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Cost per lead is the number every agency reports and almost no owner can act on. Cost per booked job is the number that tells you whether the marketing is working. Here is how to get from one to the other, with a worked example.
A lead is anything that made contact. A form fill from a tire kicker, a call from a salesperson, a homeowner four states away, and the job you actually wanted all count as one lead each. When cost per lead falls, it usually means the campaign found a cheaper way to generate contacts, not a better way to generate jobs. The dashboard turns green and the schedule stays flat.
Of last month's marketing budget, how much produced a job that was actually done?
None of them is hard to get. All four have to be in the same place.
What each campaign cost last month, including what you pay the agency, the call tracking and anything else that only exists because the channel does.
Every call, form and text, tagged with the campaign that produced it. A tracked number per channel does most of this on its own.
The CRM or the field software knows which contacts became jobs. Matching them to the source is the step most companies skip, and it is the whole point.
Because a channel that books smaller jobs at a lower cost can still be the worse channel.
Illustrative figures for a two-crew HVAC company in a mid-size metro, one month. Paid search spent $4,200 and produced 61 contacts, 24 of which booked, at an average ticket of $1,850. Cost per lead: $69. Cost per booked job: $175. Revenue produced: $44,400. Meta spent $1,600 and produced 48 contacts, 6 of which booked, at an average ticket of $2,400. Cost per lead: $33. Cost per booked job: $267. Revenue produced: $14,400.
On cost per lead, Meta wins by half. On cost per booked job, paid search wins by a third, and it produced three times the revenue. The owner who only sees the first number moves budget in the wrong direction. The owner who sees the second keeps the paid search running, and then asks the better question about Meta, which is whether the booking rate can be fixed rather than whether the channel should be cut.
It depends entirely on the ticket. A $175 cost on an $1,850 HVAC repair is excellent. The same $175 on a $220 drain clearing is a loss. Judge it against the average ticket for that service, never against an industry average.
It is not. A dedicated tracked number per channel, a recording, and a match against the CRM gets most of the way there in the first month. Multi-touch attribution is harder; source attribution is routine.
Two full months. The first month establishes the tracking; the second is the first clean read. Decisions made on week-two data are usually wrong.
Yes. Send the website and we will come back with where your calls are going, what the channels currently produce, and the first fix.
Most owners do not need all of this. They need the one thing currently leaking revenue,
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