How to calculate your cost per lead (and why most UK tradespeople have no idea)

Ask most UK tradespeople how much they spent on marketing last month and they’ll give you a rough number. Ask them how many leads that spend generated, and the answer gets a bit vague. Ask them how many of those leads actually became booked jobs — and you’ll often get a shrug.

That’s a problem, because marketing spend without measurement is just guesswork. You might be pouring £400 a month into a directory that converts at 5%, while a £100 Google Ads campaign is quietly filling your diary. Or the other way around. Without the numbers, you genuinely cannot tell.

This article walks you through the two metrics that matter — cost per lead and cost per booked job — gives you realistic UK benchmarks by channel, and explains how to start tracking both without building a spreadsheet the size of a tax return.

Why cost per lead matters

A “lead” in a trade business is any inbound enquiry — a phone call, a contact form submission, a WhatsApp message, a direct message on Instagram. Someone has expressed interest in your services. That’s valuable. But it’s not the same as revenue.

Cost per lead (CPL) tells you how efficiently each marketing channel is generating that initial interest. If you’re spending £500 a month on Google Ads and getting 20 enquiries, your CPL is £25. If your Checkatrade subscription costs £120 a month and generates 15 enquiries, your CPL is £8. On the surface, Checkatrade looks more efficient.

But here’s where it gets interesting. If 12 of those Google enquiries convert into booked jobs and only 2 of the Checkatrade enquiries do, the picture looks completely different. That’s why cost per lead is only half the story.

The two formulas you need

Cost per lead

The formula is straightforward:

“Total channel spend” should include everything associated with that channel: ad spend, subscription fees, the time you spend managing it (valued at your day rate), any agency fees, and creative costs. A lot of tradespeople forget to include the subscription cost when calculating CPL for directories, which makes those channels look artificially cheap.

Cost per booked job

This is the more useful number:

Once you know your average job value — say £800 for a bathroom refurb or £350 for a boiler service — you can work out whether your acquisition cost is sustainable. If you’re spending £60 to acquire a £350 job with a healthy margin, that’s probably a good use of money. If you’re spending £300 to acquire the same job, you’re in trouble.

UK benchmarks by channel

These figures are based on what trade businesses in the UK typically see in 2026. Your numbers will vary by trade, location, competition level, and how well your listings and ads are set up — but these ranges give you a realistic baseline.

Google Local Services Ads

Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) appear at the very top of search results, above standard paid ads, with a “Google Guaranteed” badge. You pay per lead, not per click, which means you only pay when someone contacts you directly through the ad.

• Typical CPL: £25–£60
• Typical cost per booked job: £45–£120

LSAs tend to have good intent behind them — people searching for an emergency plumber or a local electrician are ready to book, not just browsing. The conversion rate from lead to booked job is often 50–70% for well-rated businesses, which keeps the cost per booked job reasonable relative to the CPL.

Google Search Ads

Standard pay-per-click ads on Google. You pay per click, not per lead, so the CPL depends heavily on your landing page conversion rate.

• Typical CPL: £18–£50

Google Search Ads can be highly efficient when tightly targeted to high-intent keywords like “boiler replacement [town]” or “emergency electrician near me.” Broad, poorly-targeted campaigns can blow through budget on irrelevant clicks and push CPL above £80. The quality of your setup matters enormously.

Checkatrade

Checkatrade is one of the most widely used lead sources for UK tradespeople. Subscription costs vary but typically run £80–£200 per month depending on trade and region, plus there are often enhanced listing upgrades.

• Typical CPL: £8–£40
• Typical cost per booked job: £150–£400+

Yes, you read that correctly. More on this below.

Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook Lead Ads let users submit their contact details without leaving the platform. They work well for planned work — bathroom renovations, garden landscaping, loft conversions — where people are in an earlier stage of the buying process.

• Typical CPL: £12–£35

The lead quality from Facebook is often lower than from Google, because the intent is more passive — someone scrolled past your ad rather than actively searching for your service. Conversion rates of 15–30% from lead to booked job are common, which means the cost per booked job can creep up quickly if you’re not managing follow-up carefully.

