Your Google Ads dashboard says your home services campaigns converted at 8% last month. It can't tell you how many of those "leads" were ever a real homeowner with a leaky pipe or a broken furnace. Lunio's invalid traffic data layer shows what share of reported clicks and conversions never came from a genuine buyer in the first place. Find out how much of your Google Ads budget is being wasted →
Home Services is a Search-first vertical on Google Ads. Homeowners searching "plumber near me" or "emergency AC repair" have immediate, high-urgency intent, which drives both strong engagement and dense competition from independent contractors, regional franchises, and lead aggregators bidding the same keywords. That density is why subcategory variance is so wide: LocaliQ's 2025 Home Services report, covering 3,211 US campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025, found CPL ranging from $45.15 for Pools & Spas to $228.15 for Roofing & Gutters, and CPC ranging from $5.31 for Construction & Contractors to $13.74 for Paint & Painting.
| Campaign Type | IVT Rate |
|---|---|
| Search | 5.21% |
| Performance Max | 7.88% |
| Display Network | 12.02% |
| Video Partners | 20.62% |
These are Google Ads platform-level IVT rates, per the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report, not Home Services-specific figures. Home Services queries skew heavily mobile, particularly for emergency searches where a homeowner is standing next to a flooded basement and searching on their phone. This matters for conversion tracking because click-to-call, not form fill, is often the dominant action on mobile, and call-based conversions carry their own invalid traffic risks that form-based conversions don't.
CPC for Home Services has climbed steadily: $6.96 in 2024, $7.85 in 2025, and $8.33 in 2026, per TheeDigital's 2026 report citing the WordStream/LocaliQ dataset. No published source breaks this figure down by mobile versus desktop specifically for Home Services, and no CPM benchmark exists for lead-gen Search campaigns in this vertical, since Search bidding here is CPC-based rather than impression-based. That gap is worth flagging rather than guessing at: a mobile-skewed, click-to-call-heavy vertical without a published device split is exactly the kind of blind spot that hides invalid call traffic inside an otherwise reasonable-looking CPC.
| Metric | Average | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| CTR | 6.47% | Partly driven by broad-match and Performance Max placements reaching Display inventory, where click engagement can be inflated by non-human traffic before it ever reaches a landing page. |
| CVR | 8.05% | This figure, per TheeDigital's 2026 report, doesn't disclose whether short automated calls or bot-completed forms are excluded from the conversion count, meaning the genuine buyer conversion rate is likely lower than reported. |
| CPA/CPL | $90.92 | Held flat year-over-year despite rising CPC. At a directional 10% IVT rate, the true cost per real lead is closer to $101, not $90.92. |
ROAS isn't a reliable benchmark for this vertical. Most Home Services conversions are leads, not transactions, and revenue is only realised offline after a quote, a dispatch, and an invoice. Advertisers here are better served tracking cost-per-booked-job and cost-per-acquired-customer, both of which require feeding offline conversion data back into Google Ads rather than relying on the platform's native reporting.
The CPC, CTR, CVR, and CPL figures above come from third-party research (LocaliQ and TheeDigital) covering Google Ads Search campaigns for Home Services. The IVT figures on this page use Lunio's cross-vertical Google Ads baseline and its confirmed lead-generation uplift as a directional proxy, detailed in the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report. Treat these IVT estimates as directional, not precise, until vertical-specific coverage is published. Calculate how much you're losing →
Where your budget sits across Search, Performance Max, Display, and Video changes both your reported cost and your exposure to invalid traffic. Each campaign type carries a different mix of GIVT (identifiable bots and crawlers) and SIVT (traffic designed to mimic human behaviour), and Home Services' reliance on phone calls and form fills makes it harder to separate the two downstream.
Search carries Google Ads' lowest IVT exposure at 5.21%, but it's also where Home Services spends the overwhelming majority of its budget, at an average $8.33 CPC. Google's Ad Traffic Quality team filters known invalid signatures with automated systems, machine learning, and manual review; activity caught before billing closes is removed automatically, but activity caught afterward is returned only as a billing credit, never cash, and may already have fed a contaminated signal into Smart Bidding by the time it's reversed. AI Max for Search increases IVT exposure by approximately 35% above the Search baseline, per the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report, which is a meaningful risk for a vertical already running broad match plus Smart Bidding as its default stack.
Performance Max carries a blended baseline IVT rate of 7.88%, but that figure hides significant internal variance because PMax spans Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail inventory in a single reported number. Independent agency data from MDMPPC, covering managed Home Services accounts from 2023 to 2025, found Search-driven conversion rates of 9.41% against Display conversion rates of just 0.45%, a 20x gap that should prompt any PMax advertiser to question whether their blended "conversions" represent genuine buyer intent.
