Christmas Light Installation Leads: Every Channel Ranked by Cost Per Booked Roofline, Sold in September

How much do Christmas light installation leads cost?

Priced September 8, 2026, against the $444 average install, most between $220 and $684, and a customer who rebooks for five years when the lights are yours.

The rest of this post is why the calendar is the strategy, and the order to build the channels in.

The number that matters is the rebooking

A $60 lead for a $444 install that never comes back is a $60 lead. The same $60 lead for a house whose lights live in your garage is $60 against five seasons at $444 to $1,000, with the next four booked by a text in September. Everything about lead value in this trade depends on owning the inventory, which the start guide makes the case for.

So this post ranks channels by cost per booked roofline in year one, and notes which ones produce a customer that stays. The owned channels do; the marketplaces mostly do not, because the customer who shopped five installers on a platform shops five again next October. Our Christmas light advertising guide covers the ads and the copy; this post is the leads.

Why Christmas lights is its own animal

The lead arrives in September; the job happens in November. Installs run from the week before Thanksgiving; the booking happens six to eight weeks earlier. Every channel here is switched on in September and most are off by the first week of November, when the auction doubles and the calendar is full.

There is no Local Services Ads category. Google's list has no holiday lighting entry, and there is no honest workaround. The pay-per-lead channel that anchors most home-service leads posts does not exist here, which pushes the weight onto Search in September and onto the owned channels.

The product is a photo. A lit house at dusk sells more rooflines than any ad copy, and a mockup of the customer's own house lit up closes more quotes than a price. Every channel below is carrying the same photo.

The owned channels: the list, the display house, the clip, the street

The list. Last year's customers, texted in mid-September with the photo of their own house lit: "Same roofline, same price, install the week of the 20th?" If there is no last year, the summer trade's list is the next best thing; a lawn or gutter customer who trusts you on a ladder is a lighting customer.

The display house. One free install on a corner lot in the neighbourhood you want, lit by the first of November with a small sign. Six weeks of evenings, every house on the street. Two of these in two neighbourhoods is a route.

The clip. The display house filmed at dusk, thirty seconds, posted to Facebook and Instagram with the per-foot price, boosted at $5 a day to your own zip codes in September and October. A free Nextdoor business page gets the same clip, where "who did the lights on Maple?" is asked every November.

The street. A door hanger at about nine cents (1,000 for $93.51) on every house that can see the display house, with the per-foot price and a QR code to the booking page.

The profile and the page. Holiday lighting as a service on the summer trade's profile, or its own profile with a category that fits, the per-foot price in the services list, and twenty lit-house photos. Our Google Business Profile guide covers the setup.

Google Search: the early-bird ad, on in September, off in November

Clicks cost about $7.23 for "christmas light installers", $7.56 for "christmas light installation near me" and $5.33 for "permanent christmas lights" (Google Ads averages via DataForSEO, September 2026), and those are September prices. By the second week of November every installer in the county is bidding and the calendar is full anyway.

The ad that works is the early-bird: a book-by-October-15 price, a deposit, and a landing page with the lit house and the per-foot rate. Send "permanent christmas lights" to its own page with the $20 to $40 a foot price and a photo of the track under the eave; it is the highest-ticket click in the trade and it runs year-round. A click that lands on a homepage with no price is a click that calls the next installer.

Marketplaces: Thumbtack and Angi at a $444 install

Thumbtack. Pipeline On's May 2026 analysis puts most home-service leads at $25 to $75, with every responder paying and 78% of homeowners choosing the first contractor to reply; holiday lighting is not broken out. At a $444 install and a one-in-five close that is up to $375 per booked roofline, for a customer who shops the platform again next year.

Angi. LeadTruffle's 2026 guide (LeadTruffle sells lead-qualification software) puts most contractors at $15 to $85 a lead, shared with three to eight, plus about $300 a year and a reported $400 monthly minimum on twelve-month contracts. A twelve-month contract for a ten-week season is forty-two weeks of paying for nothing.

Neither produces the customer who rebooks. Both can fill a week in late November, at the highest price of the year.

So what should you do?

September: profile and page live with the per-foot price and a lit-house photo; the September text to last year's list and the summer list; the early-bird Search ad on; the clip boosted.

October: the display house installed and lit by the first of November; hangers on its street; every quote sent as a mockup of the customer's own house; deposits taken.

November: ads off by the second week; install; a review request by text the evening the lights go on, with the photo.

January: takedowns, and the lights back in the garage. Count cost per booked roofline by channel; the list and the display house win, the September ad is close, the marketplaces do not appear. Next September, the list is bigger.

Where ServicePro fits

ServicePro is the getting-found half of this post as software: the profile, the page with the per-foot price and the lit house on it, and the booking page a door hanger or a clip opens. The free plan builds it from your Google Business Profile in about five minutes, on your own domain, with up to five service pages, an inbox for every call and message, and five review requests a month, with no per-lead fees at any volume.

Pro is $99 a month, no contract, and adds Google Map rank tracking for "christmas light installation near me" and "permanent christmas lights" across every town you serve, up to 25 location pages, a tracked phone number with two-way texting so the roofline call gets a text back at dark, 100 automatic review requests a month with AI-drafted replies, and the lit-house photo posted for you to your Google Business Profile and to Facebook and Instagram.

The Christmas lights page shows what the site and the rank tracking look like for this trade, and own your leads is the longer argument.