Referrals

Word of mouth and direct referrals have near-zero acquisition cost and the highest conversion rate of any channel — typically 60–80% or higher. A customer who has been recommended to you by a trusted friend is already half-sold before they pick up the phone.

Referrals don’t scale the way paid channels do, but they should anchor your benchmarks. Every other channel you invest in should be measured against what referrals deliver for free.

Why Checkatrade looks cheap but often isn’t

Checkatrade’s CPL looks attractive at first glance. But the metric is misleading for one key reason: you pay a fixed monthly subscription regardless of how many leads you get, and the leads you do get are often shared with multiple competing tradespeople.

A homeowner posts a job on Checkatrade and your details are presented alongside three or four other businesses in your area. You’re competing on price, reviews, and response speed. Many Checkatrade enquiries result in multiple quotes, and the conversion rate to a booked job — where you actually win the work — is often 15–25% at best.

Run the numbers. If your Checkatrade subscription is £150 a month and you get 12 enquiries, your CPL is £12.50 — which sounds great. But if you only convert 2 of those into booked jobs, your cost per booked job is £75. Add in the time spent responding to tyre-kickers and writing quotes that go nowhere, and the real cost climbs higher still.

This isn’t to say Checkatrade is never worth it — for some trades in some areas, it’s genuinely effective. The point is you need to measure it properly, not assume that a low CPL means a low cost per job.

How to track this manually

You don’t need expensive software to start. A simple spreadsheet works perfectly well if you’re disciplined about updating it. Here’s the structure:

Set up a lead source log

Every time you get an enquiry, record: the date, the source (Google Ads, Checkatrade, Facebook, referral, website, etc.), whether it turned into a quote, and whether it turned into a booked job. Add the job value when the job completes.

A basic five-column spreadsheet — Date | Source | Quoted? | Booked? | Job Value — is enough to start generating real insight within a month or two.

Log your spend by channel each month

Keep a separate tab with your monthly spend by channel: Google Ads budget, Checkatrade subscription, Facebook Ads spend, any leaflet or print costs, web hosting and SEO if applicable. Record the actual spend, not a rough estimate.

Calculate at the end of each month

At the end of each month, pull the numbers together. For each channel: total spend divided by leads generated gives you CPL. Total spend divided by jobs booked gives you cost per booked job. You’ll start to see patterns after two or three months — which channels deliver work you actually win, and which generate noise.

How Trade2Base handles this automatically

If you’d rather not maintain a spreadsheet manually, Trade2Base does this tracking for you. When a lead comes in from any connected channel — Google Ads, Facebook, your website, or a directory — it’s logged against the source automatically. As the job moves through your pipeline from enquiry to quoted to booked to complete, the system updates your CPL and cost per booked job figures in real time.

The Campaigns dashboard shows you exactly how each channel is performing side by side, so you can make budget decisions based on actual data rather than gut feel. It’s particularly useful for spotting the Checkatrade trap described above — when a channel looks productive in terms of enquiries but quietly bleeds money on a cost-per-job basis.

Action steps

Here’s what to do this week:

1. List every marketing channel you’re currently paying for. Include subscriptions, ad budgets, and any other recurring costs. Total them up. Most tradespeople are surprised by how much it adds up to.
2. Estimate how many leads each channel generated last month. Use your call log, messages, and email inbox to reconstruct this as accurately as you can. This is your baseline.
3. Work out how many of those leads became booked jobs. If you don’t track this, now is the time to start. Even a rough estimate is better than nothing.
4. Calculate CPL and cost per booked job for each channel. Use the formulas above. Compare the results against the benchmarks in this article.
5. Identify the weakest channel and question it. If a channel has a cost per booked job that exceeds 20–25% of the average job value, it’s worth testing whether that budget would work harder elsewhere.
6. Start logging every new enquiry at source from today. A note in your phone, a row in a spreadsheet, or a pipeline stage in Trade2Base — whatever you’ll actually use. The data you collect over the next 60 days will tell you more about your marketing than the last two years of guesswork.

You don’t need perfect data to make better decisions. You just need to stop flying blind.