Electrical Contractor Advertising Budget Calculator

Start from what a lead costs. The platform-published benchmark for electrical search ads is $93.69 per lead (LocalIQ, Apr 2024 to Mar 2025), the lowest of the four home-services verticals LocalIQ publishes. Divide by your close rate to get your cost per customer: at 50% that is about $187, at 25% about $375. No published source meets our bar for electrical customer acquisition cost directly, so this calculator derives it and shows the arithmetic. At roughly $229 per customer and a goal of 30 new customers a month, that is about $6,900 a month in ad spend.

The auction is less crowded. Against LocalIQ's Apr 2024 to Mar 2025 benchmarks, electrical runs $93.69 per lead where plumbing is $129.02, HVAC $127.74 and roofing $228.15. Electrical work is state-licensed and mostly served by local operators, so the bidding pool stays local rather than filling with multi-state chains. The trade-off is on the other side of the equation: HomeAdvisor's True Cost Guide puts a panel upgrade or replacement at a $1,346 national average, with a typical range of $518 to $2,192 (updated June 2026), well below a roof.

Close rate is the multiplier between leads and customers. Invoca's 2025 home-services call data shows 52% of inbound calls answered, 38% of answered calls qualifying as leads, and 45% of qualified leads booking, so roughly one call in six becomes a job. ServiceTitan's by-trade data put electrical call booking at 41% (June 2022 data, so treat it as a benchmark rather than a current reading). At 50%, 20 leads are 10 customers; at 25% they are 5. The lower your close rate, the more leads you have to buy to hit the same customer count.

Google Search Ads carry a published benchmark: $93.69 per lead for electrical (LocalIQ, Apr 2024 to Mar 2025). Google Local Services Ads bill per lead at a price Google sets by market and job type; Google does not publish per-vertical lead prices, so we show none, and neither does any source that meets our bar. Lead marketplaces publish no qualifying benchmark either, and the same lead is commonly sold to several contractors at once. For corridor and neighborhood reach, WilDi Maps delivers a verified offer to an opted-in person's phone from $0.25 (background, tier-based), with tunnels and zones priced higher for hyper-local precision.

They are different audiences and should not share a campaign. Panel-upgrade demand comes from older housing stock and from insurance-driven discoveries, where obsolete Federal Pacific, Zinsco and Pushmatic panels are still in service and carriers increasingly will not renew around them. EV-charger demand comes from new EV buyers, which in Jacksonville clusters in Nocatee, Ponte Vedra and San Marco. Separate keyword sets, separate creative, separate budgets, so one does not quietly fund the other.

If your monthly electrical ad spend is $5,000, that is $60,000 a year. A $5,000 monthly deposit sits in the Enterprise tier at $0.25 per background delivery, so the same annual budget buys about 240,000 verified deliveries to real phones. A smaller $2,000 monthly deposit sits in the Pro tier at $0.32, which is about 6,250 deliveries a month. A delivery is not a lead; it is a verified offer to one opted-in person driving where you chose. Most electrical operators run zones over older-home clusters with aging panel stock, tunnels on post-storm corridors needing service-drop work, and background for the brand recognition that matters when a stranger is being let into the house.

The Starter tier opens with a $50 deposit, and that deposit becomes your ad budget. Background deliveries on Starter run $0.50 per verified delivery, so the first deposit buys 100 GPS-verified deliveries to the phones of real local people out on the road. There is no auction and no platform fee stacked on top.

Background reaches everyone active in the WilDi app: nationwide by default, or limited to one area you choose (your city, your side of town) so budget is never spent outside it. A zone is a neighborhood-sized area you hold exclusively: while it is yours, no competitor can run there. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you can place anywhere, and it follows the road's contours, ideal for the approach to your shop or a route your customers already drive.

No. Every tier has a fixed, published rate per verified delivery. The price you see is the price you pay, whether it is game day or a Tuesday morning. Higher tiers carry lower per-delivery rates.

Four public tiers: Starter ($50 minimum deposit, background only), Local ($250, up to 2 tunnels and 1 zone), Pro ($1,000, up to 8 tunnels and 5 zones), and Enterprise ($3,000, up to 25 tunnels and 15 zones). Per-delivery background rates step down by tier, from $0.50 on Starter to $0.25 on Enterprise. An Agency tier is available through sales.