A homeowner typing "kitchen remodeler near me" has already decided to remodel. That is a different, more expensive kind of click than a Meta scroll-by, and in kitchen and bath it costs real money to win. Here is what Google Ads actually cost in this niche, how to structure the keywords so you are not paying for renovation daydreams, and where it fits next to Meta and Local Service Ads.
Most kitchen and bath remodelers who try Google Ads on their own make the same handful of mistakes, and all of them cost real money before anyone notices. Here is what to get right, ranked by how much it actually moves your cost per lead.
Get this right firstBidding on a broad term like "kitchen remodeling" or "bathroom contractor" pulls in everyone from a homeowner three years out from renovating to someone researching a school project. Structure your keywords around service plus city, "kitchen remodeling [city]," "walk-in shower installation [city]," "bathroom remodeler near [city]," so the person clicking has already narrowed to your service and your area.
Then layer in the modifiers that separate a browser from a buyer. "Cost" and "near me" both signal someone actively pricing out a job, not collecting inspiration. A search for "kitchen remodel cost" is a homeowner building a budget. A search for "kitchen remodel ideas" is a homeowner on Pinterest.
The highest-leverage fixA negative keyword list is the cheapest lever in the whole account, and most remodelers never build one past the obvious. The words worth excluding in kitchen and bath specifically: DIY, jobs, hiring, salary, cheap, free, wholesale, supplier, and courses. Every one of those pulls in a click that was never going to become a signed job, someone doing it themselves, someone applying for work at a remodeling company, someone sourcing materials at wholesale instead of hiring a contractor, or someone taking a class. None of them have a checkbook open for a $25,000 kitchen.
Also structural"Full kitchen remodel" and "fix leaking shower faucet" both contain the word "kitchen" or "shower," and Google will happily match your ad to both if you let it. They are different homeowners with completely different budgets. A repair-intent search is a $200 job, not a $25,000 one. Separate the two into their own ad groups, or exclude repair terms outright, so your budget goes toward the searches that can actually become a full remodel.
Expect this, don't fight itEven with tight keywords and a clean negative list, kitchen and bath clicks cost more than most trades, because the ticket is bigger and the competition is fiercer. The number to watch is never cost per click on its own, it is what that click turns into once you follow it through to a booked estimate and a signed job.
These are not competing channels, they catch a homeowner at two different points in a remodel that can take months to decide on. A homeowner scrolling Meta and stopping on a before-and-after kitchen has not necessarily decided to remodel yet, you are planting the idea. A homeowner typing "kitchen remodeler near me" into Google has already decided, and is now comparing who to hire. That is a genuinely different, further-down-the-road buyer, and it is why the click costs more.
So which one should you run first? For most kitchen and bath remodelers working with a limited budget, Meta comes first. It creates demand instead of waiting to catch it, it scales further on the same dollar because it is not bidding against every other remodeler for the same finite pool of searches, and it is where you build the reviews, the before-and-afters, and the case studies that later make your Google landing page convert better too.
Google Ads earn their place once that foundation is producing. The ceiling on Google is real: there are only so many people searching "bathroom remodeler near me" in your market each month, and every remodeler in town bids on the same short list of terms. Meta does not have that ceiling. Once Meta is running steady, adding Google Ads and Local Service Ads lets you own the homeowners who are actively shopping right now on top of the ones you are creating demand from.
The honest version for a remodeler with $2,000 to $3,000 a month to spend: put it into Meta first, prove the offer and the creative, then add Google once you can afford to be patient with a higher cost per click while it earns its own data and Quality Score.
Not invented numbers. Every figure here names its source.
Vancouver Tile Pros booked $23,673 in the first three weeks of running with us and $130,000 in revenue in the first three months, with leads on their top-performing ad running as low as ~$20. That is a Meta result, not a Google Ads one, and it is the clearest proof we have that the same discipline, a sharp offer, real creative, a landing page built for the traffic, produces numbers like that once it is dialed in. It is also the honest baseline for why we tell most K&B remodelers to build that foundation before layering in a more expensive channel.
