General contracting has one of the lowest conversion rates in home services — here's where the model puts the money

Contractors buying broad search terms attract a mix of residential price-shoppers, unqualified commercial enquiries and a small number of real opportunities, and the published conversion rate reflects exactly that mix. The gap between the general contracting cost per lead of $165.67 and the industrial and commercial figure of $75.19 is the size of the qualification problem.

General contracting converts at 2.61% and pays $165.67 per lead. The industrial and commercial category converts at 8.20% and pays $75.19. Same trade, different intent.

1. 01

   The cheapest improvement is refusing the wrong enquiry earlier

   At a 2.61% conversion rate the campaign is paying for roughly 38 clicks per lead. Qualification in the ad copy and on the landing page — project size, project type, timeline — removes cost before it is incurred rather than after.

2. 02

   Construction websites convert at 4.9%, nearly double the paid-search rate

   The published all-channel website conversion rate for construction and engineering is 4.9% against a 2.61% paid-search rate for contractors, which points at the landing experience as the constrained step rather than the traffic.

3. 03

   Speed of response is the one lever with a causal study behind it

   The canonical research found firms contacting a prospect within an hour were roughly seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those waiting one hour longer. That study is from 2011 and should be cited with its date, but no more recent primary experiment has replaced it.

General contracting CVR **2.61%** vs home-services average **7.33%**; cost per lead **$165.67** (one of the highest in the trades).

The model runs qualification forward. Ad copy states project type and minimum project size. Landing pages are built per project type rather than per service, and carry a qualification step before the contact step. Enquiries route by project type and value into the CRM with an owner and a response clock attached. Reporting is on cost per qualified opportunity and cost per bid submitted, never on cost per form fill, because form fills are the number that looks best while meaning least in this trade.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–3

   Pipeline audit

   Current mix by project type and value, win rate by source

   Owner: OmniFlow

2. 2

   Weeks 3–6

   Qualification layer

   Ad copy, project-type landing pages, qualification step

   Owner: OmniFlow

3. 3

   Weeks 5–8

   Routing and response clock

   CRM routing by type and value, response SLA

   Owner: OmniFlow + client

4. 4

   Weeks 6–12

   Search build

   Campaigns by project type, negatives against residential intent

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   Month 3 onward

   Content and authority

   Project-type pages, completed-project detail, local authority

   Owner: OmniFlow

6. 6

   Month 6

   Review

   Cost per qualified opportunity and per bid submitted

   Owner: OmniFlow

The model reports two figures the trade does not usually see side by side: cost per lead and cost per bid submitted. The first is the published benchmark; the second is the one that survives contact with the business. Replace every benchmark input with the contractor's own data from month two.

Modelled. Inputs: LocaliQ, 2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services (3,211 US search campaigns, April 2024 – March 2025); WordStream by LocaliQ, Google Ads Benchmarks 2026 (13,474 US search campaigns, April 2025 – March 2026); Ruler Analytics, Conversion Rate Benchmarks 2026 (110M+ sessions, 5M+ conversions); Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (1.25M leads across 42 US companies). Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: LocaliQ *2025 Home Services Search Benchmarks*.

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is that the published contractor benchmarks pool residential and commercial work, so a purely commercial contractor's real baseline may sit closer to the industrial and commercial figures from the start. The audit phase exists to establish which.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.