For a three truck garage door shop targeting $100,000 a month, the honest answer is about 426 purchased leads. The blended formula that every lead calculator uses says 197. Both numbers come from the same real dataset. The difference is that one of them accounts for how garage door actually works and the other one averages it away.
Here is the shortcut, run properly. SearchLight's revenue attribution platform tracked $661,396 in Google Ads spend across 11 garage door contractors from January through April 2026 and reported a $1,393 average ticket and 1,668 paying customers from 4,555 tracked leads, a 37% lead to paying rate. Run $100,000 through those two numbers:
$100,000 ÷ $1,393 = 72 jobs. 72 ÷ 37% = 197 leads.
That number is arithmetically correct and operationally useless, because there is no such thing as a $1,393 garage door job. There is a $450 spring replacement and there is a $2,200 door, and the blend between them is a statistical artifact that nobody in your service area ever buys.
Multiplier 1: the call you did not answer
In most trades a missed lead is a delayed lead. In garage door it is a dead one.
The mechanism is specific to this trade. A homeowner does not think about the garage door until the car is trapped behind it, and then they are working down the map pack calling companies in order. An operator on r/sweatystartup put it plainly: "People need garage companies once every 8-10 years or so... When people go on Google or Yelp, whoever they find they call. The first that answer that call usually gets the job."
That turns your answer rate into a straight multiplier on the lead requirement. If you answer 70% of inbound calls live, you must buy 1.43 leads for every one you actually speak to. You paid full price for the other 43%.
A commenter working through this on the r/PPC thread from a one man Atlanta shop did the arithmetic: "At $150 a lead, a 60% answer rate means your real cost per contact is $250. Doubling your spend while missing half the calls doesn't get you more jobs, it gets you a bigger bill for the same jobs."
This is why the constraint bites hardest on small shops. The same thread's original poster said he handles the calls, the scheduling and the jobs himself. Another commenter named the consequence: "if you're up a ladder with a drill in your hand when the phone rings, that click cost you $30 and produced nothing."
By the numbers
Lifting answer rate from 70% to 95% on a 120 job repair target removes about 82 purchased leads a month. At the $145 blended benchmark that is roughly $11,900 a month you stop spending for the same job count. No channel change, no new campaign, no better ad copy.
Most garage door owners treat this as an operations problem and their lead target as a marketing problem. They are the same problem. Our breakdown of answering service versus missed call text back covers which of the two actually recovers an emergency call, and the answer is not the one most shops buy first.
Multiplier 2: you are running three businesses, not one
Repair, residential installation and commercial overhead have different tickets, different close rates, different lead prices and different sales cycles. Averaging them produces a number that is wrong for all three.
Take a $100,000 month on a realistic mix and price each line on its own terms:
| Line | Jobs | Ticket | Revenue | Lead to paying | Answered leads | Answer rate | Leads to buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Repair | 120 | $450 | $54,000 | 55% | 218 | 70% | 312 |
| Install | 16 | $2,200 | $35,200 | 18% | 89 | 85% | 105 |
| Commercial | 2 | $5,400 | $10,800 | 25% | 8 | 90% | 9 |
| Total | 138 | $100,000 | 426 |
Same revenue goal, same trade, same month. The blended shortcut said 197. Splitting the lines says 426.
The close rates are not invented. SearchLight's blended 37% is the average of a repair line that converts far above it and an install line that converts far below it. A Google Ads manager running a garage door account in Cumming, north of Atlanta, reported on r/PPC a cost per lead around $260 and that "the client closes ~60% of leads," which is what a repair heavy book looks like. Install sits far lower because the homeowner is not in an emergency. They are collecting three quotes over several weeks and comparing panel styles.
SearchLight's own break even analysis confirms the two lines cannot share a plan. A repair contractor at a $600 ticket and 50% gross margin can afford $105 per lead. A replacement heavy contractor at a $2,000 ticket and 40% margin can afford $280. Those are different businesses buying in the same auction.
The practical instruction is short: pull your last 12 months of invoices, split them by job type, and compute a ticket and a close rate for each line separately. If you have never done this, the mix will surprise you. It usually does.
We build the lead plan around your actual job mix, not a blended national average. Tell us your repair to install split and your current answer rate and we will show you the number you actually need and what it costs in your market.
Multiplier 3: if you are in Canada, the cheap tier does not exist
This one is specific to garage door and locksmiths, and no US written guide mentions it.
Google's Local Services Ads getting started page for Canada lists the eligible service categories: appliance repair, carpet cleaning, cleaning, electricians, HVAC, junk removal, lawn care, locksmiths, movers, pest control, plumbers, roofers, tree services, water damage, window cleaning and window repair. Garage door services is not on that list. Google's US ad solutions page does list garage door among eligible categories.
The consequence is a straight budget multiplier. A US garage door shop can fill its repair line at $15 to $35 per residential repair lead on LSA, with SearchLight putting the trade's LSA average at $49. A Canadian shop buying the same 312 repair leads has to do it on search at benchmark prices instead.
| Repair line, 312 leads | Lead price | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| US, Local Services Ads | $49 | $15,288 |
| Canada, non branded search | $173 | $53,976 |
That is not a small optimization gap. It is a different business model. An operator running garage door ads in Greater Vancouver posted a thread titled "Garage door ads in Canada, Search keywords restricted + no LSAs. How are you getting leads?" and the useful reply was that garage door and locksmith categories require advanced verification, plus a workaround: "One loophole I have found for local businesses in Canada that can (somewhat) replace LSAs is to run a Local PMAX campaign."
