Google Ads for landscapers in France: cost per client in 2026

The baseline click, when you run Google Ads for landscapers in France, is one of the cheapest I've measured in this series: €2.63 at the high end of the range on the French query for "landscaper," for 110,000 searches a month in France. Across the roughly three hundred service queries I isolated in the trade, the median high bid comes to €1.95.

That's nowhere near the €19 an emergency electrician pays, or the €16 a locksmith pays, both measured in August. A landscaper who sees these figures thinks they've found a bargain.

They're right about the price. They're almost always wrong about what they're buying. In this trade, half the searches that look like a job are really looking for a tool, and the other half split between two clienteles with different calendars, different ticket sizes and different tax treatment.

What a click costs when you're a landscaper

Pulled on October 14, 2026 from Keyword Planner, location France, Search Network with partners. The queries are French, translated here, and the right-hand column is the high end of the Top of page bid range.

Two readings stand out.

First, the grid climbs with intent. "Landscaper" on its own draws as many browsers as buyers, "landscaping company" already costs €3.48, and "gardener quote" reaches €4.94 because whoever types it has already decided to pay someone.

Second, pruning and felling all cost more than the baseline query, from €2.91 on "tree pruning" to €4.04 on "tree pruning company," when "landscaper" tops out at €2.63. Those are jobs a homeowner doesn't do alone, and the businesses know it.

A reminder, the same one every time. The high bid is the amount to offer to aim for the top of the page, and the actual cost comes in lower, in my experience often around half. I go through how to read these numbers in the article on how to read Keyword Planner volumes.

"Hedge trimmer" or "hedge trimming": one word, two audiences

Here's the trap specific to this trade, and it's a big one.

The French query for "hedge trimmer" gets 74,000 searches a month, with a high bid of €0.63. The query for "hedge trimming" gets 3,600, at €2.29. In French, a single word separates them. The first names the tool, and whoever types it is comparing gas models and batteries. The second names the service, and whoever types it wants someone to do it.

The whole tool family, brands and variants included, adds up to more than 260,000 searches a month in my data. More than the word "landscaper" itself. The low bid confirms it: on these queries, tool retailers are the ones competing for the spot, to sell a product online, not a day of labor.

Without negatives, a broad match campaign on "hedge trimming" will go after those people.

The same thing happens with fencing: "fence" and "rigid wire fencing" each get 60,500 searches, and the variants pulled (rigid, flexible, chicken wire, wood) almost all describe material to buy, not to have installed. Pulzeo sorts your search terms and suggests the negatives to add, which saves you from finding out after a month that you were funding a home improvement store's sales.

The families to exclude from day one:

• tools and their brands: hedge trimmer, lawn mower, pole pruner, and the manufacturer names that go with them;
• materials sold in stores: wire fencing, decking boards, artificial grass, fence panels, when the query carries neither "installation" nor "quote";
• jobs and training: landscaper salary, vocational diplomas, job listings;
• competing franchise networks, some of which are searched by name: one of them gets 1,900 searches a month in France.

Maintenance and design: two trades under one word

The word "landscaper" covers two activities that have almost nothing in common in a Google Ads account. One is routine maintenance, recurring, paid by the hour or by package. The other is designing a garden or an outdoor space, sold on a quote, once.

What separates them most clearly is the client's tax situation.

Maintenance: a client who pays half price

In France, small gardening jobs entitle households to a 50% tax credit under the personal services scheme. The official government page sets a ceiling of €5,000 of spending per household per year for them, within the general €12,000 ceiling. The service has to be provided by a registered business or association, or by an employee hired directly.

The searches show it: "gardener personal services" gets 1,600 searches a month, "gardener paid by CESU voucher" 1,300, "home gardener" 1,300. These people know the scheme and are looking for it. If your business is registered, that's the argument to lead the ad with, because it halves the perceived price of your hour.

Design: a one-off quote, and no tax credit

The definition used by the French administration covers routine garden maintenance. In an answer to a written question, published in the Senate's Official Journal on December 8, 2022, the Ministry of the Economy specifies that pruning only qualifies if done at head height, without climbing into the tree or using ropes, a harness or a removal truck.

