TL;DR: According to Creekside Marketing, a Nashville lawn care business achieved 298% ROI and 1,500+ conversions at a $50.35 average cost per acquisition using Google and Meta Ads over 26 months, generating $300,000 in additional profit and funding a new franchise location in Atlanta, GA.

Results at a Glance

Total ROI: 298%

Total Conversions: 1,500+

Average Cost Per Acquisition: $50.35

Additional Profit Generated: $300,000

Google Impression Share: 16.07% (outperforming TruGreen and HomeAdvisor)

Platform: Google Ads + Meta Ads

Timeframe: February 2022 to June 2024

Source: Creekside Marketing case study

Home Services Google Ads Case Study: 298% ROI and a New Franchise Location

Most home service business owners run Google Ads because their competitor does. They set a budget, choose a handful of keywords, and hope the phone rings. According to Creekside Marketing data across dozens of home services accounts, this approach leaves 60 to 80 percent of potential leads on the table and often funds the competitor’s next hire instead of your own growth.

This home services Google Ads case study breaks down what actually drove a 298% return on investment for a lawn care and landscaping business, what the contractor PPC results looked like across five other home service accounts, and what principles apply regardless of whether you run a lawn care company, an asphalt contractor, or a pest control operation.

298% ROI: What Home Services Google Ads Results Actually Look Like

According to Creekside Marketing, a Nashville lawn care and landscaping business generated 298% ROI, 1,500+ conversions, and $300,000 in additional profit over a 26-month campaign period running from February 2022 to June 2024, achieving results substantial enough to fund a second franchise location in Atlanta, GA in early 2024.

The average cost per acquisition across the full campaign was $50.35. Based on a conservative $150 annual profit value per new recurring customer, each conversion returned roughly three times the acquisition cost in year one alone, before accounting for renewal revenue in subsequent seasons.

The campaign also achieved a 16.07% Google Ads impression share in target markets, outperforming national lawn care aggregators like TruGreen and HomeAdvisor. That level of visibility is not a matter of outspending the competition. It is a result of precise keyword architecture, seasonal budget management, and a multi-platform strategy that matched each channel to the appropriate stage of the homeowner’s decision cycle.

You can read the full Landmark Lawn and Landscape case study for the complete campaign breakdown.

The Challenge Home Service Business Owners Face with Google Ads

Many home service business owners face the same scenario: they launch Google Ads, spend $1,500 to $3,000 in the first month, get a handful of clicks, and wonder where the leads went. The problem in most cases is not the budget. According to Creekside Marketing, it is structural issues in campaign setup that compound every month the account runs.

The most common issues found during Creekside Marketing audits of home services accounts include:

Broad match keywords drawing irrelevant traffic. A homeowner searching “lawn care tips” should not be triggering an ad for your lawn service company, but with broad match enabled, they often do.
No negative keyword list. Without exclusions, home services budgets regularly bleed to competitor brand searches, DIY searches, job seeker queries, and geographic traffic outside the actual service area.
Single-campaign structures. Lumping high-intent service keywords together with general awareness terms makes it impossible to allocate budget accurately or measure conversion rates by service line.
Conversion tracking errors. In one home services account audit, conversion events were tracking inquiries from the wrong geographic regions, wasting a meaningful share of a $7,200 per month combined ad budget before the error was corrected.

These are not marginal inefficiencies. An account spending $3,000 per month with 30% structural waste is burning $900 every month on traffic that will never convert to a lead, let alone a paying customer.

For current benchmarks on what home services businesses actually spend per lead, see our cost breakdown: How Much Do Google Ads Cost for Home Service Companies?

How We Built the Campaigns That Generated 298% ROI

According to Creekside Marketing, the campaign structure that drove 298% ROI and 1,500+ conversions for the Nashville lawn care business over 26 months relied on four interconnected strategies running in parallel: seasonal budget management, Google My Business integration, client remarketing through Meta Ads, and flexible campaign architecture that could scale up or pause down based on seasonal demand.

