Set appointments are a ranking of your call centre, not your marketing.

The industry's default metric is cost per issued or set appointment, because it is available the same week and every lead vendor reports it.

It measures how well your team books the leads it is given, which is a real and important thing and is not the same question as which marketing to buy more of.

Sources that book easily and sign rarely — shoppers, price-led enquiries, incentive-driven show leads — look excellent at that stage and poor at the contract.

Ranking on contract value moves the decision to the stage where the money is, and the reordering between the two lists is usually large enough to be uncomfortable.

Home shows, canvassing, direct mail, yard signs and referrals produce a large share of a remodeler's contracts and none of them appear in an advertising platform.

Reports built from the platforms therefore compare digital channels with each other and leave out most of the budget.

Every one of those sources can carry an identifier — a tracked number on the mail piece, a source code captured at the show, a canvasser's code on the lead record — and once it does, it ranks alongside paid search on the same money.

That comparison is frequently the one that changes the plan, because the offline sources are also the ones nobody has ever costed properly.

A bath conversion, a full roof and a whole-house window job are different amounts of money and different sales cycles.

A source that produces mostly one product will be ranked as though it produced the mix, which flatters some channels and buries others.

Where the export carries a product line, the report splits on it and the answer becomes usable: this source for roofs, that source for baths, at these costs.

Without the split, a remodeler running several product lines is reading an average that describes no real decision they can make.

A contract signed in March may install in July and may cancel in April, and both of those change what the marketing actually produced.

Whatever your convention — net of cancellations, or gross with a flag — the important part is applying it identically to every source, because cancellation rates differ sharply by source.

The report reads a year, which is long enough for the lag and long enough for the cancellations to have happened, and it keeps the lead date so the typical time to signature per source is visible.

That lag figure has its own use: a source with a four-month average is a source you must keep buying through the quiet season or lose the following one.