Direct consequence: the climbing tree surgeon and the garden designer sell at full price. "Landscape design" gets 2,400 searches at €2.85, "garden creation" 880 at €1.82. Less volume, but a single job there weighs as much as months of maintenance.

The tax credit isn't a landscaper's argument, it's a maintenance gardener's argument. Putting it in a design ad promises a discount the invoice won't deliver.

Hence a simple rule: two campaigns, or at the very least two ad groups, with two distinct promises. One talks about regular visits and the tax credit, the other about the project, the plan and an on-site appointment.

What does a client cost a landscaper?

The math comes down to three numbers: the actual cost per click, the share of visitors who request a quote, and the share of quotes you sign. The general mechanics are covered in the article on SEO vs. paid search; here I only apply them to the trade.

Take an actual cost of €1.30 on the "landscaper" family, half the high bid. At 4% quote requests, a request costs €32.50. If you sign one in three, a client costs you just under €100. At 8% requests, which assumes a clear page with job photos and a short form, you land around €50.

On pruning, the math changes scale. At about €2 per actual click on "tree surgeon," the same rates give €50 per request and €150 per signed client. It's more expensive, and that makes sense: felling a tree sells for a very different amount than mowing a lawn.

Replace these rates with your own as soon as you have them. Mine are working assumptions, yours are measurements.

When Google Ads becomes profitable for a landscaper

A client acquired at around €100 is profitable as soon as your margin on that client exceeds €100. So the question is less the price of the click than the client's lifetime.

For maintenance, the answer is almost always yes. A client who hands you their garden comes back every month of the season, often for several years. If your margin per visit is €40, they've paid for themselves by the third visit, and the rest of the relationship is profit.

For design, the threshold is crossed on the first job, provided you sign. The risk lies in the cost of unsigned quotes: an on-site visit, a plan, a costed proposal, for a request that was comparing three companies. If you sign fewer than one quote in six, the cost per client doubles, and it's your phone qualification that needs work before the budget does.

The only case where I advise a landscaper against Google Ads is the business that only does one-off mowing, with no contract. A €100 client for a single low-margin job never pays for itself.

Seasonality: when to run landscaping ads

The trade's searches don't follow one season, they follow four, and that's the most useful thing to know before setting a budget.

"Landscaper" peaks in February and March at 135,000 searches, then falls to 74,000 in July and August, 45% lower. People get their garden ready before spring, and demand fades once summer sets in.

"Lawn mowing" has the harshest calendar: 1,000 searches in December and January, 8,100 from March to May. Eight times more in three months. "Outdoor landscaping" comes later, peaking in May and June at 8,100, when people get the patio ready for summer.

Pruning, finally, barely has a winter dip: 27,100 searches in September and October and in January and February, a peak of 33,100 in March, and the low point in July at 14,800. It's the activity that fills the months when the rest of the trade slows down.

These volumes run from September 2025 to August 2026, pulled the same day as the bids. One year doesn't make a law, but the gaps are too wide to be noise. The same month-by-month reasoning, applied to another seasonal trade, is in what a client costs a mover.

How much budget to start with?

€400 to €600 a month, from February to June, then half that from July to January, when pruning takes over. At €1.30 per actual click, €500 buys nearly 400 visits. With the rates above, that's about fifteen quote requests and five new clients a month.

Split that budget according to what you sell:

• maintenance and mowing, from March to May, with the tax credit in the headline if you're registered;
• design and landscaping, from February to June, on queries that include "quote," "company" or "creation";
• pruning and felling, from October to March, to smooth out winter activity.

Stick to your actual service area, not the whole country. A landscaper works within a twenty or thirty kilometer radius, and the national volume tells you nothing about your market. Pulzeo's keyword research gives you the volumes for your city or region, with the cost-per-click range, without having to create a campaign. Pulzeo's pricing is to be compared with that ad budget, not with an agency's fee.

For a neighboring trade, where the job is also signed on a quote, see what a client costs a contractor.