Guide · Landscape design-build
What design-build leads cost
Not the answer you came for: nobody can tell you, and the number itself is the wrong one. Cost per lead compares things that are not comparable. Here is the number that is, and a worksheet that converts your own figures into it.
Why the question misfires
A lead is not
a unit of anything
Ask five agencies what a landscape design-build lead costs and you will get five numbers, all confident, none comparable. The reason is not evasiveness. It is that the word "lead" is doing completely different jobs in each answer.
A Google Search enquiry is usually a person who typed a specific intent and filled in a form. A paid social lead is often someone who tapped a pre-filled button between two other things and may not clearly remember doing it. A Local Services call is a live human on the phone. A referral is someone arriving with your name already validated by a friend.
Those four things cost wildly different amounts and are worth wildly different amounts, and the difference in worth is usually much larger than the difference in cost. Averaging them into a single cost-per-lead figure destroys precisely the information you needed.
It gets worse when you look for a benchmark. The published figures for home services blend a $400 drain clean with a $200,000 garden, because both are "home services" leads. A trade where the project value swings by two orders of magnitude cannot have a meaningful cost-per-lead average, and anyone quoting you one either has not thought about it or is quoting their own client data with the label filed off.
Which points at the fix. You do not need a benchmark. You need to push each channel's cost all the way down the funnel until it lands on something that is genuinely the same object across every channel: a signed project.
Nearly useless
Cost per lead
Fine for spotting that a campaign has broken overnight. Useless for deciding where next quarter's budget goes, because it is measuring different things in each column.
Better
Cost per booked consultation
Now you are comparing like with like — a person, at a property, with a time in your calendar. This is where most of the difference between channels actually shows up.
The real one
Cost per signed project
The only figure you can set against gross profit and make a decision with. Everything above it is a leading indicator of this.
Free · runs in your browser
Push your own numbers
down the funnel
Fill in what you actually spend and what actually happens, channel by channel. Watch where the ranking changes between the first row and the last.
Channel worksheet
The pre-filled numbers are placeholders, not benchmarks. They are round on purpose so nobody mistakes them for research. Overwrite every one of them. Set a channel's spend to zero if you do not run it. Nothing is stored or sent.
Google Search
Paid social
Local Services Ads
Organic & referral
- Cheapest per lead
- —
- Cheapest per signed project
- —
Fill in the channels you run.
A word on the last row: cost per signed project as a share of gross profit is the only line that tells you whether a channel is viable at all, rather than merely cheaper than the one beside it. To work the same problem from the other end — what you can afford to pay — use the max cost per lead calculator.
What actually moves it
Four levers, in
order of leverage
01 · The booking rate
Almost always the biggest and almost always the most neglected. Doubling the share of enquiries that turn into a booked consultation halves your cost per signed project across every channel at once, and costs nothing in media.
Speed of response and a decent qualifying call do most of it — that is the argument in qualifying design-build leads.
02 · The mix
Once you can see cost per signed project by channel, reallocation is usually free money. Firms routinely defund the channel with the ugliest cost per lead and the best cost per signed project, because the ugly number is the one on the dashboard.
Move budget toward the bottom-of-funnel winner until it stops scaling, then stop.
03 · The close rate
Powerful, but slower and harder to move than the booking rate, because it depends on the proposal, the price and the person delivering it rather than on a process you can change on Monday.
Worth attacking second, and worth measuring by channel — a channel with a poor close rate is usually attracting the wrong project size rather than the wrong people.
04 · The click price
Last, and it is where most of the effort goes. Bid tuning and negative keywords are real work with real returns, but they operate on the smallest of the four numbers and they hit a floor quickly.
If the cost per signed project is broken, cheaper clicks will not fix it. If the booking rate is fixed, cheaper clicks are a bonus rather than a rescue.
Common questions
Answers
Just give me a number. What should a lead cost?
We will not, because any number we gave you would be made up or borrowed from a different trade. Design-build project values swing from twenty thousand to seven figures, and a cost per lead that is reckless at one end is a bargain at the other.
The answerable version of the question is "what can I afford to pay," which comes from your project value, margin and close rate rather than from an industry table. The max cost per lead calculator does that in about a minute.
Our referral leads are free, so aren't they always the winner?
They are not free, they are unbilled. The photography, the follow-up, the extra care on the last job, the time spent staying visible — that is real cost and it belongs in the worksheet. Put a plausible monthly number against organic and referral rather than zero, or the comparison flatters it.
They are usually still the winner. The point is to know by how much, because that tells you what a referral is worth investing in.
What if a channel produces very few leads but they all close?
Then it is an excellent channel with a ceiling, and both halves of that matter. Cost per signed project tells you it is working; the volume tells you it cannot carry the business on its own.
The usual mistake is pouring budget into it expecting the economics to hold. They rarely do — efficient channels are efficient partly because they are small.
How long before these numbers mean anything?
Longer than you would like. With a sales cycle measured in months and a handful of signed projects a quarter, a single month of data is noise. Look at rolling quarters, and resist re-cutting the budget every time one channel has a quiet fortnight.
Booking rate moves faster than close rate and gives you an earlier read, which is another reason it is the first lever worth pulling.
Next step
Thirty minutes.
No pitch deck.
We will pull your actual numbers into this worksheet, work out cost per signed project by channel, and show you which line on your dashboard has been pointing you the wrong way. If your mix is already right, we will tell you that.
This guide sits inside our landscape design-build marketing practice.
Build note — GHL form slot. Embed goes here with hidden fields region-slug = none and vertical-slug = landscape. The none value is intentional on articles, so article conversions can be told apart from regional ones at the phase gate.
Landscape design-build
Stop pricing leads.
Start pricing customers.
One of those numbers you can spend against. The other one just looks tidy.
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