Across our shower and tile campaigns overall, cost per lead has run as low as ~$20 per lead on our top-performing ads. A realistic planning range for kitchen and bath is $60 to $150 depending on your market.
Vancouver, WA · 529 leads lifetime, $52.62 average CPL
On Google specifically, expect the click itself to cost more than a Meta impression. Kitchen and bath search terms run roughly $8 to $18 per click, with competitive metros seeing $100 to $250 per click on whole-home queries, according to agency-tracked benchmarks published by bgcollective.com. Cost per lead has been reported from $90 to $250 for bathroom search campaigns by Built-Right Digital, and kitchenremodelingseo.com cites $150 to $400 for kitchen PPC, a figure it explicitly labels an industry estimate rather than data it measured itself.
None of those numbers is the one that decides whether Google Ads work for you. The one that matters is cost per signed job. Qualified Remodeler's 2025 data across 252 companies puts the median cost per issued lead at $372 to $396. At a rough 20% lead-to-contract rate, that works out to $1,900 to $2,500 of lead cost per signed job, a range independently corroborated by Remodelers Advantage's separately measured $2,456 average lead cost per sale. Run your own numbers through that same chain, cost per click, to cost per lead, to cost per booked estimate, to cost per signed job, before you decide a click is too expensive.
Here is the mistake we see more than any other, and it is the single most expensive one on this page. A remodeler runs a tight, well-structured Google Ads campaign, wins the click on "bathroom remodeler near me," and sends that homeowner to a generic homepage listing kitchens, baths, additions, and five other services with no mention of bathrooms above the fold.
That homeowner searched for one thing, clicked expecting to find it, and landed somewhere that makes them scroll and hunt to confirm you even do the job. Most leave. The ones who do not convert at a lower rate, which raises your cost per lead directly and your cost per click indirectly, because Google rewards a fast, relevant landing page with a better Quality Score and a cheaper auction price for the same position.
The fix is a dedicated page for the service that click was searching for: bathroom remodeling gets its own page, kitchen remodeling gets its own page, each with real before-and-after work, real reviews, and a simple way to request an estimate. Kitchen and bath is also a 3 to 6 month consideration cycle for most homeowners, longer than a lot of trades, so that page carries more weight than usual: it is often the first real impression a homeowner forms of whether you are a fit before they ever pick up the phone. Get the match between the search and the landing page right, and the platform you picked matters a lot less.
From the keyword list to the landing page. Your only job is to answer the phone and quote the work.
We build your campaign around service-plus-city terms and the "cost" and "near me" modifiers that signal a real buyer, and we build the negative list before launch, DIY, jobs, hiring, salary, cheap, free, wholesale, supplier, courses, so we are not paying for clicks that were never going to sign.
A full kitchen remodel and a leaking faucet fix both contain the word "kitchen." We structure ad groups so your budget goes toward the searches that can become a real job, not the ones looking for a quick repair.
A bathroom search gets a bathroom page. A kitchen search gets a kitchen page. Each one shows real work, real reviews, and a simple way to request an estimate, so the click you paid for lands somewhere built to convert it.
We launch, then watch the full chain daily, click to lead to booked estimate to signed job, cutting what wastes budget and doubling down on what turns into real revenue.
Google is one channel. Here's how the rest fit for kitchen and bath.
Meta Ads for Kitchen & Bathroom Remodelers — the channel most K&B remodelers should run first, with real numbers from a live account.
Meta Ads for Shower Remodelers — the Vancouver Tile Pros numbers in full, and how a shower-specific offer performs.
Kitchen Remodeling Leads — what shared and exclusive kitchen leads actually cost, ranked by source.
Bathroom Remodeling Leads — real cost per signed job across the bathroom lead-gen category.
Are Angi Leads Worth It for Remodelers? — the real math on shared leads, contract terms, and the FTC action against HomeAdvisor.
Tub-to-Shower Conversion Leads — the economics of the highest-volume K&B ad product.
Free strategy call. No pressure. We'll show you exactly what your budget should hit first, Meta, Google, or both, and what it should cost.