Lockouts or car keys: where a locksmith's ad money goes

HomeAdvisor refreshed its locksmith cost guide on June 19, and for once a vendor price page is useful to the people being priced. Put its job ranges beside the published cost of a search lead and the budget question most locksmiths argue about answers itself: the cheapest job to win is often the least worth winning, and the money belongs where the ticket is bigger.

What the jobs are worth

HomeAdvisor’s figures are vendor data, so read them as ranges rather than gospel. As of the June update:

• The average locksmith job is $163, with most falling between $107 and $242.
• Opening a locked car runs $50 to $300.
• Replacing a car transponder key runs $100 to $400.
• Rekeying home locks runs $80 to $150 per lock.
• Replacing a lock runs $50 to $250, with premium or smart hardware pushing it closer to $500.
• After-hours calls add $150 to $250.

Two things stand out. The low end of a car opening is the cheapest job on the list. And rekeying four exterior locks at HomeAdvisor’s per-lock range comes to $320 to $600, more than the top of the range for opening a car, usually in daylight and without the midnight drive.

What a lead costs when no one publishes a locksmith figure

Neither WordStream nor LocaliQ breaks out locksmiths in its benchmarks, so the nearest published category has to stand in. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, released in May and covering April 2025 to March 2026, put Home & Home Improvement search advertisers at a median $8.33 per click and an 8.05% conversion rate, and the median lead across every industry at $66.69. For cost per lead in the trades, the nearest figure is older: LocaliQ’s home services report, built on search campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025, put the median across home service trades at $90.92.

At that home services median, one search lead costs more than half of HomeAdvisor’s average locksmith job. That is not a reason to stop advertising. It is a reason to stop buying the same lead for every kind of job.

There is a second pressure on the generic terms. Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection warned on July 16 that fraudulent locksmith businesses “will pay for strong keywords that cause their business to appear at the top of the search results.” In our experience, the broad “locksmith near me” auction is the most crowded one in the account, while narrower searches such as a specific key fob or a commercial rekey are quieter.

Where the money should go

Split the account by job, and give each part a different job to do.

Lockouts: a short leash. Run them, because they are the calls that build your reviews and your name, but cap the budget, keep the radius to where you can arrive quickly, and schedule the ads only for the hours someone answers. State the after-hours fee on the landing page. A caller who hears the price before you drive out is far less likely to dispute it at the door.

Car keys: their own campaign. Transponder keys reach $400 in HomeAdvisor’s list, well above a typical lockout. They deserve a campaign of their own and a page per kind of key, with the makes and models you actually program written plainly. In our experience these searches come from a driver who is stuck but not panicking, which gives your reviews and your license number time to work.

Rekeys and lock changes: planned work. These are daytime searches from new homeowners, tenants and landlords who compare two or three shops. They reward a page that explains rekeying versus replacing, a stated per-lock range and recent reviews more than they reward a high bid.

Commercial and access control: mostly not ads. Master key systems and exit devices are sold to property managers over months. A small search campaign can catch the occasional urgent call, but most of the budget here is better spent on follow-up and service records for the accounts you already have.

Local Services Ads: per lead, with fine print. You pay for each valid lead, and Google notes that message leads are typically priced lower than phone leads. Google no longer credits leads for a job type you do not serve or an area you do not cover, so switch off the job types you do not want before the first lead arrives. Locksmiths also cannot run pre-badge ads, so this channel only exists for shops that have cleared verification.

The money you already spent

The cheapest lead is the one you have already paid for. CallRail’s January 2025 report on small business calls and texts put the missed call rate for home services at 14%. A lockout caller standing in a parking lot does not wait for a callback, and the next locksmith in the results is one tap away.

Before raising any budget, check three things:

• What happens to a call at 11 pm on a Saturday, and who hears it.
• Whether a missed call gets a text back within a minute.
• Whether your call tracking can tell a lockout from a car key or a rekey, so cost per job can be worked out by type.

Without the third, every budget decision is a guess, and guesses in this trade drift toward whatever the phone rang for most recently.

What we are telling clients

• Split search campaigns into lockouts, car keys, rekeys and commercial, with separate budgets and separate landing pages.
• Put the after-hours fee and a service-call range on the site, in the ads and in the phone script, so the price at the door matches the price on the phone.
• Review your Local Services Ads job types this week and switch off anything you would not drive to, since those leads will not be credited.
• Build one page for each kind of key you program, and one that explains rekeying in plain words for new homeowners.
• Measure cost per booked job by type for a full month before moving money between campaigns.
• Keep a short list of property managers and call each one before the fall, when commercial budgets get spent.

We have written out how we run this trade, from verification to state license rules, on our locksmith marketing page. If the split campaigns are the part you want help with, see how we set up Google Ads for service businesses.