Lead generation for service businesses

What a lead is, and what it isn’t

A lead is an inquiry from someone considering a purchase: a submitted form, a call, a booking. A click is not a lead, and neither is an impression or an “engaged user.” The distinction matters because Google and Meta optimize for what you measure. Measure clicks, and you get cheap clicks from people who never get in touch.

A lead isn’t a customer either. How many become customers depends on how fast you reply, whether the price was on the page, and whether the ad promised something the page didn’t deliver. You have to measure that number yourself, because it’s what decides how much you can afford to pay per lead.

Buy leads or create them yourself?

Many service businesses start with portals like Mittanbud. It’s fast, but the lead isn’t yours alone.

Portals can be a decent supplement in busy periods. As a foundation, they make you dependent on someone else’s price and volume. Owned leads come from Google searches for “service + city,” from Google Business Profile, from Meta ads with real content, and from retargeting people who visited the site without getting in touch. How to build it up step by step is in marketing for small businesses.

The form decides the quality

A form with just name and phone gives you the most leads and the most people who don’t answer when you call back. Every field you add gives you fewer leads, but the ones who come through have thought about it. The rule we use: ask for what you need to give a price or to prioritize, and no more.

• Move-out cleaning: address, date and home size. That’s what’s needed to give a price.
• Facade and roof cleaning: postal code and which service. The postal code can also be used to send the lead straight to the right branch.
• B2B: company name and what the inquiry is about, so the salesperson can prepare.

The same goes for forms inside Meta (lead ads). They produce cheap leads because the fields are filled in automatically, but the quality is often lower than from your own landing page. Choose the higher-intent setting, where the customer has to confirm before submitting, and add one question that makes them think.

Measure leads separately

Forms, calls and bookings should be separate conversions, so you can see what comes from where. For calls, only those lasting longer than 30–60 seconds should count, otherwise wrong numbers count as leads. If you can also mark which leads became customers, in your CRM or a spreadsheet, and send that back to Google Ads, the account learns to find more of the good ones and fewer of the bad ones.

What a lead costs

For Utvendig Renhold (facade and roof cleaning) we got 549 leads in 90 days (June–September 2026), at NOK 163 on average including searches for the brand name (around NOK 188 without). Across the nine regions, the price ranged from NOK 145 to 341 for the same service. That’s why we run one campaign per region and move budget to where leads are cheapest. Numbers from more industries, with caveats.

Response time: the cheapest improvement

The customer has often sent the same request to several companies. Whoever calls back first has a head start that no ad tweak can buy. Before we switch on an account, we ask who owns the inbox and the phone, and what happens to a lead that comes in at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. If no one has a good answer, that’s the first thing to fix. An automatic text or email confirming the inquiry was received and saying when you’ll call also helps.

Multiple locations? How we structure the campaigns. Service business? Channel choice industry by industry.