Residential cleaning is one of the easier categories to run ads in and one of the easiest to run badly, because the traffic is cheap enough that waste hides.
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At two or three dollars a click you can spend a thousand dollars a month, generate a healthy-looking pile of enquiries, and still not know whether any of it paid. The reporting looks fine either way.
What the work actually is
Separating the jobs you want from the ones you do not. A recurring weekly client and a one-off move-out clean are different businesses with different economics. They need different campaigns, different budgets and different landing pages. Most accounts I look at run them together, which means the cheaper and less valuable job wins the budget.
Negative keywords, continuously. House cleaning attracts an unusually wide net of irrelevant searches: people looking for jobs as cleaners, people looking for cleaning products, students researching. This is not a one-time setup task, it is monthly maintenance, and it is the clearest signal of whether anyone is actually looking at the account.
Geography that matches your drive time. Radius targeting around a postcode is the lazy default. If your crews will not cross the river, bidding on the other side of it is buying jobs you will decline.
Call tracking. Most residential cleaning enquiries arrive as phone calls, not forms. An agency measuring only form fills is measuring the minority.
Landing pages that ask for the right thing. A quote form with eleven fields converts worse than one asking for postcode, bedrooms and a phone number.
What it costs
Management is charged either as a percentage of your ad spend, commonly 10 to 20 percent, or as a flat monthly fee. According to published rate cards across small home-services agencies in 2026, management starts around $500 to $1,500 per month, separate from the ad budget itself.
The percentage model creates a conflict worth naming: the agency’s income rises when your spend rises, regardless of whether more spending is right for you. I charge a flat fee, $800 per month to start and $1,500 for the core plan, billed monthly with no minimum term, and I take nothing from ad spend.
The full breakdown of what the ads themselves cost is in Google Ads for cleaning companies cost.
Six questions that sort the real ones from the rest
How will you separate recurring clients from one-off cleans? If there is no answer, the account will optimise toward one-offs.
Who owns the Google Ads account? It should be in your name, with the agency granted access. Your spend history makes future clicks cheaper and it should not leave with them.
How do you track phone calls? If the answer is vague, the majority of your enquiries are invisible.
What is your negative keyword process? Ask how often and who does it.
What happens in month one? Anyone promising results in week one is describing brand-name traffic you already had.
What is the notice period, in days? Not “is there a contract”, which invites a soft answer.
The part that is not the ads
I have seen cleaning companies with well-built campaigns lose most of their enquiries in the gap between the enquiry arriving and somebody calling back. Residential customers are usually contacting two or three companies at once and the first to answer wins a large share of the work.
Before you increase the budget, find out how long a new enquiry sits. Halving that is often cheaper and more effective than anything an agency will do to the campaign.
If you want an honest read on whether your current account is being managed or just left running, book a free 30-minute call. If Performance Max has come up in the conversation, my take on it for cleaning companies covers when it is the right move and when it is not.
