Anyone who quotes you a budget before asking what a job is worth to you is guessing. Here's the actual math, using the numbers that matter.
Start With What a Job Is Worth, Not With a Budget
Say you do kitchen remodels and your average job is $30,000 with maybe $9,000 of profit in it. You close about one in four estimates, and roughly half your leads turn into estimates. That means one closed job takes about eight leads. If leads from Google cost you $150 each, you're paying around $1,200 in ad spend for $9,000 in profit. That trade works all day.
Now run the same math for a $400 repair job. Same $150 lead doesn't work anymore. This is why the right budget is different for every contractor, and why the first thing worth deciding isn't the budget at all. It's which jobs you want the ads to bring in.
There's a Floor, and It's Higher Than People Want
Clicks in the trades are expensive because the jobs are valuable. Depending on your trade and your area, a single click can run anywhere from $10 to $80, with emergency services like water damage at the high end. A budget that buys two clicks a day isn't a small campaign. It's a coin flip that takes six months to tell you anything.
As a working rule, you want enough budget for at least a couple hundred clicks a month. That's the point where the data starts to mean something: which searches turn into calls, which cities are worth the drive, which ads get ignored. Below that, you're not really advertising. You're donating to Google in installments.
For most contractors in Orange County, that floor lands somewhere around $1,500 to $3,000 a month in ad spend. Some trades need more. A few can start leaner. But if a budget can't produce enough data to make decisions with, we'd rather tell you to wait than take the account.
Your Capacity Is the Ceiling
Here's the part that gets skipped: the right budget is also capped by what you can actually handle. If your crews can take on six new jobs a month and you're already booking four from referrals, buying forty leads is a waste of money and a good way to earn bad reviews from people you never called back. Ads should fill the gap between the work you have and the work you want, and no more.
This is also why "spend more" isn't always the answer when things are going well. Sometimes the smartest move is holding budget steady and getting pickier about which jobs it chases.
The Honest Answer
So: work backward from job value to see what a lead is worth. Respect the floor so your budget produces decisions instead of noise. Let your real capacity set the ceiling. The number that falls out of that math is your budget, and it will be different from the contractor down the street, because your jobs, your close rate, and your crews are different.
If you want help running the numbers with real local search data instead of estimates, that's exactly what we do before we ever recommend a budget. No package pricing pulled from thin air. Just your math, done properly.