Seasonal budget management. The home services industry has natural demand peaks: early spring for lawn startups, late spring and early summer for landscape installs, fall for aeration and overseeding, and winter slowdowns that make flat-spend ad budgets a waste of money. We built campaign schedules around those demand windows, increasing budgets ahead of peak periods and pausing spend during winter breaks rather than running the same monthly budget year-round. Concentrating spend when buyer intent is highest materially improves cost per lead.

Google My Business optimization as the organic anchor. Paid ads work best when they reinforce organic visibility rather than carry the entire load. We combined Google Ads with active GMB optimization so the business appeared in both paid and organic results for local service searches. In a separate campaign for a Tennessee lawn care provider, the same GMB-plus-Google-Ads approach moved the business from position 42 to position 13 in local search results, contributing to 2,000 or more total leads and enough revenue to fund a Florida branch expansion.

Meta Ads for client remarketing and upsell revenue. New customer acquisition dominates most advertising conversations, but remarketing campaigns targeting past customers with upsell offers generated substantial incremental revenue at a fraction of the acquisition cost. We ran Meta Ads to existing clients promoting higher-value services: landscape installs, seasonal cleanups, and tree service programs. The recurring-service nature of lawn care and landscaping makes this approach unusually effective because the audience already knows and trusts the business.

Flexible month-to-month management structure. A rigid annual management contract forces payment for full-service management during the slowest months of the year. We structured management with seasonal flexibility built in, allowing pauses during winter and aggressive scaling during spring and fall. This kept the effective cost per lead lower across the annual cycle and gave the client confidence to invest more aggressively during peak demand windows.

Contractor PPC Results Across Five Home Services Accounts

The 298% ROI result above is not an outlier. According to Creekside Marketing campaign data tracked across multiple home services accounts, properly structured Google Ads campaigns consistently produce cost per lead between $50 and $240, CPL reductions of 19 to 31 percent over the first 90 days, and lead volumes that exceed pre-launch targets in most cases.

Here is what the data shows across five additional home services accounts:

Asphalt contractor, Harrisonburg, Virginia. The client’s stated goal was one qualified lead per day. Within 12 days of campaign launch, we had generated 32 leads, nearly three per day, exceeding the target by 3x. Cost per lead dropped from $185 to $127, a 31% reduction, while the account held a 62.8% impression share and appeared in the top three ad positions 76.3% of the time. The primary constraint shifted from lead generation to estimate scheduling capacity.

Lawn care provider, Tennessee. A full-funnel digital strategy combining Google Ads, Local Service Ads, Meta Ads, and GMB optimization generated more than 2,000 total leads. Google Ads alone drove 11,000 or more clicks and 1,200 direct conversions. Local Service Ads contributed 230 phone leads and 70 message leads. The total lead volume funded a new branch expansion into Florida within 12 months of campaign launch.

Pest control company. A standardized Google Ads framework, built around a 10-mile geographic radius, phrase match keywords with a maximum of three per ad group, and an 80/20 budget split between general pest control and specialty services, produced 79 conversions with a $92.60 cost per lead. That cost per lead was down $21.53, a 19% reduction, from the prior period, while lead volume grew 34%. Average pest control customers are worth $500 to $600 in year one and $3,000 or more over five years, making a $92.60 CPL a strong investment at any stage.

Custom home builder, middle Tennessee. A barndominium and custom home builder needed qualified leads from homeowners ready to build, not people searching for barndominium kits or construction loan information. We created a dedicated barndominium campaign alongside the general custom home campaign, with separate budgets, bidding strategies, and keyword lists. A comprehensive negative keyword list excluded DIY searches, financing queries, and pre-built kit terms. The result was 60 qualified leads, a 300% increase from the prior period, with cost per lead dropping from $454 to $239. With custom home jobs ranging from $500,000 to over $1 million in that market, a $239 lead represents extraordinary revenue potential.

