This guide explains every field, slider and result in the calculator, where each benchmark comes from, and the math that connects them. It is written for business owners and for the efelle team alike. Nothing in the calculator is a promise; it is a clear way to see what better marketing could be worth, using your own numbers wherever you have them and published industry figures where you do not.
The idea in one minute
Every home-services business runs the same funnel. People find you, some of them contact you, some of those hire you, and each job is worth a certain amount. The calculator puts numbers on each step, then shows what happens when a better website brings more visitors and turns more of them into leads, when your sales process closes more of those leads, and when paid advertising adds its own stream of leads on top.
Three things make it trustworthy rather than just optimistic:
Your numbers come first. Anything you know about your own business beats a benchmark. The benchmarks are there for the gaps.
Every benchmark is quoted from a published source. A small numbered link sits beside each one, and the full list is at the bottom of the calculator. Nothing is estimated from memory.
Nothing is hidden. The formulas are in this guide, and every result on the page can be traced back to an input you can see and change.
Step 1 · Your business today
This is your baseline: what the website does for you right now, before any changes. Five fields.
Industry
Picks the benchmark set for the rest of the page: the average job value, the Google Ads costs, the Local Services Ads cost per lead and the search topics. Twenty-one home-services trades are covered; if yours is not listed, choose the closest and replace the job value with your own.
Monthly website visitors
How many people visit your site in a typical month. The "avg" pill offers 414, the average across 11,000 local-business websites in a 2019 BrightLocal study (55% of them had under 500 a month); your own figure is far better. Google Analytics shows this as "Users" or "Sessions" for the last 30 days; your web host or website company can also tell you. If the calculator was opened from a link we prepared for you, this may be pre-filled with an estimate of your Google search traffic, which is labeled as such and is usually lower than your true total because it leaves out people who type your address, click from Google Maps, or arrive from social media.
Leads per month
Phone calls, contact forms, quote requests and chats that came from the website. This field and the conversion rate are tied together: type leads and the conversion rate updates, or type a conversion rate and leads update.
Website conversion rate
The share of visitors who become a lead. If you do not track it, the "avg" pill applies a published figure. A handful of trades have their own (HVAC 2.8%, pest control 3.7%, solar 2.3%, construction trades 2.9%, from First Page Sage's client data); every other trade uses 1.9%, the average across efelle's 400+ home-services client sites, and the pill says "efelle clients" so you know where it came from.
Close rate
The share of leads that turn into paying jobs. Most contractors know this roughly ("we win about half our quotes"). Plumbing, HVAC and electrical default to the booked-job rate measured across 888 contractors' Local Services accounts (about 44%), roofing to a homeowner survey (33%), solar to purchased-lead data (7%), and the remodeling-type trades (kitchen, bath, decks, siding, concrete, windows and doors) to 25%, the rate efelle uses from its own client work; every other trade uses the cross-industry survey figure, and the pill says "all trades".
Average value of a new customer
What a typical new job is worth to you. Your real average ticket is far better than any benchmark, because prices vary a lot by region and by the work you specialize in. The default is the national average project cost for your industry, shown with its source. If repeat work and referrals matter in your trade, the Lifetime Value slider in step 2 lets you count them.
Under the fields, a short summary states what the website brings in today: leads and jobs a month (rounded up), and revenue per month and per year. "Use the industry averages" fills every field that has a published benchmark at once; the small "avg" pill beside a field fills just that one.
Step 2 · Dial in the growth
Six sliders. The first three set the marketing growth; the last three describe your business: how well you close, your margin and what a customer is worth over time. Every result on the page updates as you move them, and the three dials at the top of the screen follow you as you scroll.
Monthly AdSpend ($1,500 to $25,000)
The advertising budget. It runs across Google Search Ads, Google Local Services Ads and Meta Ads at published benchmark costs, split by each channel's benchmark budget for your industry. The clicks join your projected visitors and the leads join your projected leads. See AdSpend below for how each channel is modeled and where the figures come from.
Site Traffic (0% to +250%)
What search engine optimization and a faster, better-structured site do over time. The top three organic results on Google take over two thirds of all clicks, so moving from page two to page one is the difference between being seen and not.
Conversion Rate (0% to +125%)
What a website designed to convert does: clear calls to action, visible phone number and reviews, fast pages, forms that work on a phone. Speed alone matters: Google found that more than half of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes over three seconds to load. Reviews matter too: consumers say they are most likely to visit a business's website after reading positive reviews.
