Lawn care lead costs after the Local Services move

This month Google began moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads, where they become Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. Lawn care was on the list of categories named for the first phase, alongside plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, roofing, pest control and moving. If your account looks different this week, that is why.

The timing is awkward: aeration season is a few weeks out and fall budgets get set now. So here is what changed, what the published numbers say a lead costs, and how we would think about the money between now and the first frost.

What moved in August, and what stayed put

Google’s own help page on the transition lists most of what an owner needs to know:

• You still pay per lead. Charges are for valid leads such as phone calls and messages, not for clicks.
• The ads appear in the same places. They continue to show only on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions as before.
• Your verification carries over. A business that has finished verification keeps its status and its Google Verified badge, and insurance and license reverification are no longer required.
• Manual bidding goes away. Setting a maximum cost per lead is no longer supported in Google Ads, and industry-level Target CPA is being retired too.
• There are no keywords. The new campaigns draw on your Business Profile rather than keyword lists, and after migration the service areas, schedules and categories in the campaign can be set separately from the profile.
• Photos still count. The assets page takes up to 100 additional business photos, and Google already weighs high-quality images when it ranks these ads.

For most lawn companies the loss of manual bidding is the change to watch. A maximum price per lead was the one lever that kept a slow week from becoming an expensive one. Without it, the weekly budget does that job, and it should be set at a number you can afford in a week when half the leads are for work you do not do.

Not every lawn and landscaping account moves at once

The first phase covers “select” home and storefront service advertisers, so being in a named category does not guarantee your account has moved yet. Google’s timeline puts service-area businesses without physical storefronts in a later wave in late 2026, and a lot of mowing companies work exactly that way, from a home or a yard that customers never visit. All remaining categories follow next year.

Landscaping services, the category for companies that design, install and maintain gardens, was not named for the first phase. If you advertise in both categories, expect to run one account the old way and one the new way for a while, and keep their numbers apart.

What a lead costs in the published numbers

No publisher breaks out lawn care on its own, so these are the closest categories, all medians or averages across many advertisers:

• Landscaping, Google search. LocaliQ’s 2025 home services benchmarks, from campaigns that ran April 2024 to March 2025, put the median cost per lead at $117.92, with a cost per click of $8.76 and a conversion rate of 6.42%.
• All home services, Google search. The same LocaliQ report put the median across all 16 home service categories at $90.92 per lead for April 2024 to March 2025. For the wider Home & Home Improvement group, WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2026 benchmarks, covering April 2025 to March 2026, show $8.33 per click and an 8.05% conversion rate.
• Local Services Ads overall. In an article published on August 3, WordStream says the average Local Services lead costs about $60, without a date range or a breakdown by trade.
• Home & Home Improvement, Facebook ads run for leads. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 Facebook ads benchmarks, covering April 2024 to June 2025, put the median cost per lead at $41.26.

Google adds one more detail worth using: message leads are typically priced lower than the matching phone lead, though not always. That makes message leads worth answering within minutes: they usually cost less, and a reply that comes hours later may find the homeowner has already booked someone else.

How many mows pay back one lead

Run this arithmetic before deciding where the fall money goes. Thumbtack’s cost guide, updated in June, puts the national average for one professional mow at $56 to $163.

At the bottom of that range, it takes three cuts to cover one $117.92 search lead. At the top, one cut covers it. That assumes the lead books at all. If one lead in three becomes a customer, the cost of winning that customer is three times the lead price, and at $56 a cut you are well into the season before the account pays for its own acquisition.

That is why a single mow is the wrong unit. The lead pays back when it becomes a season agreement, adds aeration in September and a leaf cleanup in November, and renews in spring. Judge each channel on cost per account that lasted, using your own close rate and your own prices, and the published benchmarks become a starting point rather than a verdict.

Where we would put the fall budget

With aeration, overseeding and leaf season ahead, this is the order we are suggesting:

• Your own customers first. An aeration and overseeding offer to every mowing customer costs nothing in media and reaches people who already trust the crew.
• Local Services Ads next, if someone answers live. Google ranks these ads partly on responsiveness, and you can pause them in the weeks the schedule fills. With manual bidding gone, set a weekly budget and check cost per booked job in your own records, not only in the ad dashboard.
• Search ads only for installation and design. Landscaping’s click-through rate was the lowest of the 16 home service categories in LocaliQ’s data, which in our reading means many searches come from people looking for ideas rather than a contractor. Keep mowing and do-it-yourself terms out.
• Your Business Profile all the time. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey found 32% of people look for reviews written in the last two weeks, so a review request after each fall visit keeps the profile current through the winter.

What we are telling clients

• Check this week whether your account has moved, and which category it sits in.
• Export last season’s lead and booking reports before the old screens change, and note cost per booked account by channel.
• Replace your old maximum per lead with a weekly budget you could live with in a bad week.
• Answer message leads within minutes; Google prices them below phone leads in most cases.
• Send the fall aeration and overseeding offer to your own customers before buying new leads for it.
• Keep design and installation search separate from anything to do with mowing.

The move changes the screens more than it changes the job, which is still answering fast and turning one visit into a season. Our page for landscaping and lawn care companies sets out how we plan the year, and our Google Ads and Local Services management covers how the paid side runs through the transition.