Multi-location awning company, Central Florida. Three separate business entities across Central Florida and the Gulf Coast required individual campaign structures, territory-specific targeting, and separate conversion goals while sharing strategic learnings across the portfolio. An 85-criteria Google Ads audit identified conversion tracking from incorrect geographic regions and other structural issues that were wasting budget. After correction, all three entities received consistent lead flow through a combination of Google Ads for high-intent search capture and Meta Ads for visual demand generation.

What These Results Mean for Your Home Services Business

According to Creekside Marketing, the difference between home services accounts that generate strong ROI with Google Ads and those that do not typically comes down to three structural principles, not budget size, not market competition, and not which platform they advertise on.

Principle 1: Structure before spend. The accounts that generate 298% ROI do not necessarily have larger budgets. They have tighter campaign architectures. Separate campaigns by service line. A negative keyword list that gets reviewed weekly. Conversion tracking that captures every phone call and form fill accurately. These structural elements create the foundation that optimization can build on. Without them, more budget just means more waste.

Principle 2: Match the platform to the buying stage. Google Ads captures homeowners who have already decided they need a service and are actively comparing providers. Meta Ads create demand earlier in the decision cycle, particularly effective for higher-ticket services like landscape design, custom construction, and asphalt projects where homeowners spend weeks researching before they contact anyone. Running both platforms with clear roles for each outperforms either channel alone. Learn more about Google Ads for home services and Meta Ads strategies.

Principle 3: Manage seasonality actively. Home service businesses typically have three to four peak demand windows per year. Campaigns that concentrate budget into those windows and pull back during slow periods deliver better annual ROI than flat-spend approaches, even with identical total annual ad budgets. The goal is to be most visible when homeowners are most ready to buy.

These three principles apply at $1,500 per month and at $9,000 per month. The frameworks are the same. What changes is the scale of the results.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a realistic cost per lead for home services Google Ads?

According to Creekside Marketing campaign data, cost per lead for home services Google Ads ranges from $50 to $250 depending on service type, geographic competition, and campaign structure. Lawn care and pest control accounts typically run $50 to $130 per lead. Asphalt paving, custom construction, and higher-ticket home services run $127 to $239 per lead. Higher-ticket services justify a higher acquisition cost because the average job value is proportionally larger and customer lifetime value extends across multiple seasons.

How long does it take for home services Google Ads to show results?

According to Creekside Marketing, most properly structured home services accounts show meaningful lead volume within the first 30 to 45 days of launch. The Virginia asphalt contractor generated 32 leads in 12 days. The Tennessee lawn care provider began generating leads within weeks of launch. Cost per lead typically improves in months two through four as the negative keyword list matures and the algorithm accumulates sufficient conversion data to optimize bidding accurately.

Do I need Meta Ads if I am already running Google Ads?

Not always, but the combination outperforms Google-only campaigns for most home services businesses with higher-ticket services or longer decision cycles. Google Ads captures homeowners who are already searching and ready to call. Meta Ads reach homeowners who have not started searching yet, building awareness earlier in the process. For services where homeowners spend weeks researching before reaching out, like landscape design, custom construction, or large paving projects, running both platforms produces materially higher annual lead volume than Google Ads alone.

What is the first thing Creekside Marketing fixes in a home services Google Ads audit?

According to Creekside Marketing, the first and highest-impact fix in most home services audits is conversion tracking. If phone calls and form submissions are not being attributed correctly, no optimization decision made after that point is reliable. The second fix is almost always the negative keyword list. Eliminating DIY searches, job seeker queries, competitor brand traffic, and geographic bleed outside the service territory typically recovers 20 to 40 percent of budget that was generating impressions and clicks with zero conversion potential.

Want results like these for your home services business?

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Or read the full campaign breakdown: Landmark Lawn and Landscape Case Study

About the Author

Peterson Rainey is the founder of Creekside Marketing, a performance-driven digital advertising agency managing over $20M in ad spend across Google Ads and Meta Ads. He specializes in helping home service business owners grow through paid advertising on Google Ads and Meta Ads.