Close Rate (0% to 100%, under "Sales, margin & lifetime value")
This slider is the close rate itself, not a lift. It starts at the rate you entered in step 1 and stays there until you move it, because closing is your sales process, not the website's. Raise it to model tighter follow-up: in one study of HVAC companies, 88% took more than five minutes to reply to a new lead.
Gross Margin (10% to 90%)
The share of revenue left after materials and crew labor. It turns new revenue into new gross profit in the "Return on the investment" card.
Lifetime Value (1.0× to 3.0×)
How much a new customer is worth over time compared with their first job. A pest-control customer on an annual plan, or a landscaper's client who comes back every spring, is worth more than one ticket. 1.0× means first job only.
The three preset buttons are starting points, not predictions. Each sets the growth sliders and the ad budget together: Conservative (+25% traffic, +10% conversion, the industry's benchmark ad budget), Expected (+50%, +25%, 1.5× that budget) and Aggressive (+100%, +50%, 2.5× that budget). The benchmark ad budget is the sum of the published benchmark budgets for the channels in your industry, so the same preset means a different dollar figure for a roofer than for a house cleaner. Move the traffic, conversion or AdSpend slider and the scenario becomes custom. The traffic dial at the top of the page is tied to the model: its arc is the projected visitor gain (organic growth plus ad clicks at your industry's benchmark cost per click) as a share of the most the sliders can add, which is +250% traffic plus $25,000 of ads. Cheaper clicks in your industry move it faster. The number inside it counts ad clicks too, which is why its lift can be far larger than the slider.
AdSpend · how the budget becomes leads
The AdSpend slider is one number, but behind it are three channels at published benchmark costs. "See how the budget is split" under the sliders opens a panel showing the split for your industry: how much goes to each channel, what a click or a lead costs there, how many leads that buys, and the source for each figure. The split is shown for transparency rather than for editing: the efelle team tailors the channel mix, the budgets and the targeting to each client's market and goals.
The three channels
Google Search Ads
The text ads at the top of Google results for searches like "fence company near me". You pay per click. The calculator divides the channel's share of the budget by the benchmark cost per click to get clicks, then applies the benchmark conversion rate to get leads. Both figures come from LocaliQ's study of 3,211 US home-services ad campaigns, broken out by trade where LocaliQ publishes a row and using the home-services average where it does not (the panel says which).
Google Local Services Ads
The "Google Guaranteed" cards that appear above the search ads, with your rating and phone number. Google bills these per lead rather than per click, so the calculator simply divides the budget share by the benchmark cost per lead. Cost per lead by trade comes from a study of 888 contractors' accounts and from an agency's published client figures, both cited. Google only offers this channel for certain service categories; where your trade is not on Google's list, the channel is left out of the split and the panel says why.
Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram)
Lead-form and click campaigns in the social feed. Billed per click, so the math is the same as Google Search Ads, using the home-improvement benchmarks from WordStream and LocaliQ's Facebook advertising study.
How the budget is split
Each channel gets a share proportional to its benchmark budget for your industry, such as LocaliQ's typical monthly search spend for your trade, Google's guidance of ten Local Services leads a week, or LocaliQ's client spend on social ads. Ad clicks from Google Search and Meta count as projected visitors; leads from all three channels count as projected leads.
Where a trade has no published figure
Local Services and Meta cost-per-lead figures are published for a handful of trades and for home services as a whole. Applying the blended figure to every trade would price a kitchen-remodel lead like a drain-cleaning lead, so where a trade has no figure of its own the calculator derives one from that trade's published Google Search cost per lead, scaled by the published ratio between channels ($53 Local Services and $41.26 Meta against the $90.92 search average). The split panel labels these as derived and shows the arithmetic.
A ceiling on return
Benchmark costs and close rates come mostly from service trades with tickets in the hundreds or low thousands. Applied unchanged to a $27,000 remodel they would imply returns of fifty times the ad spend, which nobody sees. So no channel is allowed to return more than 7.84× its spend, the highest closed return on ad spend in any published study we found. When that ceiling binds, extra leads do not all become jobs, the split panel says so, and it shows the effective close rate that results.
Advertising leads that become jobs
Advertising leads are colder than referrals, so they close at a lower rate than your overall close rate. The calculator uses 23%, derived from the 888-contractor Local Services Ads study: $53 per lead and $233 per paying customer, so about 23 in 100 paid leads become a job.
Return on the investment
This card uses the Gross Margin and Lifetime Value sliders and treats the monthly AdSpend as the investment. It shows four figures.
