What a concrete lead costs without Local Services Ads

Early June is when concrete owners are busiest and least inclined to look at the ad account. Crews are booked, patios are going in ahead of summer, and the phone is doing its job. It is also the best moment to check what that phone is costing, because the numbers from April and May are fresh and the fall budget is still flexible.

The question we hear most is simple: what should a lead cost? For this trade the answer starts with a placement you do not have.

The ad slot concrete companies cannot buy

Google’s Local Services Ads, the pay-per-lead ads with a badge that sit above the map, cover dozens of home trades. The category list includes Foundations services, General contractor, Landscaping services and Handyman. It has nothing for concrete, masonry, paving or driveways.

Two narrow exceptions are worth knowing:

• Foundation repair and waterproofing can fall under Foundations services, which Google defines around basements, crawl spaces and other foundations.
• A licensed general contractor may qualify under General contractor.

For the driveways, patios, steps and brick repairs that make up most homeowner work, the paid option is ordinary Google search advertising, charged per click. That changes the math. With Local Services Ads you pay per lead; with search ads you pay for every visit, and your landing page decides how many visits become leads.

What the nearest benchmarks say

No publisher breaks out concrete or masonry on its own. The closest figures come from LocaliQ’s 2025 home services report, built from 3,211 search campaigns that ran between April 2024 and March 2025. All figures are medians:

• Construction & Contractors (General): $5.31 per click, a 6.48% click-through rate, 2.61% of clicks becoming leads, and $165.67 per lead.
• Landscaping, the nearest group to hardscape work: $8.76 per click, 6.42% conversion and $117.92 per lead.
• Home services across all 16 categories: $7.85 per click, 7.33% conversion and $90.92 per lead.

The newer WordStream by LocaliQ benchmarks, published last month and covering April 2025 to March 2026, put a click in the broader Home & Home Improvement category at $8.33, with 8.05% of clicks turning into leads.

The contractor category is the strange one. Its clicks were the cheapest of the 16 home service groups and its conversion rate the lowest, which left it with the third highest cost per lead. Cheap traffic that rarely calls is expensive traffic.

Why so few contractor clicks become leads

Plenty of concrete searches are not looking for a contractor at all. In the accounts we run, the usual culprits are:

• People pricing the job months ahead, with no intention of calling yet.
• Do-it-yourself searches: how to pour a slab, how much bagged mix a walkway needs, how to fix a spalled step.
• Job seekers looking for finishing or laborer work.
• Searches for the wrong service, such as a homeowner wanting pavers sent to a page about poured driveways.

The fix is unglamorous: negative keywords for each of those groups, separate campaigns for driveways, patios, foundation repair and brick, and a landing page for each with photos of that exact work. A homeowner who searched “stamped concrete patio” and lands on a page of foundation walls leaves, and you paid for the visit.

Set the lead price against the job

A lead cost means little until it sits beside the job it can win. Thumbtack’s cost guide, updated in April, puts a concrete driveway at $2,695 to $7,998 nationally, with most people paying around $4,665. That is marketplace data, so smaller jobs are probably over-represented.

As an illustration, not a benchmark: suppose every lead gets an estimate and one estimate in four signs. At the contractor category’s median of $165.67, a signed driveway would carry about $663 of ad spend, roughly 14% of a $4,665 job. Sign one in three and it falls to about $497. Your own close rate is the number that decides whether search pays, which is why we track signed jobs by source rather than leads alone.

Marketplaces, Facebook ads and your own pages

Thumbtack and other marketplaces. Thumbtack publishes driveway and patio cost guides with a free estimate button beside the prices, so it catches homeowners while they are still pricing. Ask whether a request goes to other contractors as well, and judge the channel on signed jobs.

Facebook and Instagram. WordStream by LocaliQ’s benchmarks for Facebook ads from last September, covering April 2024 to June 2025, put lead-form campaigns in Home & Home Improvement at a median $41.26 per lead with a 5.22% conversion rate. Stamped and colored work photographs well enough to stop a scroll. Those leads usually need a faster callback and more qualifying than search leads.

Your own site and profile. The cheapest leads come from pages that answer what homeowners ask before they call. Permits are a good example. The model residential code exempts driveways and sidewalks from a building permit, but counties add their own rules: Fairfax County, Virginia, lists on-grade concrete patios and driveways among work needing no building permit, but notes that other approvals can apply, including a VDOT permit for driveway work in the state right-of-way. A plain permit note for each county you serve costs nothing per click.

The missed call is the costliest lead you buy

Every channel above ends in a phone call or a form, and a concrete crew is worst placed to answer either at 10 in the morning with a truck discharging. CallRail’s January 2025 report put the home services missed-call rate at 14%. With search clicks priced in the median at $5.31 and only a small share converting, a lead that rings out has already been paid for in full.

Route calls to the office, an answering service or an AI receptionist during pours, and call back within the hour.

What we are telling clients

• Pull April and May leads and tag each by service, by source and by homeowner or builder.
• Work out cost per signed job for search, marketplaces and Facebook ads separately, using your own close rate.
• Add negative keywords for do-it-yourself, materials and job searches, and review the search terms report every week through the summer.
• Give each service its own campaign and landing page, with photos of that work only.
• Write a permit note for each county you work in and put it on the matching service page.
• Decide who answers the phone during a pour, and check last month’s missed calls by hour.

Concrete has no badge-topped shortcut, so the search account, the landing pages and the phone have to do that job between them. Our page for concrete and masonry contractors sets out how we plan it, and our Google Ads work shows how we run the search side.