Google Ads for house cleaning companies: budgets, campaigns and what wastes money
Realistic cost per lead, the negative keyword list every cleaning company needs, why move-out terms are a trap, and how to bid for recurring not one-time jobs.
Google Ads works for house cleaning, but it punishes a specific mistake harder than it punishes anything else: buying one-time cleans at recurring-client prices. A move-out clean lead at $50 looks fine until you notice the client never comes back. A biweekly client acquired at $120 is a bargain. Same platform, same account, opposite outcomes. Everything below is organized around that difference.
One thing to check before you spend anything: 37.3% of house cleaning companies have no website linked on Google. Paid traffic pointed at a thin profile and no landing page is the most expensive way to learn that lesson.
What a lead actually costs
In most US metros a house cleaning company pays $2.50 to $7 per click on residential cleaning search terms, and converts 12% to 25% of clicks into a call or form fill. That puts cost per lead between roughly $18 and $55. Big-city move-out and deep clean terms run higher, sometimes $9 a click, because restoration and franchise budgets sit on them.
Then apply your close rate. If half of your leads book, a $35 lead is a $70 client acquisition cost. If that client goes on biweekly service at $160 a clean, you have paid $70 for something worth $4,100 a year. If that client was a one-time move-out at $300 with a 40% gross margin, you paid $70 to earn $120. Both are positive. Only one builds a company.
The account structure that works
Three search campaigns, separated because they deserve different bids:
- Recurring residential. Keywords: house cleaning service, maid service, weekly house cleaning, biweekly cleaning service, home cleaning near me, plus each of your city names attached. This is where the money goes. Bid highest here.
- Deep and one-time. Keywords: deep cleaning service, one time house cleaning, spring cleaning service. Lower bids, and treat every booking as a chance to convert to recurring on the doorstep.
- Move-out and move-in. Keywords: move out cleaning, move in cleaning, apartment move out cleaning, end of lease cleaning. High intent, high price per job, near zero repeat rate. Cap this budget deliberately. It is cash flow, not growth.
Run each with exact and phrase match only for the first 60 days. Broad match in this category is a money furnace until the account has conversion history, because Google will happily read "cleaning" as carpet cleaning, gutter cleaning, air duct cleaning and janitorial contracts.
The negative keyword list
Load these before you turn anything on. This one list saves more money than any bid strategy:
jobs, hiring, employment, salary, career, "how to", diy, franchise, "for sale", business plan, insurance, license, checklist, template, free, cheap, carpet, upholstery, duct, dryer vent, gutter, window washing, pressure washing, pool, chimney, septic, crime scene, hoarding, biohazard, commercial, janitorial, office cleaning, industrial, Airbnb management, Molly, Merry, Maids (if you are not those franchises), and the names of every franchise operating in your metro.
Two of those need explaining. "Jobs" and "hiring" traffic is enormous in cleaning, far larger than in the trades, because cleaning is one of the most searched entry-level job categories in the country. Without those negatives, a meaningful share of your spend goes to people wanting to work for you. And franchise brand names get searched constantly, but clicking searchers usually want that brand, so unless you are running a deliberate conquest test with a comparison landing page, block them.
Check the search terms report weekly for the first two months, then monthly. Add every irrelevant term you find.
Geography and schedule
Set targeting to "Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations," never the default that includes people merely interested in the area. Draw a radius you actually service. A 25-mile radius that includes a city your crews will not drive to produces leads you have to reject, which trains the algorithm on bad data.
Set the ad schedule against when someone answers. Cleaning searches cluster on weekday mornings and Sunday evenings. If nobody answers Sunday evening, either turn the schedule off then or, better, keep it on and put missed-call text-back behind it. The missed calls guide has that setup, and the calculator shows what the unanswered ones cost.
Ads, extensions and the landing page
Two things move click-through rate in this category more than clever copy: a starting price and a specific promise about people entering the home.
Headlines worth testing: "Biweekly House Cleaning From $140", "Same Cleaner Every Visit", "Background-Checked, Insured, Bonded", "Free Quote in Under 10 Minutes", "Move-Out Cleans, Deposit-Back Guarantee."
Use call extensions with call reporting on, location assets, and sitelinks to your recurring, deep clean and move-out pages. Callout assets: bring our own supplies, pet friendly, no contracts, satisfaction guarantee.
Send clicks to a page that matches the search. A move-out search that lands on a generic homepage converts at half the rate of one that lands on a move-out page with a price range and a checklist. The website guide covers what those pages need.
What to skip
Performance Max, at first. It will spend your budget on Display and YouTube placements that generate form fills from people who were not looking for a cleaner. Consider it only after your search campaigns have 30 conversions a month and you can feed it a good audience signal.
Broad match plus Smart Bidding with no conversion data. Target CPA needs history. Start on Maximize Clicks with a bid cap for two to four weeks, switch to Maximize Conversions once you have 15 to 30 conversions, then to Target CPA after 30 days on that.
Display remarketing as a first campaign. It is cheap and it feels productive. It also converts near zero for a service someone books once and forgets about. Retargeting belongs on Meta for this industry, which the Facebook and Instagram guide covers.
A realistic starting budget
$1,200 to $2,000 a month is the floor for a metro of any size. Below about $40 a day you will not gather enough conversion data for bidding to work, and you will conclude Google Ads does not work when what happened is you never gave it a signal.
Split it roughly 55% recurring, 25% deep and one-time, 20% move-out. Expect 25 to 60 leads a month at that spend, and expect month one to be your worst month.
One hard constraint specific to this industry: do not buy more booked clients than you can staff. Filling a schedule you cannot cover produces cancellations, and cancellations produce the one-star reviews that make the next $2,000 work worse.
Frequently asked
Should I bid on my own brand name? Only if a competitor or a marketplace is bidding on it. Check by searching your name. If Angi or a franchise sits above you, spend $3 a day to defend it.
How long before I judge it? Sixty days and at least 40 leads. Anything shorter is noise.
Do call-only campaigns work here? Yes, well, especially on mobile for move-out and same-week requests. Run one alongside search with a $10 to $15 daily budget and compare cost per call.
Google Ads management is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, set up in your own ad account, no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.