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Free tool · No signup · Updated July 2026

Would paid ads workfor your business?

Six questions, then a projection built from July 2026 benchmark data for your industry: what clicks cost, what leads cost, where breakeven sits, and how the first six months realistically play out. If the numbers say ads are a bad idea for you right now, the tool says that too.

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The thinking behind the numbers

How much should a service business spend on ads?

Enough to buy roughly 100 clicks and 10 conversions a month in your market; below that, the platforms cannot learn and the results tell you nothing. In practice that floor ranges from about $500 a month for an auto detailer (clicks around $2) to $25,000 or more for personal injury law, where our July 2026 pull put hiring-intent clicks at $140 to $263. Between verticals, the honest answer is the calculator above: it computes the floor for your specific market.

What is a good ROAS?

One that clears your breakeven, which is 1 divided by your gross margin. At 40% margin you need 2.5x just to stop losing money, so a 3x campaign is thin and a 5x campaign is healthy. At 70% margin, breakeven drops to 1.4x and a 3x campaign is excellent. A good ROAS is relative to margin; there is no universal number, and anyone quoting one without asking about your margin is guessing.

How do you know if paid advertising will work for your business?

Compare two numbers: what a customer costs to acquire in your click market, and what a customer is worth to you in gross profit. A roofing lead in metro Atlanta runs $80 to $140 from search; if your average job is $12,000 at 40% margin, closing one in ten leads pays for the whole month. When acquisition cost exceeds customer profit even at the cheap end of the click market, ads cannot work at any budget until prices, close rate, or repeat purchase improve. That comparison is exactly what this calculator runs.

Why do most first ad campaigns lose money in month one?

The platforms optimize on conversion data your account does not have yet. A new campaign spends its first weeks finding which clicks become customers, and efficiency in months one and two typically runs at 60 to 75% of steady state. Our projections build that ramp in. A campaign judged on its first thirty days almost always looks worse than the campaign it will be in month three, which is why quitting at week five is the most expensive common mistake in paid media.

Google Ads or Meta ads for a local service business?

Google first, in almost every case. Someone searching "emergency plumber" has a burst pipe and a credit card; Meta reaches people who might need you someday. The exception is offer-driven and visual work (med spa treatments, gym memberships, remodels) where Meta's interruption model can generate demand profitably. It depends on the trade, and here is on what: urgency. The more urgent the problem you solve, the more of your budget belongs in search.

Reference table · Google Search · July 2026

2026 cost-per-click benchmarks by industry

Median figures from our July 2026 Semrush pull across baskets of hiring-intent keywords, cross-checked against the LocaliQ 2026 study of 13,474 US campaigns. The full spread (25th to 75th percentile) drives the ranges in the calculator.

IndustryMedian CPCCPC range (P25 to P75)Median conv. rateTypical cost per lead
HVAC$29.35$25.68 – $31.1212.0%$244.58
Roofing$19.03$9.19 – $22.9410.0%$190.30
Plumbing$22.66$17.00 – $24.8713.0%$174.31
Electrical$10.56$7.01 – $14.8512.0%$88.00
Auto detailing / tint / wrap$2.17$1.73 – $2.459.0%$24.11
General home services$6.31$5.02 – $8.3410.0%$63.10
Personal injury law$197.68$140.07 – $263.477.0%$2824.00
Family law$8.50$7.63 – $9.128.0%$106.25
Criminal defense law$16.81$12.69 – $20.209.0%$186.78
Other law practices$7.89$6.20 – $9.848.0%$98.63
Dental$5.30$3.73 – $5.7510.0%$53.00
Chiropractic$4.20$4.07 – $4.5111.0%$38.18
Med spa / aesthetics$3.70$2.89 – $5.3310.0%$37.00
Skincare / esthetics$2.43$2.30 – $2.4610.0%$24.30
Fitness$2.09$1.78 – $2.4012.0%$17.42
Health & wellness$3.58$2.42 – $6.5910.0%$35.80
Accounting / financial services$12.82$9.78 – $13.888.0%$160.25
Consulting / professional services$7.49$6.53 – $10.307.0%$107.00
Real estate services$7.30$4.52 – $32.497.0%$104.29
SaaS$18.76$16.92 – $51.577.0%$268.00
Restaurant$1.11$0.76 – $1.439.0%$12.33
Apparel ecommerce$1.11$0.79 – $1.771.9%$58.42 / order
Beauty ecommerce$2.18$0.81 – $3.532.3%$94.78 / order
Home goods ecommerce$1.11$0.81 – $1.641.6%$69.38 / order
Food & beverage ecommerce$2.24$1.78 – $4.772.4%$93.33 / order
General ecommerce$1.40$0.80 – $2.401.9%$73.68 / order

Cost per lead here is median CPC divided by median conversion rate; your real figure moves with landing page quality and market. Ecommerce rows show cost per order. Ranges reflect keyword spread inside each basket, and personal injury is its own world: $140 to $263 per click means a lead-gen budget under five figures a month cannot generate enough data to optimize on.

Methodology

Where these numbers come from

Google Search cost-per-click bands come from a July 2026 Semrush Keyword Analytics pull: for each industry, a basket of 10 to 20 hiring-intent keywords (the terms a lead-generation campaign actually bids on), with the band set at the basket’s 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile. Baskets are documented keyword by keyword so the pull can be reproduced.

Conversion and close-rate bands are anchored to the LocaliQ 2026 search advertising study (13,474 US campaigns, April 2025 to March 2026: $5.42 average CPC, 8.18% average conversion rate, $66.69 average cost per lead) and adjusted per industry for intent. Meta and TikTok rows are built from published 2026 platform benchmark aggregates, since Semrush’s paid data covers search; those rows carry wider error bars and the tool labels them accordingly.

Where sources conflict, the dataset keeps the more conservative figure. One example worth knowing about: LocaliQ’s legal category averages $9.87 per click, but that blends every practice area. Our per-practice baskets put personal injury at $140 to $263 and family law at $8 to $9, and the tool uses the split because the category average would mislead both groups.

What projections cannot do: know your close rate, your landing page, or your market’s competitive quirks. Every benchmark in the results screen is editable for exactly that reason, and the projection is a range, never a promise. Benchmarks last updated July 2026.

The firm behind the tool runs paid media for a living: see home and auto services, health and wellness, and ecommerce for how these numbers behave in live accounts, or the case studies for specific results.