Where Home-Service Jobs Actually Come From

Home-service jobs come from a short list of places: ads you pay for (Google Ads, Local Services Ads, Meta), marketplaces that sell you requests (Angi, Thumbtack), referrals and repeat customers. The price you see for each is the price of a click, a request or a contact. The number that matters is different: what you paid, divided by the jobs you booked, and what is left of each job after your sub and the parts.

This guide goes through each source, says what you are really buying, and shows what to count. It quotes no industry averages. Every price and cost-per-lead number you see in articles depends on the trade, the city and the year, and the ones I could check are not worth repeating here.

The Number That Decides It

Two counts and one subtraction. Count what you spent on the source in a month. Count the jobs you booked from it. Divide. That is your cost per booked job. Then take the job's average ticket, take off the parts and the cut you pay your tech or sub, and compare. If the profit on a job is $300 and a booked job costs you $150 in ads, the source pays. If it costs $350, it does not, however cheap the leads looked.

In HeadHoncho a lead is a job with a name, a phone and an address, and the cost of a lead is spend divided by jobs. We count our own two numbers and not a click price from an ad platform. The step by step is in How to Work Out Your Cost per Booked Job, and the glossary has Cost per Lead.

The Best Lead Sources for Contractors, One by One

Google Ads (Search)

Google describes Search billing as the amount you are charged for a click (Google Ads Help, read 9 November 2026). You pay for someone who tapped, not for a job. Some taps are a customer in a rush and some are not. What arrives is a call or a form. What to count: spend, calls, jobs booked, and which click each job came from. That last part is why we built the link from a booked job back to the click. See Offline Conversion Tracking.

Local Services Ads

These are Google's pay-per-lead ads for service businesses. Check Google's own page for how a lead is charged and whether you can dispute one in your account, because the rules differ by trade and place. What to count is the same: what you were charged, how many of those leads you reached, how many you booked.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram)

People scroll past your ad. They did not go looking for a plumber. Expect more questions and fewer people ready to book today. Count the same way, and tag the Job source so you do not mix it with Google.

Angi and Thumbtack

These sell you a request from someone looking for a pro. I tried to read both companies' pro pages on 9 November 2026 and could not load them, so there are no prices here. Read your own statements. Ask three things: do you pay per request, per contact or per month; does the same request go to other pros; and can you dispute one? The posts Is Angi Worth It?, Angi vs Google Ads and Thumbtack vs Angi go through it.

Referrals

A customer sends a neighbor. No ad bill, so it looks free. If you give a gift or a discount, that is the cost. If your tech asks every happy customer, you get more of them. Tag each as Job source: Referral, and count the jobs.

Repeat Customers

The cheapest job you will ever book. It is also the one that hides in a report as "unknown". Tag repeat work too, or your ads will look like they carry the whole business, or none of it.

The Comparison Table

Cheaper per Request, Dearer per Job

Here source A is cheaper on both counts. Now change one number. If A's 30 requests booked only 5 jobs, A costs $300 per booked job, and B at $187.50 is the better buy, even though B's price per request is higher. The request price tells you nothing until you divide by jobs.

What You Can and Cannot Measure

A job's source is a column on Jobs, and Source is one of the lists in Filter. When a call came through a connected call tracker, HeadHoncho fills the Job source from the call. For a job that did not, you set it. For the rest, there is no honest way to know, and a blank is better than a guess. On the money side, the Jobs panel's money columns show what was collected, the parts, the cut and what the job made. If a source is not tagged, it cannot be compared.

Tracking each booked job back to its source is the subject of Track Leads to Booked Jobs. What we do and do not show is on How It Works. If the bad requests are the problem, count them first with Why So Many of Your Leads Are Junk.

Why Hopping Between Sources Proves Nothing

Two months on Google, then Angi, then boosting posts, then referrals. Each stretch books a handful of jobs. With so few, one canceled job swings the cost per job by a third. You end up with four stories and no test. Pick the sources worth keeping, give each a fair run, tag every job, and compare on cost per booked job and profit after the cut. See Angi vs Google Ads for the arithmetic.

Questions