That workaround has data behind it. Performance Max returned $34 per lead at 10.37x ROAS in SearchLight's garage door dataset, the lowest cost per lead of any campaign type. The caveat is real and SearchLight states it: only two accounts and less than 1% of total spend, and PMax can absorb branded traffic that pulls the number down artificially. Treat it as a promising second campaign, not a plan.
For a Canadian shop the honest conclusion is that the paid repair line is expensive enough that it cannot carry the whole job count. Which brings us to the part that actually fixes the number.
Multiplier 4: January and April are different businesses
A monthly target that does not move is wrong most months.
SearchLight's month by month garage door data shows the swing clearly:
| Month 2026 | Non branded CPL | Non branded leads | Closed ROAS |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | $208 | 762 | 2.92x |
| February | $186 | 860 | |
| March | $156 | 1,041 | |
| April | $151 | 882 | 4.23x |
Cost per lead fell 27% and volume rose 37% between January and March, and return on ad spend improved 45% across the four months. January leads cost 38% more than April leads and convert worse.
The physical driver is the trade itself. Standard torsion springs are rated around 10,000 cycles, which industry guides put at roughly 7 to 10 years of normal use, and cold makes steel brittle, so failures cluster in winter while replacement and upgrade demand clusters in spring. You are buying scarce expensive emergency leads in January and cheap plentiful project leads in April, and a flat monthly number gets both wrong. We go deeper on the timing in the best time of year to advertise a garage door business.
Subtract the leads you already own
Now run the number in the other direction, because 426 purchased leads at benchmark prices is not affordable and pretending otherwise is how shops go broke buying growth.
The booked to paid gap. SearchLight recorded 2,344 booked customers and 1,668 paying customers. That is 676 jobs, about 29%, that got onto a schedule and produced no revenue. Cancellations, no shows, and quoted installs that never closed. Recovering a quarter of that gap is cheaper than buying the equivalent lead volume, and it is the first place to look when more leads did not produce more revenue.
The installed base. The 8 to 10 year replacement cycle cuts both ways. It means a homeowner will not call you often, and it also means every garage you have ever worked in is a lead with a timer on it, if you left something behind. A 40 year old shop on r/GarageDoorService answered the lead source question in seven words: "We put a sticker in the garage." Another operator described the mechanic in detail: sell a cheap tune up at $49 to $69, and in his experience 20% to 30% need repairs, 20% to 30% take the roller upgrade, about 10% become a door or opener sale, and every single one gets your sticker.
What maturity does to the number. The clearest illustration came from an operator on the same subreddit describing his own arc: "Ran ads at the beginning when LSA was $8-$20 for a lead. And I would have enough work for 3 trucks on a 3k monthly ppc budget. That was 5-6 years ago when I started. Now I just get work from my GMB and return customers."
Three trucks on zero paid leads. His lead requirement did not get optimized. It got replaced. That is the actual goal of the exercise, and it is why garage door lead generation without buying leads is a strategy rather than a slogan in this trade specifically.
Run the subtraction and the plan becomes affordable:
| Line | Jobs | Earned | To buy | Leads to purchase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Repair | 120 | 42 from base and referral | 78 | 149 at 95% answered |
| Install | 16 | 4 technician generated | 12 | 78 |
| Commercial | 2 | 1 relationship | 1 | 4 |
| Total | 138 | 47 | 91 | 231 |
231 purchased leads instead of 426, from fixing the phone and counting the customers you already have. Technician generated leads are worth naming separately: a tech spotting a worn opener or unsafe hardware while already in the garage is an install lead that cost nothing, and it is the one KPI in this trade that converts service volume into replacement revenue.
Watch out
Even the optimized plan is expensive. At US LSA and search prices, 231 leads runs roughly $22,000 a month against $100,000 in revenue, above the 10% to 15% of revenue that growth mode marketing budgets usually allow. This is not a failure of your campaign. It is the structural reason the garage door shops that scale profitably are the ones whose repair line is majority organic. If your three line plan says you need to spend 40% of revenue on leads, the problem is job mix or market selection, not lead volume.
The seven line worksheet
Ten minutes with your own invoices beats any published benchmark.
- Revenue target for the month. One number.
- Split it three ways. Repair, install, commercial, using last year's actual mix rather than your aspiration.
- Divide each line by its own ticket to get jobs. Pull real tickets from invoices, split by job type.
- Divide each job count by its own lead to paying rate. Start at 55% repair, 18% install, 25% commercial until you have your own.
- Divide again by your answer rate. If you do not know it, pull the call log. This step is the one everybody skips and it is usually the largest correction.
- Subtract what you already own. Repeat customers, referrals, technician generated install quotes, and recovered booked-but-unpaid jobs come off the top before you buy anything.
- Price what is left at your market and country. US shops price the repair line on LSA. Canadian shops price it on search and plan accordingly.
What the number actually was
For the shop in this example: 426 leads if you buy your way to the goal, 231 if you fix the phone and work the base first.
But the number that decides whether any of it works is not the lead count. It is cost per paying customer, and it is easy to compute and rarely computed. SearchLight spent $661,396 to produce 1,668 paying customers, which is $397 per paying customer against a $1,393 average ticket. At a 50% gross margin that job carries about $697 of gross profit, so acquisition eats well over half of it.
That is the real test of a lead target. Not whether 426 is a lot, but whether the last lead you buy still clears the gap between $397 and $697. In an expensive metro with a repair heavy mix it will not, and the answer then is not more leads. It is a heavier install line, a tighter service radius, a phone that gets answered, and a sticker in every garage you have ever worked in.
If you want that number worked out against your own invoices rather than a national blend, we build lead plans for local service businesses and the first conversation is the arithmetic, not a pitch.