What's a Good ROAS for Local Service Businesses? Here's What We're Seeing

ROAS — return on ad spend — is one of the most referenced and least understood metrics in local service business advertising. Most people know the definition: revenue divided by ad spend. But fewer know what a "good" ROAS actually looks like for a cleaning company, a snow removal service, or a medical aesthetics clinic.

Here's what we're seeing across our client base, and how to think about whether your number is telling you good news or bad. If you haven't already looked at the underlying cost-per-lead numbers, start with our CPL benchmarks by service industry — ROAS and CPL tell different parts of the same story.

What ROAS Actually Measures

ROAS = Revenue Generated ÷ Ad Spend

A 3x ROAS means you generated $3 in revenue for every $1 you spent on ads. A 1x ROAS means you broke even on ad spend alone — before cost of goods, overhead, or your time. Anything below 1x means your ads are spending more than they're bringing back in.

Simple enough. The tricky part for service businesses is that ROAS can be calculated in very different ways depending on what you count as "revenue" — and not all calculations are equally useful.

Real ROAS From a Winnipeg Cleaning Campaign

One of our longest-running client relationships is with a residential cleaning company in Winnipeg. Over the full lifetime of their Facebook Ads campaign, here's where the numbers landed:

• Total leads generated: 1,184
• Average cost per lead: $14.12
• Campaign ROAS: 3.49x
• Platform: Meta (Facebook & Instagram only)

A 3.49x ROAS means that for every dollar spent on ads, the client generated $3.49 in booked cleaning revenue. For a residential cleaning business where the average initial booking runs $150–$200 and customers tend to rebook monthly, this is a strong and sustainable result.

More recently, the same campaign has improved significantly — generating 224 leads in a single month at just a $7.87 cost per lead, down from the $14.12 lifetime average. As creative gets better and the algorithm accumulates more data, ROAS compounds. Campaigns that have been running 12+ months consistently outperform newer ones.

ROAS Benchmarks by Service Vertical

The right ROAS target depends on your margins, customer lifetime value, and average job size — not just your industry. That said, here's what we typically target and see across the verticals we work in:

Home Cleaning & Recurring Services — Target: 3x–5x

Recurring customers are what make cleaning businesses exceptional ad investments. A client who books once and becomes a monthly customer is worth $1,800–$3,600/year. Even a first booking that looks marginal on paper can be extremely profitable when you account for retention.

Lawn Care & Snow Removal (Seasonal) — Target: 2.5x–4x in-season

Because the buying window is compressed, you often need to accept higher CPLs to capture enough volume during peak weeks. A 2.5x ROAS that fills your schedule during snow season is a win — don't chase a 4x number if it means leaving bookings on the table when demand is high. See our Facebook vs. Google Ads comparison for how platform choice affects CPL — and by extension, ROAS — during peak season.

Medical Aesthetics & High-Ticket Services — Target: 2x–3x

Even a 2x ROAS can be highly profitable when a single booking is worth $500–$3,000. A well-managed aesthetics campaign at 2x ROAS on a $6,000/month ad budget generates $12,000 in first-booking revenue — and those patients often return two or three more times in the same year.

The Two Problems With ROAS for Service Businesses

Most service businesses don't track ROAS accurately, for two reasons.

First, there's usually a gap between the lead and the recorded revenue. If your leads come in through Facebook forms and bookings happen over the phone, you need to manually match those bookings back to the ad source. The fix is simple: ask every new client where they heard about you, log it in your CRM, and reconcile it monthly. It takes 30 minutes to set up and makes your ROAS number meaningful instead of approximate.

Second, ROAS calculations usually ignore customer lifetime value. If your average cleaning client books once and then becomes a monthly recurring customer worth $2,400/year, the ROAS on that first booking looks completely different when you account for the 11 subsequent bookings that follow. The first-booking ROAS might look like 2x. The lifetime ROAS on the same customer is closer to 15x.

ROAS Is a Direction, Not a Fixed Target

The most honest answer to "what's a good ROAS?" is: better than last month. If your ROAS was 2x last quarter and it's 2.8x this quarter, your campaigns are improving — even if 2.8x sounds modest compared to benchmarks you've read online.

We focus on improving ROAS over time through creative testing, audience refinement, and offer optimization. The 3.49x ROAS from the cleaning campaign above didn't start there — it was built through consistent testing over more than a year. Early months looked different. The data advantage compounds.

If you're not sure whether your current ROAS is where it should be, we're happy to take a look at your account and give you an honest read on the numbers.