Dealers ask us what a lead should cost. They expect one number. The honest answer is a range that moves with the calendar, and one of our own published accounts shows how far. The same dealer, on the same monthly budget, paid $117 for a lead in June and $14 in December. Neither number was wrong. Here is how to read a figure like that, and which version of it to judge your advertising on.
One dealer paid $117 and $14 for a lead in the same year
The account is a family-owned fireplace and grill center in St. Louis. Its numbers are on our results page, published with the client's permission. The campaign launched in late May 2025. These are its first seven full months, exactly as the reporting dashboard shows them.
- June: 28 leads at $116.97 each
- July: 38 leads at $80.43
- August: 72 leads at $41.75
- September: 82 leads at $43.46
- October: 133 leads at $24.43
- November: 218 leads at $13.41
- December: 243 leads at $14.31
The budget held at roughly $3,200 a month the whole time. Multiply each month's leads by its cost and the spend works out to between about $2,900 and $3,600. Nobody turned the money up in the fall. The same dollars bought 28 leads in June and 243 in December.
Two things moved the number
It is tempting to credit all of that drop to the campaign getting smarter. Some of it was. A new campaign spends its first weeks learning which searches and which hours produce calls, so the first full month is usually the most expensive one.
The rest is the season. A fireplace store's buyers do not arrive evenly. To see the season without a launch mixed into it, look at an account that had been running for years. Bromwell's, a fireplace retailer whose 2025 numbers are on the same page, took in 61 leads in May and 341 in December. That is more than five times the leads, from a mature campaign, with nothing new being learned.
So a hearth dealer's cost per lead has a built-in swing. The budget is a fixed number. The count of people ready to buy a fireplace is not. A fixed budget divided by a moving count gives a moving cost.
The blended number is the one to judge
A single month tells you very little. $117 in June would have gotten the campaign canceled by a dealer who looked at nothing else. $14 in December would have convinced the same dealer that leads cost $14, which they do not.
Add the seven months together instead. That is about $22,500 spent and 814 leads in the monthly table, or roughly $28 a lead. For October through December alone, the published figure is $16.25.
Even $28 flatters the year, because those seven months include the whole peak and leave out January through May. A full twelve months comes in higher. On the hearth campaigns we run, the blended cost over a full year lands between $30 and $50 a lead. Winter months come in under $20. Summer months sit well above the average.
If you remember one number from this article, make it the twelve-month one. It is the only version that has every season in it.
The published benchmark sits near $91
LocaliQ publishes search advertising benchmarks by industry each year. The 2026 edition puts the average cost per lead for Home and Home Improvement at $90.92. The average across every industry it tracks is $66.69.
Treat that as a rough outside marker and nothing more. It is an average across roofers, remodelers, HVAC companies and everything else filed under home improvement. It covers search ads only. It also counts a lead the way the report counts one, which may not be how you would.
What it does tell you is that a specialty showroom with specific, local searches can land well under the category average. It does not tell you what your store should pay in July.
Define a lead before you price one
Cost per lead is spend divided by leads. The spend is not in dispute. The lead count is.
Most hearth leads are phone calls. In the St. Louis account, 711 of the 814 leads in that table arrived by phone. If every ring counts as a lead, the cost looks better than it is. We published what that does in our own accounts: across four clients with call tracking running, 17 of the 97 calls with a recorded length ran under 30 seconds, and 8 of 99 were repeat callers.
Two reports on the same campaign can show different costs per lead and both be honest. One counts every call. The other counts calls over a minimum length and one lead per person. Before you compare your number to anybody's, ours included, find out which one you are holding.
Read a bad month against the same month last year
The usual mistake is comparing this month to last month. In a seasonal business that comparison is rigged. At Bromwell's, October brought in 227 leads against September's 119. February brought in 92 against January's 180. Neither swing says anything about the advertising.
The comparison that works is the same month a year earlier. If this July cost less per lead than last July, the campaign improved, whatever it did against June. If this December cost more than last December, something needs a look, even though it was the cheapest month of the year.
The same logic applies to budget decisions. A high summer cost per lead is not, by itself, a reason to switch the ads off. The St. Louis account's cheap fall leads came from a campaign that had been running since May. Whether to hold spend flat or shape it to the season is a real decision, and we covered it in the seasonal marketing trap. Make it on the yearly number, not on one hot month.
Ask for three numbers
- Blended cost per lead over the last twelve months. Total spend divided by total leads. One figure.
- Cost per lead by month, next to the same month a year earlier. This is the one that shows whether the campaign is getting better.
- How a lead is counted. Calls and forms separately, the minimum call length, and whether a repeat caller counts twice.
Anyone running your ads should be able to produce all three from the reporting they already have. If you would like us to work them out from your own account, send us twelve months of spend and lead counts. We will send back what we find whether or not it turns into a conversation about working together.
Sources
- Monthly leads, phone calls and cost per lead for the St. Louis fireplace and grill center, the steady monthly budget of roughly $3,200, and the $16.25 October through December figure are from our results page, sourced there to LocaliQ campaign reporting and published with the client's permission. Monthly spend and the seven-month blended figure are our arithmetic on that table.
- Bromwell's leads by month for 2025 are from the same page.
- The $30 to $50 full-year range, and the winter and summer figures either side of it, describe the hearth campaigns we manage. They are our own results, not an industry survey.
- LocaliQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks, 2026 data, last updated June 1, 2026, for the $90.92 Home and Home Improvement cost per lead and the $66.69 all-industry average.
- Call length and repeat caller figures are the ones already published in our post on call tracking for showroom retailers.
Every market and every account is different. These are real numbers from real campaigns, and they are a way to read your own, not a promise of what yours will be.