"What's a roof cleaning lead going to cost me?" It is usually the first question a roofer or exterior cleaner asks, and it is a fair one. It is also the question nobody can answer honestly with a single number.

Anyone who tells you a roof cleaning lead costs a fixed amount is either quoting someone else's account or selling you something. What we can do is show you how that cost is made up, and how to work out what a lead is worth to you.

First, be clear what you mean by a "lead"

Half the confusion in this conversation comes from three different things sharing one word. There are really three numbers, and they are not interchangeable:

• Cost per click — what you pay when somebody taps your advert. Most of them will never contact you.
• Cost per enquiry — what you pay for each person who actually rings, fills in the form or messages you. This is what most people mean by a lead.
• Cost per job — what you pay in advertising for each enquiry that turns into money in the bank.

The last one decides whether advertising is working for you. A cheap click means nothing if the phone never rings, and a cheap enquiry means nothing if it never books. When someone quotes you a cost per lead, ask which of the three they mean.

Why the number moves around so much

Roof cleaning is not one market. The cost of getting in front of someone changes with all of the following:

• Where you work. A dense city with a dozen firms bidding on the same searches is a different market to a rural patch with two.
• The time of year. Demand for roof and moss work is seasonal, and so is the competition for it.
• The job itself. Somebody searching for moss removal on a terrace is not worth the same to you as somebody with a large detached roof wanting a full softwash.
• How urgent it is. Urgent searches tend to be more expensive and also more likely to book.
• Who else is bidding that week. This changes constantly and is outside anybody's control.
• How good your advert and your page are. Two firms bidding the same money on the same search can end up paying very different amounts per enquiry.

That last point is worth sitting with. A large part of your cost per lead is not set by the market. It is set by how your advertising is put together and how you handle what comes through.

Work out what you can afford to pay

Rather than asking what a lead costs, ask what one is worth to you. You already have the figures for this — nobody else does.

Take your average roof cleaning job value. Take off materials, labour and your travel, so you are left with what the job puts in your pocket. Then think about how many quotes you have to give to win one job. If roughly one in three of your quotes turns into work, then three enquiries is what a job costs you — so the most you can pay per enquiry is a third of what a job is worth, and comfortably less than that if you want to make money on it.

That is arithmetic, not a promise, and the numbers are yours to fill in. But it turns a vague worry into a ceiling: above this figure per enquiry, it is not worth doing; below it, it is.

One thing that catches people out: a roof cleaning customer often has a drive, gutters and fascias too. If a job frequently turns into two jobs, the enquiry was worth more than the first invoice suggests — but be honest about how often that really happens.

What pushes the cost up

Most expensive roof cleaning advertising is expensive for ordinary, fixable reasons:

• Broad keywords catching searches for roof repairs, new roofs, roofers wanted and people looking for work
• No negative keyword list, so you pay for "roof cleaning jobs", "how to clean a roof yourself" and similar
• One campaign covering roofs, gutters, drives and windows, so you cannot see or control what any of it costs
• Clicks landing on a homepage rather than a page about the actual job they searched for
• Adverts running well outside the area you would genuinely travel to
• Enquiries sitting unanswered for hours while somebody else rings them back first
• No call tracking, so nobody knows which enquiries came from advertising at all

What brings it down

The opposite, mostly. Tight keywords with a proper negative list. A separate campaign for roof work so its numbers stand on their own. A page about roof cleaning, with your own before and after photos on it. A sensible radius. Reviews that make you the obvious choice among three quotes. And answering quickly — speed of reply changes your cost per job more than almost anything else, because the enquiry is already paid for by then.

If you want the detail on how the campaign side of that is built, our page on Google Ads management for trades walks through it, and there is more on this trade specifically on our roof cleaning leads page.

Cheap leads are not the goal

It is tempting to judge everything on cost per enquiry, because it is the easiest number to see. But you can drive that number down by advertising to people who were never going to spend much, and end up busier, poorer and more tired. A dearer enquiry from somebody with a large roof who wants it doing this month beats three cheap enquiries from people ringing round for a price. Judge the money by the jobs it produced, not by the count of phone calls.