Display Network placements run a 12.02% IVT rate, more than double Search. For Home Services this is a remarketing channel, not a primary lead source, and running it without placement exclusions means exposing budget to inventory quality risks that Search simply doesn't carry.
Video Partners inventory carries the highest IVT exposure on Google Ads at 20.62%. For Home Services, Video has limited direct conversion value and functions mainly as brand awareness; the inventory quality gap here is the widest on the platform, and spend should be treated accordingly.
Local Services Ads sit alongside standard Search campaigns rather than inside them, complicating attribution further. LSAs run on a pay-per-lead model with no published platform-level IVT figure, but they share the same structural vulnerability as Search form fills and calls: a conversion that's easy to fake because there's no payment step to filter it out.
| Country | IVT Rate |
|---|---|
| United States | 8.44% |
| United Kingdom | 7.97% |
| Germany | 6.34% |
| France | 6.63% |
| Australia | 7.87% |
| Canada | 6.29% |
These figures, per the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report, are cross-vertical country averages rather than Home Services-specific rates, since no published per-country CPC or CPM data exists for this vertical. The US combines Home Services' highest reported CPC ($8.33) with an above-average 8.44% country IVT rate, making it the highest-combined-risk market for Home Services advertisers on Google Ads. Australia and the UK sit close behind at 7.87% and 7.97% respectively. Germany and Canada offer relatively lower IVT exposure at 6.34% and 6.29%, though Home Services advertisers expanding into either market should still budget for the lead-gen uplift rather than assuming the country rate applies cleanly. See Lunio's ad fraud data by country for the full regional breakdown.
Take a Home Services advertiser spending $500,000 a year on Google Ads, a realistic figure for a multi-location operator or franchise group. Applying the directional 10% IVT estimate (Google Ads' 7.57% baseline adjusted upward by the confirmed 32.07% lead-gen premium) puts wasted click spend at roughly $50,000 a year. That's before accounting for the downstream cost of invalid conversions training Smart Bidding to chase more of the same low-quality traffic, a dynamic that doesn't show up as a line item but compounds over every optimisation cycle.
This pattern isn't hypothetical. Culligan Harvey, a lead-generation advertiser selling home water treatment systems, saw a sharp rise in low-quality leads from paid search and Performance Max, including form submissions with missing or fake contact details. After implementing Lunio, they cut IVT by 54%, increased Lead to Demo conversions by 42%, and identified a local competitor fraudulently clicking their ads, enabling an IP blacklist. The mechanics, form-fill spam, competitor-driven invalid traffic in a local market, Performance Max lead quality risk, map directly onto what a Home Services advertiser faces. Separately, Funding Circle's Head of Digital noted that "Google no longer refunds the costs of click fraud at the request of advertisers," which is precisely why independent conversion-quality auditing matters even on a platform with its own filtering.
Lunio holds SOC2 and ISO 27001 certification covering how it secures advertising data. Its detection system maintains a false positive rate below 1%, a deliberate trade-off that protects genuine buyer traffic from ever being blocked.
Start your free 14-day traffic audit with Lunio →
The $8.33 CPC and $90.92 CPL that define Home Services on Google Ads in 2026 are useful starting points, not finish lines. They tell you what the market pays per click and per reported conversion; not how many of those conversions came from a real homeowner. Invalid traffic is the gap between the benchmark and the budget's actual return, and it's a gap every published Home Services benchmark currently leaves unmeasured. Lunio exists to close that gap.
Start your free 14-day traffic audit with Lunio →
The average CPC for Home Services on Google Ads was $8.33 in 2026, up from $7.85 in 2025, per TheeDigital's 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks citing WordStream/LocaliQ data. Individual trades vary enormously: Construction & Contractors averaged $5.31 while Paint & Painting averaged $13.74, per LocaliQ's 2025 Home Services report, so the blended average is only a starting reference point.
Home Services CTR averages 6.47%, slightly below the 6.64% cross-industry average, per TheeDigital's 2026 report. A CTR that's unusually high relative to your subcategory peers, especially on Performance Max or Display placements, is worth investigating rather than celebrating, since engagement on lower-quality inventory can be driven by non-human traffic rather than genuine homeowner interest.
Invalid traffic inflates reported clicks and conversions without adding real buyers, which understates true CPC and CPL while overstating CVR. Because Home Services relies on Smart Bidding, invalid conversions such as bot-completed forms or short automated calls can also train the algorithm to chase more of the same low-quality traffic, degrading performance over time even as reported metrics look stable.
The US carries a country-level IVT rate of 8.44%, higher than the UK (7.97%), France (6.63%), Germany (6.34%), or Canada (6.29%), per the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report. Combined with the US having Home Services' highest reported CPC, American advertisers face the steepest combined cost-and-risk exposure among these markets.