What should a pressure washing company spend on Google Ads in Austin?

There is no correct number, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your business is guessing. But there is a correct way to work it out, and it starts from the job rather than from the budget.

Work backwards from job value

Start with three numbers you already have.

Average job value. For residential pressure washing in the Austin metro this varies enormously — a single driveway is a different business from a whole-exterior package. Use what you actually average, not your best job.

Close rate on inquiries. Of the people who call or submit a form, what share book? Most owners guess high. If you do not know, find out before you spend anything, because every other number depends on it.

What a customer is worth over time. If you have any repeat or seasonal rebooking, a customer is worth more than their first job, and you can afford to pay more to acquire one.

From there: if your average job is $400, you close half your inquiries, and you are willing to spend 15% of revenue on acquisition, you can afford roughly $30 per inquiry. That is your target cost per lead, and it is the number that should drive the budget — not the other way round.

Then check it against reality

In the Austin metro, competitive home-service search terms are not cheap. Click costs for pressure washing vary a lot by suburb and season, but you should expect to need a meaningful number of clicks to produce one inquiry — landing page quality, offer and how fast you respond all move that ratio substantially.

The practical implication is that very small daily budgets do not work on search. Below a certain level you are not buying leads, you are buying a sample too small to learn anything from, and the campaign never gets enough conversion data to optimise. A budget that produces one or two clicks a day will take months to tell you anything useful.

If the arithmetic says you cannot afford a meaningful daily budget on search, that is genuinely useful information — and it usually points toward Meta instead, where tight local reach is considerably cheaper.

Why Meta is often the better first spend for this trade

Pressure washing is largely latent demand. People walk past a dirty driveway for months without ever searching for anything. The search volume for “pressure washing” in a given Austin suburb is thinner than most owners expect.

Meta reaches people before they have thought about it, and before-and-after video is unusually persuasive in this trade. The cost per thousand impressions for a tight geographic radius is low, and you are creating demand rather than competing for a small pool of existing searches.

A common structure that works: the majority of the budget on Meta creating demand, a smaller search budget capturing the people who are actively looking, and the split adjusted once you can see which is producing.

The seasonal shape matters more than the total

A flat monthly budget is the wrong shape for this trade.

Spring, after the oak pollen, and the pre-holiday window are when demand concentrates in Central Texas. Those are the months to spend heavily. January and February are quiet — but they are also cheap, because competitors pull back, and a mild Central Texas winter means exterior cleaning never fully stops.

Spending the same amount every month means underspending in the months that would have returned the most and overspending in the months that return least.

Budget for the landing page, not just the clicks

The most common way a small advertising budget gets wasted is being pointed at a page that does not convert.

If your click costs $4 and your page converts at 2%, each inquiry costs $200. If the same traffic hits a page that converts at 6% — clear offer, visible pricing, obvious way to get in touch, loads fast on a phone — the same inquiry costs $67.

That is a far larger improvement than any bidding change will produce, and it is a one-off cost rather than a monthly one. Which is why we usually want the page sorted before scaling spend rather than after.

A reasonable way to start

Set a target cost per lead from your own numbers. Start with a budget large enough to generate meaningful data within a few weeks rather than a few months. Run it for at least four to six weeks before judging, because the first fortnight is mostly the platform learning.

Then measure against the target, not against how the month felt. And make sure the tracking is real before you spend, because a campaign optimised toward the wrong conversion will efficiently deliver you the wrong thing.