When this is not for you

Worth saying plainly, because it is true more often than the advertising industry admits:

• If you are already booked out for months, spend the money on another van or another pair of hands instead.
• If nobody can answer the phone during the working day and there is no one to take messages, paid advertising will mostly buy missed calls.
• If your average job is small and your margin is thin, the ceiling you worked out above may simply be too low to bid into a competitive area.
• If you cannot leave a budget running for long enough to gather real numbers, you will be making decisions on noise.
• If you are not willing to track where enquiries come from, you will never know whether it worked, and neither will anyone else.

None of that means avoiding advertising forever. It means fixing what is in the way first.

How to find your own number

Track calls and form submissions so each one is attributed to a source. Write down what each enquiry was for and what it was worth if it booked. Review monthly, not daily — daily figures on a small budget will send you round the bend. After a couple of months you will have the only cost per lead figure that means anything: yours.

So what does it cost?

Honestly: it varies enough that a headline figure would mislead you. What does not vary is the method. Work out what a job is worth to you, work out your ceiling per enquiry, get the campaign tight enough that you only pay for people who want the work you do, then answer quickly and measure what books.

If somebody runs your advertising and cannot tell you your cost per enquiry and your cost per job, that is the problem to solve before you worry about the price of a click. Always ask for current figures directly rather than relying on an average you read somewhere.

Plenty of UK service businesses start out managing their own Google Ads account, and there's nothing wrong with that early on. But there's usually a point where doing it yourself starts costing more, in wasted spend and missed jobs, than paying someone to do it properly. Here are the signs worth watching for.

1. You're not sure what's actually working

If you couldn't say which keywords, ads, or campaigns are actually bringing in paying customers, as opposed to just clicks, that's the clearest sign your account is missing proper conversion tracking, and by extension, that nobody's really steering it.

2. Your cost per lead keeps creeping up

Google Ads accounts left unmanaged tend to get more expensive over time, not less. Without regular pruning of underperforming keywords, adding negative keywords, and refreshing ad copy, you end up paying more for the same, or fewer, leads month after month.

3. You're getting leads, but they're the wrong ones

Plenty of enquiries but few actually turn into booked jobs? That's usually a targeting problem: broad match keywords, the wrong locations, or ad copy that doesn't filter out people who were never going to be a good fit in the first place.

4. You don't have time to check it regularly

Google Ads isn't a "set it up once and forget it" system. It needs regular attention to stay efficient. If you're running a business and only glancing at your account once a month, or less, it's very likely losing money quietly in the gaps.

5. You've never tested different ads or landing pages

The businesses that get the most out of Google Ads are constantly testing: different headlines, different offers, different landing pages, to see what actually converts best. If your ads and landing page have looked the same since day one, there's almost certainly performance being left on the table.

6. Leads come in, but nobody follows up fast enough

This one isn't really an ads problem at all, it's a systems problem. Studies on lead response time consistently show that the odds of converting a lead drop sharply the longer you wait to contact them. If leads are sitting in an inbox for hours before anyone replies, you're paying for clicks you're not capitalising on.

7. You're competing against businesses with dedicated marketing support

If your competitors are running polished, well-tested campaigns backed by an agency or in-house marketer, a self-managed account is starting from behind. Not because your business is worse, but because theirs has more consistent attention behind it.

What hiring the right agency actually changes

A good agency isn't just "someone else clicking the buttons". It's ongoing keyword and negative keyword management, conversion tracking that actually tells you what's working, regular ad and landing page testing, and a system for making sure every lead gets followed up quickly. That combination is what turns ad spend into booked jobs rather than just clicks.

At LeadCrafters, every campaign includes a CRM that lets you view, manage, accept and reject every lead as it lands, so the follow-up side is covered too, not just the ads.

Final thoughts

None of these signs on their own mean you have to hire an agency. But if two or three sound familiar, it's worth at least getting a second opinion on your account before more budget goes out the door.

