Where a siding or gutter lead should come from this fall

Late August is an odd week for a siding and gutter company. Spring’s hail work is mostly scheduled, the leaves are weeks from filling every gutter in the North, coastal crews are watching the hurricane peak approach, and next year’s budget is taking shape. This month added one more thing: Google began moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads, and siding was not on the first list.

Here is the money question with published numbers, and where we would put the next dollar.

No one publishes a siding lead price, so start with the nearest

LocaliQ’s 2025 report on home services search ads, built from 3,211 campaigns with data from April 2024 to March 2025, has 16 trade categories and none of them is siding. The two closest:

• Roofing & Gutters, the nearest for gutter work: a median cost per click of $10.70, a conversion rate of 3.70% and a cost per lead of $228.15, the highest of the 16.
• Doors & Windows Sales, the nearest for exterior replacement sold in the home: $8.76 per click, a 4.41% conversion rate and $200.34 per lead.

Across all 16 home service categories, the median lead cost $90.92. And in the broader Home & Home Improvement group, WordStream by LocaliQ’s figures for April 2025 to March 2026 show a click at $8.33 and a conversion rate of 8.05%, well above both exterior lines.

Side by side, the problem with exterior work is the conversion rate, not the click price: fewer than four in a hundred Roofing & Gutters clicks became a lead. Plenty of siding searches are research, such as a homeowner pricing fiber cement against vinyl a year out or checking a contractor after a knock on the door, and every one of those clicks is paid for.

What Google’s August change means for a siding company

Google’s migration notes say the first phase began in August 2026 for select home and storefront service advertisers, naming plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving. Siding was not named. Google says the move expands to broader groups, including service-area businesses without storefronts, in late 2026, and that every category still left moves the following year.

When your account does move, Google’s notes describe three changes:

• Pay per lead stays. You are still charged for valid calls and messages, not clicks.
• Manual bidding goes. There is no maximum cost per lead to set once the account lives in Google Ads.
• Reverification stops. Google no longer asks you to re-prove insurance and licenses.

Two things are already true today and matter more than the timing. Google no longer credits leads marked “job type not serviced” or “geo not serviced,” so the job types you leave switched on and the area you draw are now your main protection against paying for work you do not do. Lead prices also vary by job type and lead type, and message leads usually cost less than calls.

If you bid manually today, write down what you pay per lead by job type for the rest of the season. When manual bidding disappears, that record is the only baseline you will have.

Gutters need their own budget line

Local Services Ads has no gutter category; gutters appear only inside the Roofing and Window cleaning descriptions, so your Local Services account will not carry gutter work, before or after the move. That work has to come from search ads, the Business Profile and pages built for each gutter service.

The timing is now. Gutter guard and cleaning demand in the North follows leaf fall, so a guard campaign that starts in October is a campaign that starts late. Search ads on guard, repair and installation terms should be live by mid-September, with a separate budget so a busy siding week does not starve them.

Facebook and Instagram ads are worth testing for guards in particular, because a guard is easy to explain in one photo. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 Facebook ads benchmarks, covering April 2024 to June 2025, put the median Home & Home Improvement lead from lead-form campaigns at $41.26 with a 5.22% conversion rate. Those leads cost less than search leads and go cold faster, so someone has to call them back the same hour.

Lead sites: judge them on signed jobs

No independent benchmark covers what Angi, HomeAdvisor or Thumbtack leads cost a siding company or how often they close, so your own records have to answer it. In 2023 the FTC finalized an order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million in redress over what it found were false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about its leads’ quality and source.

The test takes one season:

• Tag every lead-site lead in your CRM the day it arrives, by service.
• Record how fast someone called back. Shared leads are often a race, and the contractor who returns the call second rarely gets the estimate.
• Count estimates and signed jobs from each source, not just leads.
• Compare cost per signed job with your Siding services ads and your search campaigns.

Where we would put the next dollar

For an owner-run company with a couple of crews, this is the order we usually argue for:

• First, tracking and the profile. Every lead tagged siding or gutter, storm or planned, and a Business Profile with recent reviews and photos sorted by material. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found 47% of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.
• Then Siding services ads, once reviews are steady and calls are answered live, with job types trimmed to the work you actually do.
• Then gutter search ads, timed to leaf fall in the North and to storm windows elsewhere.
• Then material search terms by region. The Census Bureau’s 2025 figures for new single-family homes show vinyl as the main wall material on 70% in the Northeast and 64% in the Midwest, while the West ran 55% stucco and 31% fiber cement. New homes are not the replacement market, but they show which material a neighborhood is comparing.
• After that, Facebook and Instagram for guards and planned re-sides in the quiet months.
• Last, lead sites, kept only where your records show signed jobs.

What to do this month

• Export the last twelve months of leads and mark each with service, source and whether it signed.
• Review your Siding services job types and service area, since wrong-type and wrong-area leads no longer earn credits.
• Record current cost per lead by job type while manual bidding is still available to you.
• Launch or refresh gutter guard and repair search ads before mid-September, on their own budget.
• Build next spring’s budget month by month around your local storm window rather than an even split.

No published figure will tell you what your next re-side costs to win, but a season of tagged leads will. Our page for siding and gutter companies sets out how we plan that work, our Google Ads and Local Services Ads work covers the search side, and our Facebook and Instagram ads cover the guard campaigns.