Net new profit per year
New gross profit minus the ad spend, times twelve.
New gross profit per month
The month's new revenue times your gross margin.
Back for every $1 of the investment
New gross profit per month divided by the monthly ad spend. $6.14 means six dollars and fourteen cents of gross profit for every dollar of ads.
Return on the marketing program overall
The same ratio expressed as a percentage gain: $6.14 back per $1 is a +514% return.
Website and SEO fees are not in this card, because they vary by program. Ask us for the figure with your full program cost included.
Reading the results
The three dials
Projected visitors a month, conversion rate and close rate, each with today's figure and the lift beneath. They stay at the top of the screen while you scroll so the sliders and the outcome are always visible together. The conversion arc follows its slider; the close arc fills to the projected close rate itself, so 60% closes shows a 60% arc. The traffic arc is the projected visitor gain, organic plus ad clicks at the industry's benchmark cost per click, as a share of the most the sliders can add (+250% traffic and $25,000 of ads). The visitor number inside it counts ad clicks, which is why its lift can be far larger than the slider alone.
The black summary bar
New revenue per year, then leads, customers and revenue per month as today → projected, and the program return.
Projected new revenue
The big number is new revenue per year: the difference between the projected month and today's, times twelve. The sentence beneath it states the extra customers and leads a month (rounded up to whole people) and the percentage gain. The trend chart shows cumulative revenue over the next twelve months, with the dashed line as "keep doing what you're doing" and the orange line ramping up to the projected level over the first six months, which is roughly how long a program takes to reach full stride.
Your funnel, per month
Today versus projected for visitors, leads, customers and revenue. Projected visitors include ad clicks and projected leads include advertising leads.
Where the new revenue comes from
Each lever as a bar with its dollar contribution and share of the total: more organic traffic, paid advertising, better conversion, stronger close. The levers are attributed in that order, so they always add up exactly to the total.
Industry benchmarks
The "Show" link opens every benchmark for your industry with its quote and a link to the source, in four groups: average job value, conversion and close rate, advertising, and why it matters.
Sharing. "Copy share link" puts the whole scenario in the web address, so the person you send it to sees exactly what you see. "Reset" returns to the starting point.
The math, with a worked example
Website leads = visitors × website conversion rate
New customers = leads × close rate
Revenue = new customers × average job value × lifetime multiplier
Projected visitors = visitors × (1 + traffic lift)
Projected conv. = conversion rate × (1 + conversion lift), capped at 100%
Projected close = close rate × (1 + close lift), capped at 100%
Channel budget = AdSpend × channel share (by benchmark budgets)
Google / Meta = channel budget ÷ cost per click → clicks × ad conversion rate = leads
Local Services Ads = channel budget ÷ cost per lead = leads
Paid jobs = paid leads × 23%, capped so channel revenue ≤ 7.84 × channel spend
Paid revenue = paid jobs × average job value × lifetime multiplier
Projected funnel = website projection + ad clicks + paid leads
New gross profit = new revenue × gross margin
Return per $1 = new gross profit per month ÷ AdSpend
A worked example
A roofing company with 800 visitors a month, a 4.9% conversion rate, a 50% close rate and a $9,608 average job.
Today
Expected preset
Visitors
800
800 × 1.5 = 1,200
Conversion rate
4.9%
4.9% × 1.25 = 6.1%
Leads
39.2
73.5
Close rate
50%
50% × 1.1 = 55%
New customers
19.6
40.4
Revenue per month
$188,317
$388,404
New revenue per year
+$2,401,000
Now put $5,000 a month of AdSpend into Google Search Ads alone at the roofing benchmarks of $10.70 per click and a 3.70% conversion rate: 467 clicks, 17.3 leads at about $289 each, 4.0 jobs at the 23% close rate for advertising leads, $38,200 in revenue. In the calculator that budget is split across the three channels, so the mix differs, but the arithmetic for each channel is the same.
The example uses benchmark figures throughout. Your own numbers will move every line.
Benchmarks by industry
The figures the calculator starts from for each trade, generated from the same data the calculator uses. Where a source publishes only a range, the range is shown and the calculator uses the nearest published average. Angi and HomeAdvisor share one data set, so matching figures from the two are one source, not two.
Where the numbers come from
Every benchmark was read on the page it links to, and the quote next to it is the sentence or table row it came from. The main sources:
Average job values: Angi and HomeAdvisor cost guides (verified project data), HomeGuide, Fixr, Forbes Home, Thumbtack and EnergySage.
