Where our numbers come from

The three numbers

• Lead cost is the average Google Ads cost-per-click for the job in a given metro: what your competitors actually pay to buy a click from someone searching for that service. It comes straight from Google's advertising data.
• Demand is how many times people search for that job in the metro each month. It is search interest, not the number of jobs sold, and we label it that way.
• Price range is a typical range for the job, compiled from published pricing and operators in the field. It is a starting point, not a quote for any specific job.

Source

Lead cost and demand are pulled from DataForSEO, which resells Google Ads and Google search-volume data through its Keyword Data API (the google_ads/search_volume endpoint). For each job we read the reported search volume, cost-per-click, competition level, and the trailing twelve months of monthly search volume that powers the trend line.

How a job's number is built

A "job" (for example, a core Event DJ service) is not a single keyword. Real owners and customers phrase the same need many ways, so each job maps to a small cluster of the way people actually search for it (the plain term, the "near me" variant, the "cost" variant, common synonyms). For that job we report:

• Demand = the search volume of the highest-volume term in the cluster, so the figure reflects genuine interest in the service rather than one narrow phrase. (An early version reported only the exact "cost" phrase, which made demand look far lower than reality. This is the fix.)
• Lead cost = the volume-weighted average cost-per-click across the cluster, so a rarely-searched phrase does not distort the going rate.

Metros

Numbers are pulled per metropolitan area (city-level for the major US and Canadian metros we cover, plus national US and Canada baselines). Metro-level search volumes are naturally much smaller than national ones: a few hundred monthly searches for a specific service in one city is normal and real, not an error.

Freshness

We refresh the data on a regular cadence and stamp each market page with the month it was last updated. The trend badge compares the most recent three months against the same three months a year earlier, smoothed so a single odd month does not swing it.

What it is not

These are market signals, not a promise. Search demand is not a count of jobs available, cost-per-click is not what you will pay per booked customer, and a price range is not a quote. Use the numbers to sanity-check your own pricing and lead spend, not as the last word. Spot something that looks off? Tell us and we will check it.