What Digital Ads Actually Cost a Somerset Moving Company in 2026

If you run a moving company in Somerset, you already know the part nobody writes about: the job is physical, the margins are thin, the season is short, and the phone has to ring in April or the summer does not happen. Three trucks, a crew you have to keep paid through February, and a market you share with everyone who can rent a box truck and print a magnet.

So when someone tells you to "get on Google," the fair question is: what does that cost, exactly?

I went looking for that number the way an owner would. Here is everything I could find with a source attached, and everything I could not.

First, the number that comes before advertising#

Before a dollar goes to Google, Massachusetts wants its cut. If you move household goods within the state, the Department of Public Utilities requires operating authority. The mass.gov application page lists the fees plainly:

A three-truck Somerset operation therefore enters at $100 + $100 + (3 x $40) = $320, plus annual proof of insurance and a renewal decal application every year. There is also a public hearing on the second Tuesday of the following month, and the principal owner is required to attend in person.

This is not a tangent. It is the gate on the biggest ad channel available to you.

Line item 1: Google Search Ads#

Here is the first honest thing in this article. There is no published Google Ads benchmark for movers. I checked both of the reports the industry actually cites, and neither breaks out moving companies. WordStream's 2026 report covers 23 industries and has no moving category. LocaliQ's home services report has 16 subcategories and the closest is "Storage."

So the nearest published numbers are these, and I am labelling them as approximations rather than pretending they are yours:

Two things worth noticing before you plan a budget around that table.

First, Home & Home Improvement is the second most expensive of 23 industries in WordStream's set. Movers are not a cheap keyword neighbourhood, and "movers near me" in a market where Somerset, Fall River, Swansea and Westport bleed into each other means bidding against operators from three states.

Second, the two $90.92 cost-per-lead figures are identical, published a year apart, from different data windows, by two properties that are both owned by LocaliQ. Treat that as one data point, not two.

Do the arithmetic yourself and it does not quite reconcile. At $8.33 a click and an 8.05% conversion rate, one lead takes about 12.4 clicks, which is $103 a lead, not $90.92. So model on $100, not $90.

At a modest $1,500 a month, that is roughly 180 clicks and about 14 leads. Fourteen. If you close a third of them and an average local job is worth a few hundred dollars, you can see how quickly this becomes a spreadsheet question rather than a marketing question.

Line item 2: Local Services Ads#

This is the one most movers should look at first, and it is also the one with the least honest public pricing.

The good news is structural. "Moving services" is a listed eligible LSA category in the US, the background check is free ("Businesses aren't charged for the background check"), and the model is pay-per-lead rather than pay-per-click. In Google's own words, you "pay only for leads related to your business and the services you offer."

The billing works on an escalating threshold: an initial payment threshold that starts around $50 and steps up through $200 and $350 to a maximum of $500, charged when you hit the threshold or every 30 days, whichever comes first. Useful to know, because it means the first month's charges arrive faster and in smaller pieces than you expect.

The bad news is the credit policy. Manual lead disputes are gone. Credits are now issued automatically by machine learning, applied within 30 days, and — this is the part that costs you real money — Google no longer supports credits for leads flagged as "job type not serviced" or "geo not serviced." If someone in Attleboro calls you about a piano you do not move, that is now your cost, not Google's.

What does an LSA lead cost a mover? Not measured. I could not find a single published dataset that breaks out movers. The best adjacent figure is a vendor study of 888 contractors, 1,774 campaigns and $6.72M of spend in February 2026, which put the blended home-services LSA cost per lead at $53 against $104 for blended Google Ads. But that sample is HVAC, plumbing and electrical, which are frequent, urgent, small-ticket jobs. Moving is infrequent, planned, quote-driven and heavily comparison-shopped. Do not carry $53 into your plan as if it were a mover's number. It is not.

Overall, across all accounts, we saw spending go up by 5% in September. So yep, Google made more money. Shocking, I know.

Hawkins was writing about a structural change Google made to Local Services Ads, and her point holds for every change since: the platform is not neutral about your budget. Plan as though costs drift upward, because in her agency's data across all accounts, they did.

Line item 3: Meta#

Facebook and Instagram look cheaper on the surface, and for awareness they are.

The all-advertiser Meta CPM sat at $8.19 as of October 2025, with a cost per link click of $0.37 and a link CTR of 1.77%. Two caveats: that page is nearly a year stale as I write this, and its own prose contradicts its own table. I am citing the table.

