What LSA Leads Cost for Tree and Lawn Care Right Now

What LSA leads are costing in your space right now

Most of what gets written about Local Services Ads is written by people who have never run them. So here are actual numbers.

We pulled 60 days of spend from 18 lawn care and tree service accounts we manage on Google Local Services Ads. Every figure below is a lead, meaning a real person who called or messaged. Not a click. Not an impression. Somebody with a problem, on the phone.

The number

Across all 18 accounts, the average cost per lead is right around $50, and it has held steady for two straight months.

By trade it splits like this:

Smaller tree accounts: as high as $80 to $85

Lawn care and landscaping: around $40 a lead

Tree work: around $55 to $65

If you do both, which most of you do, you land somewhere in the middle. Tree jobs cost more per lead and carry a much bigger ticket, so that trade-off usually works in your favor.

The part that actually decides your price

Here is what jumped out of the data.

The cheapest leads in the group, $23 to $30, all went to companies with more than 100 reviews. The most expensive, $80 and up, went to companies with fewer than 40.

That is a consistent pattern across 18 accounts. We are not going to tell you that adding one review drops your cost by a set amount, because we did not measure it that precisely and nobody honestly can. But the shape of it is hard to miss, and it lines up with how Google’s system is built. Reviews live on your Google Business Profile now, and they feed everything.

If you are sitting at 30 reviews and paying $80 a lead, the fastest lever you have is not your budget. It is asking every customer you finish a job for.

The finding nobody expects

We looked at the two highest-volume accounts in the group, both doing more than 110 leads a month, expecting to see whether cost climbs as you scale.

One paid $30 a lead. The other paid $67.

Same trade. Same volume tier. More than double the cost.

So volume is not what sets your price. Something else is, and it is the same something across both of the accounts we just described: reviews, how fast the phone gets answered, and whether Google’s system has learned what a good lead looks like for that specific business.

That last one is where most accounts leave money on the table.

The math that matters

Say an average tree job is worth $1,500 to you.

Ten leads at $60 is $600 in ad cost. Book three of them and you have done $4,500 in work for about $200 of ad spend per job.

Two honest notes on that. The three-out-of-ten is an illustration, not a number from our data. We measured what leads cost, not what each shop closes. Your own close rate is the one that decides whether this math works, and if you do not know it, that is worth finding out before you spend a dollar on ads. Second, LSA leads are not exclusive in every case. Some are shared, and you may be racing somebody to the callback.

What we actually do with it

Running Local Service Ads is not setting a budget and walking away. There are two jobs, and most shops only ever do the first one.

Job one is the Google side. Profile, budget, service types, service area, verification, keeping the badge in good standing.

Job two is the feedback loop, and it is the one that separates a $30 account from a $67 account.

Google’s system learns what a good lead looks like for your business from what you tell it. Rate the leads and it gets better at sending you more of the ones you want. Ignore that, like almost everybody does, and it keeps guessing.

Nobody running five trucks is going to sit down at nine at night and grade twenty phone calls. So we do it.

We listen to every call and every message that comes in, and grade it. Was it a real job. Was it in your area. Was it the kind of work you actually want. That grade goes to Google. You get seven days to look at anything we graded and change it if we got it wrong, and after that it locks in and goes through.

A handful cannot be graded automatically, usually bad audio or a call where the story does not add up. Those get flagged for you in Needs Review, and those are the only ones we need your eyes on.

We also show you what you are missing. Missed calls and unanswered messages, both in the dashboard. On LSA, an unanswered phone is not just a lost job. It is a signal to Google, and it costs you on the next lead too.

And you tell us which ones turned into work, and roughly what the job was worth. That is the one thing we cannot do for you, and it is what makes the rest of it sharpen over time.

What we are not going to tell you

A few things you may have heard elsewhere that are not true anymore.

You cannot dispute your way out of a bad lead. Google ended manual disputes. Out-of-area and wrong-service leads are not creditable. Anyone promising to get your money back on bad leads is selling you something from 2023.

The $2,000 Google Guarantee ended in November 2025.

Google bills your card directly. Ad spend goes from you to Google. Our fee is separate and it is on your invoice from us. Two charges, and you can see exactly what each one is.

We are not going to promise you a lead count. Anyone who does is guessing at your market, your season, and your reviews.

Where to start

If you want to know what this looks like for your mix of tree and lawn work, we can put a budget in front of you based on your service area and what jobs are worth to you.

And if your review count is under 40, start there first. It is free, it is the biggest lever in the data above, and it makes everything you spend afterward work harder.