Google Ads for remodelers: budgets, keywords and a realistic cost per lead
What kitchen and bath clicks cost, the campaign structure that survives a 90-day sales cycle, the keywords that drain budgets, and how to track a signed job.
Google Ads punishes remodelers harder than any other trade, for one structural reason. Your keywords are expensive, your lead volume is low, and your feedback loop is 90 days long. A plumber knows in a week whether the account works. You will spend $6,000 before you know anything, which is precisely why so many contractors quit in month two and conclude that Google Ads does not work for remodeling.
It works. It has to be run differently.
What the clicks actually cost
In most US metros in 2026:
- "kitchen remodeling" and "kitchen remodeler near me": $12 to $35 per click
- "bathroom remodeling": $10 to $28 per click
- "home addition contractor": $15 to $40 per click
- "general contractor near me": $8 to $22 per click, and the worst money on this list
- "basement finishing": $9 to $25 per click
At a 6% to 10% conversion rate on a decent landing page, a call or form fill lands between $80 and $250. After you disqualify the people with no budget and the people who wanted a handyman, a booked site visit costs $250 to $600.
That is fine. It only sounds bad next to a service call. At a $24,000 average project and a 25% close rate on qualified visits, four booked visits at $400 each costs $1,600 and returns one signed project. Run those numbers with your own figures in the calculator.
The number to hold in your head is not cost per lead. It is cost per signed contract, and remodelers who track only the first number cut the campaigns that were working.
The account that works
Three campaigns, no more, at $60 to $150 a day total to start.
Campaign 1: high-intent service search. One ad group per room. Kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home addition, basement finishing. Phrase and exact match only. Twenty to forty keywords per ad group, all of them naming a room or a project type.
Campaign 2: branded and competitor-adjacent. Your own name, cheap, and it stops other contractors from buying clicks off your referrals. Usually under $5 a day.
Campaign 3: retargeting through Demand Gen or Display. Cheap impressions to people who already visited a project page. On a 60 to 180 day cycle this is not optional; it is the campaign that keeps you present while the client argues with their spouse about the budget.
Skip Performance Max until you have 30 or more conversions a month with clean tracking. PMax on a low-volume remodeling account will spend most of your budget on display placements and report "leads" that are form fills from three states away.
The keywords that drain the account
Add these as negatives on day one, before the first click:
- "cheap", "free", "diy", "how to", "cost calculator", "salary", "jobs", "hiring", "apprentice"
- "handyman", "repair", "fix", "install only" if you do not take small work
- "home depot", "lowes", "ikea kitchen", "cabinet refacing" if you do not offer it
- "commercial", "office buildout" if you are residential only
- Any city outside your drive radius, and any state name
Two structural mistakes cost more than any keyword. The first is broad match on "contractor" or "remodeling", which Google will happily match to "remodeling ideas" and "contractor license classes". The second is running ads 24 hours when nobody answers. Set an ad schedule matched to your answering, or set up missed-call text-back before you turn ads on, which is covered in the missed calls guide.
The landing page and the budget question
Do not send kitchen traffic to your home page. Send it to a kitchen page with twelve local projects, a price range, your license number in text, and a form that asks the budget question.
That form field is the highest-leverage thing in the whole account. Ask "What range have you set aside for this project?" with options: under $15,000, $15,000 to $35,000, $35,000 to $75,000, $75,000 and up, not sure yet. You will lose a few submissions. You will also stop driving 45 minutes to price a $9,000 kitchen against Costco cabinets.
Fire a distinct conversion action for each budget band, then optimize toward the bands you can actually serve. Google's bidding will follow whatever you tell it is valuable, and if you tell it every form fill is equally valuable, it will find you the cheapest ones, which are the smallest ones.
Measuring a 90-day close
Set this up before you spend, or the account will look like a failure at day 45 when it is actually working.
- Call tracking with a 90 second threshold. A 20 second call is not a lead.
- Distinct conversion actions: phone call, form fill by budget band, booked site visit.
- Offline conversion import, or a spreadsheet if you will not do the import. Every signed contract gets traced back to the click that started it, with the date and the value.
- A 90 day reporting window, not a 30 day one. Judging remodeling ads on last month's revenue is judging a crop by what you can see in April.
Give the account 90 days and roughly $6,000 to $10,000 before making a real decision. Below that you do not have enough conversions to conclude anything, and every change you make in week three resets the learning.
When Local Services Ads make sense
Google Local Services Ads, the Google Guaranteed listings above the map, are per lead rather than per click and run $60 to $200 per lead for remodeling in most markets. They require license and insurance verification, which is a barrier your unlicensed competition cannot clear.
They are worth testing alongside search, not instead of it. Lead quality is mixed and disputing junk leads takes discipline, but for a licensed contractor in a market where 23.8% of the field cannot even produce a website, the verification badge is a real differentiator. Keep your license and insurance visible everywhere else too, which the website guide covers.
Frequently asked
How much do I need to start? $2,000 to $3,000 a month for 90 days in a mid-size metro. Below $1,500 a month you will not gather enough data to optimize, and a partially funded remodeling account is worse than none.
Should I bid on "general contractor near me"? Only late, only in exact match, and only with heavy negatives. It attracts handyman work, warranty complaints and people looking for a permit signature.
Can I run ads without a website? No. You can point them at a single landing page, but with 23.8% of contractors linking no site at all, you would be paying for clicks to a page Google has no reason to trust. Build the site first, then buy traffic. See the benchmark report.
If you want the account built and run on your own credentials, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.