For lead generation specifically, WordStream's 2025 Facebook benchmarks put Home & Home Improvement lead campaigns at $2.23 CPC, 5.22% conversion rate, $41.26 cost per lead — against $0.99 CPC for traffic campaigns in the same category. Those are medians, from 726 US campaigns between April 2024 and June 2025, and the report itself says so.

Now the part that matters more than any of those numbers.

You have probably been told Meta's minimum is a dollar a day, or five dollars a day. That is not in Meta's documentation. I went through their minimum-budget, daily-budget and budget-too-low help pages. Meta publishes no fixed dollar minimum; it says minimums are dynamic and surfaced in Ads Manager. What they do publish is one hard formula:

Run that for a mover. If you want a $40 lead, Meta's own arithmetic says your daily budget should be at least $200. That is roughly $6,000 a month, per ad set. Meta will also spend up to 75% over your daily budget on any given day, and up to 210% when ad set budget sharing is on, as long as the week stays within seven times daily.

That is the number nobody in a sales call will say out loud. You can absolutely spend less than that. You will just be running the algorithm below the volume it needs to learn, and you should go in knowing it.

Line item 4: somebody to run it#

Two published sources, both with a disclosure attached: both are companies with a commercial interest in this answer.

AgencyAnalytics, a reporting SaaS vendor rather than a PPC agency, published in July 2025 that the most common model is a percentage of ad spend "typically ranging from 10% to 20%," with a typical fee starting "between $500 and $2,000 per month for small to mid-sized clients." Elsewhere on the same page they widen it to 10–25%.

WebFX, an agency, puts management at 10–20% of spend or $1,000 to $3,000 a month, with total monthly PPC cost between $1,000 and $10,000, based on a survey of 350 marketers. Their own advertised floor is $750 a month.

The practical squeeze for a small mover: 15% of a $2,300 monthly spend is $345, which is below almost every agency's floor. So you either pay a flat fee that is a large fraction of your actual media budget, or you run it yourself.

The total, for one three-truck Somerset mover#

Modelled from the sources above. This is arithmetic on published benchmarks, not an invoice I was shown.

Meta is deliberately not in that table. By Meta's own 5x rule, doing it properly at a $40 lead goal is another $6,000 a month, which would more than triple the budget. Including it at $300 a month would have made the table look friendlier and would have been dishonest.

The free fix, and you can do it this afternoon#

Two things, both genuinely $0, both of which most small movers skip.

One: claim and verify your Google Business Profile. Google states plainly that creating a Business Profile is free and that you can "add or claim your business at no charge." It is also a hard prerequisite for Local Services Ads — advertisers must have a public, verified profile before they can run LSA at all. If you do nothing else after reading this, do this. Twenty minutes, and the verification postcard does the waiting for you.

Two: turn on conversion tracking before you spend anything. Google describes it as "a free tool in Google Ads that lets you understand more about the actions a customer takes after interacting with your ads." Movers close on the phone, not on a form. If you are not tracking calls as conversions, you are paying $8 a click for data you cannot read, and every optimisation decision after that is a guess. Half an hour of setup, and it is the difference between an ad budget and a donation.

Do both of those before you fund a single campaign. They cost nothing and they make every dollar after them measurable.

What I could not measure, stated plainly#

• A movers-specific Google Ads CPC, conversion rate or cost per lead. No benchmark publisher breaks movers out. Everything above uses Home & Home Improvement or Home Services as a proxy.
• A movers-specific Local Services Ads cost per lead. The $53 figure is trades-weighted and is not a moving number.
• Meta's actual dollar minimum. They do not publish one. The $1/day and $5/day figures repeated everywhere are not in Meta's documentation.
• An official $0 for the Meta Pixel. Meta's Pixel documentation makes no pricing statement at all. It is free in practice; I could not verify a first-party published price.
• Real Somerset auction prices. Every figure here is a national or regional benchmark. Your actual local CPC could sit either side of it, and the only way to know is to run a small campaign and read the search terms report.

One correction worth carrying: Google's current help documentation calls it the "Google Verified badge," not "Google Guaranteed." If a vendor is still pitching you "Google Guaranteed" in 2026, they are reading from an old deck.

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If you want the version of this run against your actual account and your actual service area rather than a national benchmark, that is a conversation, not a pitch. I am in Fall River, ten minutes from Somerset, and I will tell you if the numbers do not work.

774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com