Cost Per Booked Job: The Only Number That Matters in Trades PPC
A roof replacement and a gutter clean come from the same campaign and are worth wildly different amounts. Until you bid on job value instead of lead volume, you are buying the cheap ones.
Here is the problem with high-ticket home services, stated plainly: the same campaign can produce a ₱8,000 repair and a ₱600,000 replacement, and if you are measuring cost per lead, those two look identical.
Worse, the cheap one looks *better* — it converts faster, from a shorter form, at a lower cost per lead. So bidding finds you more of it. Six months later you are drowning in small jobs, your crews are busy, and margin is flat.
The fix is to work out what a booked job is actually worth per service line, then buy against that.
TL;DR
Why blended averages lie
Say you run roofing ads. Last month:
| Service line | Jobs | Avg job value | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Repairs | 30 | ₱12,000 | ₱360,000 |
| Full replacement | 4 | ₱480,000 | ₱1,920,000 |
| Blended | 34 | ₱67,059 | ₱2,280,000 |
The blended average says a job is worth ₱67K. That number describes nothing that exists. No job is worth ₱67K — they're worth ₱12K or ₱480K, and the entire profit sits in four of the thirty-four.
Bid on the blend and you overpay for repairs and badly underpay for replacements — losing every replacement auction to the competitor who did the maths per line.
The four rates you need
1. Enquiry → qualified. In the right service area, a job you actually want, not a supplier or a wrong number. In trades this is often brutal — half or worse for broad campaigns. 2. Qualified → quoted. Did you get out there and price it? This is where speed-to-lead shows up. If nobody rang back for four hours, most of this leaks. 3. Quoted → booked. Your close rate. Trades owners usually know this one well. 4. Booked → completed. Cancellations, financing falls-through, jobs that slip out of the year. On high-ticket work this is a real number.Worked example: solar
Per 100 enquiries on residential solar:
| Step | Rate | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Enquiries | — | 100 |
| Qualified | 55% | 55 |
| Quoted | 65% | 36 |
| Booked | 30% | 11 |
| Completed | 90% | 10 |
Average completed job: ₱420,000. Gross margin after panels, inverter, labour, and permits: 28%.
Spend a third of margin on acquisition and your maximum cost per enquiry is about ₱3,900 — and your maximum cost per *booked job* is roughly ₱39,000.
Most solar installers I talk to would call ₱3,900 per lead insane. It isn't. It's what the economics support. The ones bidding ₱800 because "that feels like a lot for a lead" are losing every auction that matters.
Turning it into bids
Once you have a ceiling per service line:
1. Separate campaigns by service line, or at minimum by ad group with distinct conversion values. A replacement campaign and a repair campaign should not share a budget.
2. Assign conversion values that reflect job value, not a flat ₱1 per lead.
3. Feed booked jobs back from your CRM as offline conversions, keyed on the click ID — the method is in offline conversion tracking. This is what lets bidding learn that the "expensive" replacement lead was worth fifty repairs.
4. Run at 60–70% of your ceiling so there's headroom for a bad month.
Where trades owners get this wrong
Using revenue instead of margin. A ₱480,000 roof at 18% margin and a ₱120,000 bathroom at 45% are closer than they look. Ignoring crew capacity. If you can complete eight replacements a month, buying leads for twenty is not a win — it's a scheduling problem and a pile of annoyed prospects. Budget follows capacity; the reasoning is in budget pacing. Not counting calls. In trades most enquiries are phone calls. If calls aren't tracked, every number above is guesswork — see call tracking. Forgetting repeat and referral. A satisfied HVAC install customer is a service contract and two neighbour referrals. If you can measure it, it belongs in job value.Want your ceiling calculated?
The maths is not hard. Getting the real rates out of a trades business — where half the enquiries are calls and the CRM is a whiteboard — is the actual work, and it's usually the highest-value week anyone spends on the account.
That's the diagnosis half of my home services PPC work. Send your service lines, rough job values, and how enquiries reach you through the project fit page.
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Written by
Vince Servidad
PPC Strategist · Google Ads, Meta Ads & conversion systems
Filipino PPC strategist. A seven-figure Shopify brand and 10+ years across Google Ads, Meta Ads, stores, tracking, and content.
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