"How much does Google Ads cost?" is one of the most common questions we get asked by UK service businesses, and it's a fair one, because the honest answer is "it depends." Unlike a fixed-price product, Google Ads runs on an auction, so your cost is shaped by your industry, your location, your competitors, and how well your account is actually set up.

This guide breaks down exactly what you're paying for, what's typical for UK trade and service businesses in 2026, and how to avoid the hidden costs that quietly drain a budget.

The two costs you're actually paying for

Every Google Ads campaign has two separate costs, and mixing them up is where a lot of confusion starts:

• Ad spend — the money paid directly to Google every time someone clicks your ad. This goes straight to Google, not to whoever manages your account.
• Management fee — what you pay an agency or freelancer (or the time cost of managing it yourself) to research keywords, write ads, build landing pages, and optimise the campaign over time.

A cheap management fee with a badly built campaign almost always costs more in wasted ad spend than a slightly higher fee attached to an account that's actually optimised. The management side is where the real value, or the real waste, happens.

Average Google Ads costs for UK service businesses

Cost-per-click (CPC) varies hugely by trade. As a rough guide for 2026:

• Home services (plumbers, electricians, roofers, garage doors, landscaping) typically see CPCs from around £2 to £8.
• Higher-ticket trades (boiler installation, driveways, extensions, solar) often sit in the £5 to £15 range, since the lifetime value of a customer is much higher.
• Professional services (solicitors, accountants, financial advisers) can see CPCs well above £15 to £20 in competitive areas.

These are general ranges, not guarantees. Your actual CPC depends on how many competitors are bidding in your area and how relevant Google judges your ads and landing page to be.

How much should you budget to see real results?

As a starting point, most local service businesses need at least £500 to £1,000 a month in ad spend to gather enough data for the campaign to start optimising properly, with £1,000 to £2,000 and above being a more realistic range for businesses wanting a steady, predictable flow of leads rather than a trickle.

Spending too little is one of the most common reasons Google Ads "doesn't work" for a business. The campaign never gets enough clicks and conversions to learn who your best customers actually are.

Management fees: percentage vs flat fee

Agencies typically charge one of two ways:

• Percentage of ad spend — usually 10 to 20 per cent. The downside is the agency's incentive is for you to spend more, whether or not that spend is actually needed.
• Flat monthly fee — a fixed price regardless of ad spend. This removes the conflict of interest entirely, since the agency isn't paid more for pushing your budget up.

Hidden costs that catch businesses out

The sticker price is rarely the full story. The costs that actually sink a Google Ads budget are usually:

• No conversion tracking — without it, neither you nor Google's algorithm can tell which clicks actually turned into paying customers, so the campaign can never truly optimise.
• Broad match with no negative keywords — ads showing for irrelevant searches, burning through budget on clicks that were never going to convert.
• Slow or unclear landing pages — paying for a click only to lose the visitor because the page took too long to load or didn't make it obvious what to do next.
• No lead follow-up system — the ad spend did its job and generated the enquiry, but the lead went cold because nobody followed up quickly enough.

This last one is exactly why we build every LeadCrafters campaign with a CRM that feeds lead outcomes back into Google Ads. The better the follow-up, the better the algorithm gets at finding you more of the same.

What LeadCrafters charges

We keep our pricing simple and transparent: a one-off £400 setup fee and a flat £250 a month for ongoing management. No percentage-of-spend fee, and no incentive on our end to push your budget higher than it needs to be. Your ad spend is paid directly to Google, so there's never a markup hiding in the middle.

That includes campaign setup, keyword research, ad creation, a CRM to manage every lead that comes in, and a dedicated account manager watching performance week to week.

Final thoughts

Google Ads cost is really two decisions in one: how much you spend with Google, and how well that spend is managed. Get both right and it becomes one of the most predictable ways to generate new customers. Get either wrong and it's easy to burn through a budget with little to show for it.

If you'd like an honest, no-obligation look at what a realistic budget would look like for your business, book a free strategy call below.