows Saturday hours, so Saturday morning is genuinely less contested.
No negative keyword list. Build it on day one: free, cheap, jobs, hiring, salary, near me jobs, DIY, how to, ideas, wholesale, supply, rental, equipment, mower repair, parts, school, license, insurance quote, Home Depot, Lowes. Then read the search terms report weekly for the first month and add ten more each time.
A radius instead of a route. Do not run a 25-mile radius. Target the six to ten towns you actually service, set location targeting to "presence" rather than "presence or interest", and exclude the ones where drive time kills the job. Route density is profit in this business, and a lead 40 minutes out costs you money even when it closes.
Ads pointed at the homepage. A "paver patio" click landing on a page that starts with "welcome to our family business" converts at a third the rate of a patio page with three before and after pairs and a price range. The website guide covers what those pages need.
Conversion tracking, or you are guessing
Track three things before you raise a budget past $1,000 a month:
- Calls from ads, using a Google forwarding number, counted only past 45 seconds so hangups do not inflate the numbers.
- Form fills, as a separate conversion action.
- Which keyword produced which call. Call recording is legal in most states with a notice, and one afternoon spent listening to twenty recordings will tell you more than a month of dashboards.
Then close the loop by hand. Once a month, sit down with the schedule and mark which ad leads actually signed. In this trade, half the maintenance leads that call in March get put on a waitlist and forgotten. That is not an ads problem, and no dashboard will show it to you.
A realistic budget by size
- Solo, one mower, filling a route: $600 to $1,000 a month, January through May, mostly maintenance search. Expect 20 to 40 calls a month at the low end of the CPL range.
- Two crews, adding installs: $1,500 to $3,000 a month, split roughly 40% maintenance in pre-season and 60% install in summer.
- Design-build with hardscape: $3,000 to $8,000 a month, weighted to install terms, plus retargeting on Meta covered in the Meta ads guide.
Below about $500 a month you cannot gather enough data in a month to optimize anything. If that is the budget, put it into reviews, the profile and door hangers first and come back to Google when the route can pay for it.
When to turn it down
In cold states, cut maintenance search hard after the last cleanup and hold budget for snow terms if you plow. In warm states, September through November is install season and January is the maintenance push. The seasonality guide has the month-by-month version. Do not pause the account entirely, dropping to $10 a day keeps history alive and costs less than restarting cold in February.
Frequently asked
How long before it works? Two to three weeks to gather search terms and cut the waste, six to eight weeks to a stable cost per lead. Anyone promising results in week one is showing you clicks, not jobs.
Should I bid on my own name? Yes, if a competitor is bidding on it, which you can check by searching your name in an incognito window. It costs pennies a click and protects a customer who is already looking for you.
Can I run ads with no website? Local Services Ads, yes. Standard search, no, and it would be a waste anyway. Companies with a website linked show a median of 13 reviews against 2 without, and the same seriousness gap shows up in ad performance.
Google Ads is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, built in your own ad account so you keep it either way. Text or call (385) 832-6175.