Why the cost-per-lead range is so wide for this trade
A $12 lead and a $60 lead can both be labeled "chimney sweep lead" while representing completely different acquisition strategies. The $12 to $26 range reflects a business with a strong organic presence, an optimized Google Business Profile, and steady reviews doing most of the work for free once it's built. The higher end of the range, up to $60, tends to reflect businesses leaning more heavily on paid channels to compensate for a weaker organic foundation.
Neither number is wrong, but they represent different points in a business's growth. A new chimney sweep operation with no review history and no search visibility yet will likely pay closer to the top of the range until the organic side catches up.
Budgeting against a customer acquisition cost target
A target CAC of roughly $120 gives a concrete planning number: a $12,000 marketing budget over a season should produce approximately 100 new customers at that rate. This framing is more useful for planning than the raw cost-per-lead figure alone, since it accounts for the fact that not every lead converts to a paying customer.
For a seasonal trade specifically, this budget is best thought of as concentrated rather than spread evenly across the year: the bulk of it should be deployed to be visible during the narrow window when most searches actually happen, not distributed evenly across twelve months where most of it would be spent chasing off-season demand that barely exists. Exactly when that spend needs to happen matters as much as how much of it there is.