Homeowners price the job before they call a painter.

Average CPCs run $2-$5 across industries with daily budgets starting at $25. Compare that with painting's $13.74 cost per click on established search, the highest of any contractor trade, and the case for testing early is arithmetic rather than enthusiasm.

Median Google Ads painting leads ran about $157-$193 per lead through the first five months of 2026, with the strongest campaigns at $67-$128. Those are the numbers this channel has to beat, and we will benchmark against your own figures rather than an industry average wherever your tracking is good enough to give us them.

Enough of them to matter now. 22% of homeowners already use AI tools like ChatGPT to research or book home services providers, and 83% start their local search online. Painting is a textbook case for it: an unfamiliar price, lots of variables, and a homeowner who wants a rough answer before speaking to anyone.

They are useful for the office, not for lead generation. Prompts help you draft a proposal or an estimate follow-up faster. Getting found is a separate discipline: paid placement inside the answer, plus content and business data solid enough that the model names you unprompted. We do use prompts as research, reading how assistants answer the questions your customers ask, because that tells us who gets named in your market today.

Yes, and we treat it as a hard boundary. Drive time, job value by area and the crews you have available all shape the targeting, and campaigns are split so residential and commercial can be funded and read separately. Paying for enquiries an hour away that you would decline is the fastest way to make a good channel look bad.

Spend less, and spend it on the work you actually want. The useful pattern for most painting companies is to push hardest in the shoulder weeks, on interior work through winter, and on the job types with the best margin rather than paying to compete for jobs you would have won anyway. Seasonal pacing is set in the plan before launch, not improvised in June.

By being straight about it. Homeowners accept that a real number needs a walkthrough; what loses them is a form that reveals nothing. So the page explains how you price, gives a defensible range where you can, shows what changes it — prep, height, coats, substrate — and makes booking the estimate the easy next step. That converts far better than hiding the number.

Yes, and it is the measure we prefer. Calls, forms and chats are tracked from launch, and where your CRM or estimating software allows we connect the sold outcome, so reporting shows cost per estimate and cost per sold job rather than clicks. Our conversion tracking team builds and verifies that before any spend starts.

By being verifiable. Assistants lean on clear service content, consistent business information, licence and insurance details, real reviews and third-party references, so a contractor with thorough content about prep, products and process gets cited more often than one with a photo gallery. Our AI search visibility team runs that alongside the ads, and it has the longer payback.

A great deal. Reviews are one of the few things a model can actually verify about a painting company, and they are what a homeowner scans before letting a crew into the house. Steady review volume, sensible replies to the difficult ones and consistent business details everywhere are unglamorous work that directly affects who gets named in an answer.

About four weeks from kickoff for a full build: benchmarks, campaign structure, landing pages and verified tracking. We could go faster by skipping the tracking work, and we will not, because launching a channel with no way to prove it worked is how budgets get argued about six months later.

Campaign management, new ad copy and creative variants, landing page changes where the data points, tracking maintenance, and a written monthly report tying spend to estimates and sold jobs. You get a named senior strategist who joins your monthly session, and nothing on the invoice should be a mystery to you.

Almost certainly. Paid search catches the homeowner who has decided to hire and wants a quote this week, while this channel catches them earlier, while they are still working out what the job involves. We run them side by side against one shared benchmark and let the sold jobs decide the split.

More than before. The signals that make you rank locally — an accurate profile, service and area pages, reviews, citations — are largely the same evidence an assistant uses to decide who to name. Our local SEO work and this channel feed each other, so we usually check the state of one before recommending the other.

A named senior paid media strategist, with a copywriter who has written for home services and an analytics specialist alongside. You will know their names, you can email them directly, and the same person joins your monthly session. Your account is not handed to a rotating queue of juniors.