LSA or Meta? Split the Budget.

How should a contractor split budget between LSA and Meta?

Fill Local Services Ads to its capacity first, then put everything above that into Meta. LSA captures people already searching, so it converts far better — 43.9% of leads booked across 888 tracked contractors — but it is capped by how many people search for your trade in your area. Meta has no ceiling because it creates demand rather than capturing it.

Why does the calculator make me supply the Meta close rate?

Because no public dataset publishes a Meta lead-to-booked-job rate for home services, and printing an invented one would silently decide the entire output. The LSA book rate is a real measurement from 126,650 tracked leads. The Meta figure is your number, from your CRM, and the tool labels it that way on screen.

What is the average LSA cost per lead in 2026?

$53 blended across home services in February 2026, from $6.72M of tracked spend across 888 contractors (SearchLight). A separate May 2026 snapshot of 1,011 businesses put the cost per unique lead at $63.29, up from $55.08 in March — so treat $53 as a floor that is moving upward, not a stable benchmark.

What is the average Meta cost per lead for home services?

$41.26 for Home & Home Improvement, the median across 726 US lead-objective campaigns running April 2024 to June 2025 (WordStream/LocaliQ). The same dataset put the landing-page conversion rate at 5.22% and the all-industry median cost per lead at $27.66 — home services sit well above the cross-industry average.

Is a cheaper cost per lead the same as a better channel?

No, and this is the single most common budgeting error. Meta usually shows a lower cost per lead than LSA while producing a higher cost per booked job, because LSA leads arrive with active intent and Meta leads are interrupted mid-scroll. Compare channels on cost per booked job or ignore the comparison entirely.

Which trades does the LSA benchmark actually break out?

Four: electrical ($39 CPL, 43.4% book rate, $1,434 ticket), HVAC ($51, 44.0%, $2,110), plumbing ($57, 44.5%, $1,714) and drain/sewer ($59, 39.5%, $1,521). Everything else sits inside the blended figure. If your trade is not one of those four, use the blended defaults and expect meaningful drift.

Why is drain and sewer the weakest LSA category?

It has the lowest book rate in the dataset at 39.5%, an above-average $59 cost per lead, and the weakest closed return on ad spend among the major categories at 5.50x. Drain and sewer work skews toward price-shopping emergencies where the homeowner calls several listings, so the same lead is worked by more contractors.

How does Google Search compare to both of these?

Worse on cost per lead than either. WordStream's 2026 benchmark, covering 13,474 US search campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026, put Home & Home Improvement at $90.92 per lead and $8.33 per click. SearchLight's February 2026 comparison put LSA at $233 per paying customer against $472 for Google Ads — roughly half the cost per customer.

Can I spend an unlimited amount on Local Services Ads?

No. LSA volume is bounded by local search demand, and once you are showing for every eligible query in your service area, extra budget buys nothing. That is the point at which additional spend has to move to a demand-generation channel. Contractors who ignore the ceiling raise their LSA budget for months and see no additional leads.

Does the best split the calculator finds account for LSA running out of volume?

It does not, and the tool says so next to the result. The optimiser is straight arithmetic that assumes both channels scale linearly, which neither does. Use it to see the shape of the trade-off, then cap the LSA side at whatever your account has actually been able to spend in a full month.

What raises the LSA book rate?

Answering the phone. LSA ranks partly on call answer rate, and the leads are phone calls rather than form fills, so a missed call is both a lost job and a ranking penalty. Review count and rating carry the most ranking weight, response behaviour next. The same 43.9% average hides a wide spread between contractors who answer live and those who do not.

Should a brand-new contractor start on LSA or Meta?

LSA, if the trade is eligible and the review base supports it, because the economics are better from day one. The catch is verification — licence, insurance and a background check — which takes weeks and can fail. Meta has no gate and works immediately, which is why contractors waiting on LSA verification typically start there.

How does the average ticket in this calculator affect the answer?

It scales revenue but not the split, because it applies equally to both channels. The defaults come from the LSA benchmark's measured tickets by trade — $2,110 for HVAC, $1,714 plumbing, $1,434 electrical, $1,521 drain/sewer. Your own average ticket is the number to use if it differs, particularly for replacement-heavy businesses.

Does this replace running both channels and measuring?

No. It is a planning model built on other contractors' medians, and your market, offer and answer rate will move every number in it. Its real job is to stop budget being allocated on a hunch for the first 90 days, after which your own data should replace every default in it.

Are any of these figures Elev8 Operations data?

No. Every default is from a named third-party dataset linked in the Sources block — SearchLight's LSA benchmark, The Data-Driven Trades' May 2026 snapshot, and WordStream/LocaliQ's Facebook and Google Ads benchmarks. The one number with no public source, the Meta close rate, is an input rather than a printed benchmark.