National averages are useless to a business that works within a forty-minute drive. This page treats Ghent as its own market: what a lead costs here, how much demand the metro can realistically supply in a year, and which channels are worth the effort at this scale.

The defining local feature is a large protected historic centre where permit conditions on facades and windows are stricter than anywhere else in Flanders. That single fact shapes both which trades find work easily and how much a quote is worth once it converts.

The numbers, at a glance

• Metro premium: the local auction runs roughly 12 percent above the Belgian national average, which is where the lead price below comes from

• Exclusive lead price: EUR 45 to EUR 125, depending which of the trades below you work in

• Households you can sell to: about 260,000, inside a metro population of roughly 600,000 people

• Live projects per year: modelled at 9,000 to 15,000 across all home-improvement trades combined

• Worked example: one garden and landscaping customer costs about EUR 405 to acquire at these prices

Which channels are worth running at this scale

Five channels genuinely work at metro scale for contractors. They are not alternatives so much as a sequence, and the mistake most businesses make is starting with the most expensive one.

• Google Search captures people who have already decided to buy and are choosing who from. Highest intent, highest cost per click, smallest audience.

• Buying exclusive leads skips the build entirely. You pay more per enquiry and nothing per month, and you can turn it off in a week.

• Meta and Instagram creates demand rather than capturing it. Cheaper per click, lower intent, and it needs a real offer rather than a contact form.

• Google Local Services sits above the normal results and charges per lead rather than per click, but requires verification and is not available everywhere.

• Local SEO and the map pack is the cheapest sustainable source in any metro and the slowest to build. Reviews and proximity decide it more than content does.

If you are new to Ghent, the order that wastes the least money is: claim and complete the local business profile in week one, buy exclusive leads in week two so the crew has work while everything else matures, and only open a paid search account once you know your close rate well enough to calculate what a click is worth to you.

What the protected centre does to a window quote

Ghent has one of the largest protected historic cores in Flanders, and inside it the exterior of a building is not the owner's to change freely. Frame profiles, sightlines, opening direction and material are all capable of being conditioned, and a PVC replacement that would be waved through in a suburb gets refused here. That turns a two-week sale into a three-month one. The installers who make money on it quote in two stages, charge separately for the permit work, and keep a portfolio of approved installations to show the next customer what is achievable.

Proximity and proof decide the map pack here

There is no content trick that beats being close to the searcher with recent reviews. Local ranking in a metro is decided mostly by distance from the point of search, by how many people have reviewed you lately, and by whether your pages describe the actual place. Everything else is a rounding error.

1. Write at suburb level, not city level. One page per district you genuinely serve, naming streets or neighbourhoods, outranks one page that names Ghent alone.

2. Make the review request part of handover. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a large old total, and reviews that mention the district do double duty.

3. Use your own photographs of local buildings. They convert better than stock images and they give a retrieval engine something concrete to attribute to you.

4. State the radius and hold it. Every enquiry outside it burns a quote and drags your close rate down, which shows up as a higher cost per signed job even though the lead price never moved.

The circulation plan quietly filters out half your competitors

The city centre is divided into sectors with no through traffic between them, so a van cannot simply cross from one side to the other and deliveries into the core need planning. Contractors based outside Ghent consistently underestimate this and price a city-centre job as though it were a suburban one. Local firms know which access route serves which sector and load accordingly. If you are entering from outside, either build that knowledge before you quote or stay in the outer belt where it does not apply.

What an exclusive lead costs in Ghent

Lead prices in Ghent run EUR 45 to EUR 125 across the three trades modelled below, and that band is roughly 12 percent above the Belgian national average. The premium exists because installer density inside a metro is higher than across the country as a whole, and every one of those installers bids on the same short list of high-intent keywords.

• Roofing: EUR 80 to EUR 125 per exclusive lead. 4 to 6 leads normally convert into one customer, and the buyer is a homeowner with a leak or a roof past twenty-five years old. Peak demand runs after the first autumn storms.

• Painting and plastering: EUR 45 to EUR 80 per exclusive lead. 5 to 8 leads normally convert into one customer, and the buyer is a homeowner or landlord preparing a property. Peak demand runs spring.

• Garden and landscaping: EUR 45 to EUR 70 per exclusive lead. 5 to 9 leads normally convert into one customer, and the buyer is a homeowner planning a terrace, fence or full garden redesign. Peak demand runs March to June.

The distance between the cheapest and the dearest trade on that list tracks job value rather than difficulty. A lead worth a five-figure contract will always cost more than one worth a four-figure contract, because the person bidding against you can afford it and knows it.

Renovation support in Belgium is regional, not national

There is no single Belgian grant. Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels each run their own renovation support with their own conditions, their own forms and their own definitions of what counts, and a contractor working across the language border effectively works in two administrative systems. Say on your site which region you handle. A homeowner searching for support finds regional pages, and a contractor who mirrors that structure is far easier to match to the right scheme than one who writes about Belgium in general.

Cost per customer, not cost per lead

A lead price on its own tells you nothing. Divide it by your close rate and the number becomes decision-grade.

Take the middle trade on this page. A garden and landscaping lead in Ghent averages EUR 60. At the normal 5 to 9 exclusive leads per signed customer, that is about EUR 405 to win one, against a typical project of EUR 5,000. Acquisition is therefore running near 8.1 percent of contract value.

The working rule across home-improvement trades is that a healthy acquisition cost sits between 4 and 9 percent of job value. Above 12 percent, either lead quality or follow-up is broken, and in practice it is almost always follow-up. Metro job values are higher than national ones, which is precisely why a metro lead premium is usually affordable.

A first ninety days in Ghent

1. Weeks one and two: fix the local business profile, the service area and the review request process. This is unpaid and it compounds.

2. Weeks three to six: buy exclusive leads in one trade only and answer every one within five minutes. Speed to first contact moves close rate more than any other single variable.

3. Week six: calculate your close rate honestly. Multiply it out to a cost per customer and compare it against your average job value of about EUR 5,000 in garden and landscaping.

4. Weeks seven to ten: add the second trade only if the first one is converting. Two half-run trades lose to one well-run trade every time.

5. Week ten onwards: open paid search with a bid ceiling derived from your measured numbers, not from what the platform suggests.

6. Review the drive-time boundary once a month. If the crew is spending more than ninety minutes a day travelling, the boundary is wrong, not the lead source.

How these figures were built

These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote. The local numbers stack a metro premium on top of the national band, and convert population to households at 2.3 people per household. The annual project pool assumes 3.5 to 6 percent of households commission qualifying work in a year, which is a modelled range rather than a measured one.

How Flock Leads prices this

Leads in Ghent are sold exclusively and priced by volume rather than by trade, so the per-lead cost falls as the block gets larger. Compare the per-lead figures below against the EUR 45 to EUR 125 modelled above for this metro.

• Starter - 10 leads for EUR 750, which is EUR 75 per lead

• Growth - 25 leads for EUR 1,750, which is EUR 70 per lead

• Scale - 45 leads for EUR 2,925, which is EUR 65 per lead

• Pro - 70 leads for EUR 4,340, which is EUR 62 per lead

• Max - 90 leads for EUR 5,400, which is EUR 60 per lead

No retainer, no contract term, and no lead sent to a second business. Unused volume rolls over under the Flock Lead Promise.

Want leads like this in your pipeline?

Flock runs the campaigns, screens the enquiries and hands you only the ones that match your service area, job size and capacity. You pay per lead, not per month.

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