Ask ten electricians what they spend on advertising and you'll get three answers: "nothing, it's all word of mouth," "too much, and I don't know if it works," and "whatever the marketing company charges me." All three are the same answer wearing different hats: I don't have a number.
So let's build the number. How much an electrician should spend on advertising comes down to three calculations you can do on the back of a work order: percent of revenue, cost per booked job, and capacity. Work through them once and you'll never budget by vibe again.
Start with percent of revenue (the ceiling)
The rule-of-thumb range for home-service companies is 5–10% of gross revenue on marketing, adjusted for what you're trying to do:
- Maintain: established shop, full board, referral base — 3–5% keeps the pipeline topped up.
- Grow: adding a truck or a crew — 6–10%, because you're buying market share, not just filling this week.
- New market or new shop: 10–12% for the first year or two. Nobody knows you; visibility is bought before it's earned.
Worked example: a shop doing $900,000 a year that wants to grow budgets 7% — $63,000 a year, call it $5,250 a month. That's the ceiling. Whether the money is well spent is what the next number tells you.
Then check cost per booked job (the truth)
Percent of revenue tells you what you can afford. Cost per booked job tells you whether it's working. The chain is simple: spend ÷ leads = cost per lead; leads × booking rate = jobs; spend ÷ jobs = cost per booked job. Then hold that against the ticket.
Electrical work splits into two very different tickets, and your budget should know the difference:
- Service calls (troubleshooting, outlets, fixtures, fans): $250–$600 tickets. Booked jobs need to cost $40–$90 to make sense. This is Local Services Ads territory — pay-per-lead pricing fits small tickets.
- Project work (panel upgrades, rewires, generator installs, EV chargers): $2,500–$15,000+ tickets. You can profitably pay $150–$400 for a booked estimate. This is where Google Ads on specific searches ("panel upgrade cost," "Generac installer near me") earns its keep even at $15–$30 a click.
Run the $5,250/month example: put $1,750 into LSA and book 25 service calls at $70 each — roughly $10,000 of service revenue. Put $3,500 into search ads targeting projects, generate 14 estimates at $250 each, close 5 at an average $6,000 — $30,000 of project revenue. Total: $5,250 spent, about $40,000 booked. That's a 7.6x return, and every number in the chain is checkable on your own dispatch board. If your current spend can't produce this paragraph, that's the problem to fix before the budget goes up.
Cap it with capacity (the governor)
The budget that matters most isn't in your bank account — it's on your schedule. If your electricians are booked out nine days, more ad spend buys you angry voicemails. If the board has holes on Thursday, spend. The practical rule: fund advertising up to the point your calendar fills to 85–90%, then bank the surplus demand as scheduled-out work or raise prices. Advertising a shop that can't answer or can't show up is paying to disappoint people at scale.
Where the first dollars go (in order)
- 1. Answering the phone. Costs almost nothing, doubles the value of every dollar below it. A missed call is a 100% wasted lead.
- 2. Google Business Profile + reviews. Free visibility in the map pack. Maintain the profile, systematize the review ask.
- 3. Local Services Ads. Pay-per-lead, capped budget, ideal first paid channel for service calls.
- 4. Google Ads on project keywords. Panel upgrades, generators, EV chargers — high-ticket searches worth real cost per click.
- 5. SEO. The slow channel that eventually delivers your cheapest booked jobs — fund it once the paid channels are producing.
Notice what's not on the list: radio jingles, sports-team sponsorships, and shared-lead platforms that sell the same homeowner to four shops. Those can come later, if ever, after the measurable channels are maxed.
Two housekeeping rules make all of this math possible. First, call tracking on every channel — separate numbers for LSA, search ads and organic, so "where did this job come from?" has an answer that isn't a shrug. Second, give any change 60–90 days before you judge it. Electrical project work has a long fuse; a homeowner who clicks your panel-upgrade ad in March may not sign until May. Shops that yank budgets around weekly are steering by the wake instead of the road.
Budget by the board, not by the gut. Spend ÷ booked jobs. That's the whole religion.
The answer, in one paragraph
A Florida electrical shop doing under $1M that wants to grow should plan on 6–10% of revenue — roughly $3,000–$7,500 a month — split between LSA for service calls and Google Ads for project work, governed by schedule capacity, and judged monthly on cost per booked job against ticket size. Maintain-mode shops can run at half that. Anyone who quotes you a budget without asking your revenue, your average tickets and your capacity is reading from a script.
We do this math for electrical contractors before we spend a dollar of their money — that's the whole point of the plain-numbers plan. See electrician marketing for how we run the channels, or send us your numbers and we'll send back what we'd spend and where, in writing, within one business day.