What a booked move costs: quote sites, LSA or your profile

Early December is when most moving companies settle next year’s marketing money. The trucks are quieter, the holiday moves are on the board, and the dates that will matter most, late May through August, are still six months away. The decision usually comes down to three places to buy a request for an estimate: quote sites and brokers, Google’s Local Services Ads, and your own website and Business Profile.

Here is how the three compare on published numbers and on the rules, and how to put them on one scale before spring.

What the published benchmarks say about a moving lead

No benchmark publisher reports a moving category, so here are the nearest ones, named as such.

• Storage. LocaliQ’s 2025 home services search benchmarks, built on campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025, put the median Storage click at $7.46 and the median cost per lead at $120.30. People clicked readily, with an 8.32% click-through rate, but only 4.65% of clicks became a lead.
• Home services as a whole. The same report puts all home services at $7.85 a click, a 7.33% conversion rate and $90.92 a lead. For scale, WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 Google Ads benchmarks put the median lead across all industries at $70.11.
• Facebook ads. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 benchmarks for Facebook ads, covering April 2024 to June 2025, put a Home & Home Improvement lead from a lead-form campaign at $41.26, with a 5.22% conversion rate.

Two things follow. First, a lead is not a move. In our experience a good share of moving requests are price checks for a date months out, and a form lead from social needs a quick call before it turns into a survey. Second, the Storage numbers fit a purchase people compare in writing: plenty of clicks, slower commitment. The FTC’s advice to consumers is to get written price estimates from several movers, so expect to be one of several.

Local Services Ads: paid per lead, ranked on your profile

Local Services Ads have a Moving services category. Since October the ads carry a single Google Verified badge in place of the older ones, and the money-back guarantee tied to the old badge has ended: customers had to file for jobs booked through the ads before December 7.

What matters for next year’s budget is how you pay and how you rank:

• You pay per valid lead, meaning a call, a message or a booking request, against a weekly budget. Google’s pricing page says message leads are typically priced lower than phone leads.
• Credits are narrower than many owners assume. Google reassesses charged leads and credits some automatically, but its lead credit page says it no longer credits leads for a job type you do not serve or an area you do not cover. Your job types and service area have to be right before the first lead arrives.
• Ranking leans on your profile. Alongside your bid, Google weighs how likely you are to get the lead and profile quality: rating, number of reviews, average response time, photos and the verification checks you have completed.
• Screening takes weeks. Movers are screened for liability insurance and state licenses where the law requires them, need a verified Business Profile, and Google puts the average at three to four weeks once documents are in.

That last point sets the calendar. An application filed in late March can still be in review when May’s calls start.

Quote sites and brokers: read the federal rules before the invoice

Quote sites sell requests. Household goods brokers arrange moves that a carrier then performs. The federal rules for brokers, in 49 CFR Part 371, tell a carrier a lot about what it is buying:

• A broker must display in its advertisements and on its website that it is a household goods broker and that it will not transport the customer’s goods.
• A broker may show the names or logos only of carriers it has a written agreement with.
• A broker’s estimate must be based on a physical survey conducted by the carrier, under a written agreement between them.

Put plainly, if a broker is quoting your crew’s work, the estimate is supposed to rest on your survey, and the broker is not supposed to present itself as you. Before renewing any arrangement, ask for the written agreement, how many carriers receive each request, and whether you pay per request or per booked move.

The costs that never appear on an invoice

Two costs decide whether a cheap lead is actually cheap.

The unanswered call. CallRail’s January 2025 analysis of 1.1 million leads found a 14% missed-call rate in home services. A full crew out on a job with nobody in the office is how a mover misses calls in July.

The estimate itself. For interstate moves, the federal rules in 49 CFR Part 375 require a physical survey and a written estimate based on it unless the customer waives the survey in writing. A non-binding estimate must be provided without charge, while a binding one may carry a charge. Every survey that never books is part of what the booked moves cost to win, so count surveys per booked move by source, not just leads per channel.

Putting all three on one number

The number that settles the argument is cost per booked move: what you spent on a channel divided by the moves it produced, with survey time counted. To have it before spring:

1. Tag every call and form with its source on the day it arrives.
2. Record which requests got a survey and which got a written estimate.
3. Mark the ones that booked, and whether each move was local or interstate.
4. Divide each channel’s spend by its booked moves.

Expect most of the volume to be local. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2023 found that 12.1% of people moved, 9.1% within their own state and 2.3% to a different state. The bulk of the work stays inside your own state, under state rules, and that is where your profile and reviews carry the most weight.

What we are telling clients

• Pull twelve months of requests and tag each one by source, survey, estimate and booked move before you set the budget.
• Check your Local Services Ads job types and service area now, since wrong-type and wrong-area leads are no longer credited.
• If you are not running Local Services Ads yet, apply in February so screening finishes before the spring rush.
• Ask every broker and quote site for written terms: per request or per booked move, and how many movers see each request.
• Decide who answers the phone when the whole crew is out, before June makes that decision for you.
• Ask this fall’s customers for reviews now, so your profile looks current when spring shoppers start comparing.

The cheapest channel on paper is often not the cheapest per booked move, and the only way to find out is to count through one full season. Our page for moving companies sets out the order we work in, and our Google Ads and Local Services work shows how the paid side runs alongside review requests.