Website conversion rates: Ruler Analytics' conversion rate by industry (110 million sessions) and Unbounce's landing-page benchmark (41,000 pages).
Close rates: Jobber's Home Service Trends Report (1,050 owners), ServiceTitan's call-booking data (3,000 shops) and Invoca's call-conversion benchmarks (70 million calls).
Google Search Ads: LocaliQ's home-services search advertising benchmarks (3,211 US campaigns) and WordStream's annual Google Ads benchmarks.
Local Services Ads: SearchLight Digital's cost-per-lead study (888 contractors, 126,650 leads), The Media Captain's client statistics, and Google's own help pages on how leads are billed and budgeted.
Meta Ads: WordStream and LocaliQ's Facebook advertising benchmarks.
Search topics: Google Ads keyword data (monthly US searches and average cost per click) via DataForSEO.
Local search behavior: Google and Think with Google research, First Page Sage's click-through study, BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey and Hatch's speed-to-lead data.
Benchmarks are reviewed against their sources every quarter. When a source updates a figure, the calculator updates with it; when a source stops publishing one, we look for a replacement rather than keep a stale number. The full numbered list for any scenario is at the bottom of the calculator page.
What the calculator does not know
Your market. National averages hide big regional differences. A cedar fence in Seattle costs more than a chain-link fence in Ohio, and a click in a big metro costs more than one in a small town. Your own figures always win.
Averages are averages. Most of the advertising benchmarks are medians across thousands of campaigns. Half of those campaigns did better and half did worse. Well-run campaigns with strong reviews and fast follow-up land on the better side.
Time. The projection is a steady-state picture, not month one. Search optimization builds over six to twelve months; paid advertising ramps in weeks but improves as it is tuned.
Capacity. The calculator will happily project more jobs than your crews can do. Use the break-even and jobs-per-month figures to size the program to what you can deliver.
Management fees. Return on ad spend is shown before any agency or management fee. Put those in the investment field to see the net figure.
Eligibility. Google decides which trades can run Local Services Ads. Where a trade is not on Google's list, the calculator leaves that channel out and says why.
Glossary
Lead
A person who contacted you: a call, form, quote request or chat.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who become leads. 5% means five leads from every hundred visitors.
Close rate
The share of leads that become paying jobs.
Paid close rate
The close rate for leads that came from advertising, which is usually lower than for referrals.
CPC, cost per click
What you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
CVR, ad conversion rate
The share of ad clicks that become leads.
CPL, cost per lead
Ad spend divided by leads. For Local Services Ads it is the price Google charges per lead.
CTR, click-through rate
The share of people who see an ad and click it. Shown in the benchmarks for context; the calculator does not need it.
ROAS, return on ad spend
Revenue from a channel divided by what you spent on it. 5× means five dollars back for every dollar of ads.
Local Services Ads (LSA)
Google's pay-per-lead ads for local service businesses, shown with the Google Guaranteed badge above the regular search ads.
Meta Ads
Advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
Gross margin
Revenue minus the direct cost of doing the work (materials and crew labor), as a percentage of revenue.
Lifetime value
What a customer is worth over the whole relationship, including repeat work and referrals.
Break-even
The number of jobs a month that covers the marketing investment.
Median
The middle value in a set: half the campaigns are above it and half below. Less affected by outliers than a simple average.
Questions we hear a lot
Is this a guarantee?
No. It is a transparent model built on your inputs and published benchmarks. It shows what a better website and advertising could be worth so the decision can be made with numbers rather than hunches.
Why is the return on ads so high?
Because home-services jobs are valuable relative to what a lead costs. If a lead costs $90 and one in four becomes a $5,000 job, each job costs $360 in advertising. Returns of five to ten times are common in published studies. Very high returns usually mean the average job value is high; check that number first.
Why does the traffic estimate look low?
When we pre-fill a visitor number, it is an estimate of Google search traffic only. Your Google Analytics total includes direct visits, Google Maps, social and referrals and is normally higher. Replace it with the real figure.
Why are the paid channels all the same close rate?
Published data with a clear method exists for Local Services Ads leads; we apply that rate to the other channels rather than guess a different one.
Can I change the channel split or use my own ad-account numbers?
The calculator shows the industry defaults so everyone sees the same starting point. When we build your program we use your real account data and tune the channel mix to your market, and we can run the projection with those figures for you.
How often are the benchmarks updated?
They are checked against their sources every quarter, and each one shows the year it was published.
