Everybody wants three quotes. Only some of them were ever going to accept one.

Two sources delivering the same number of enquiries can produce completely different books of work, because the people they send arrive with different intentions.

A marketplace that sells the same job to four trades produces price comparison. A tracked number on a van produces somebody who already decided who they wanted.

With quotes exported beside invoices, the report gives acceptance rate and average accepted value per channel, which is a far better basis for a budget than cost per enquiry.

It also distinguishes a channel sending poor enquiries from one whose quotes you are slow to send, and those are different problems with different fixes.

Work grows on site, variations get added, and occasionally a job shrinks when the customer sees the price of the full version.

Ranking channels on quoted value therefore measures optimism, which is a property of whoever wrote the quote rather than of the marketing.

The report uses invoices for revenue throughout and shows the gap per channel where both files are present.

A source whose jobs systematically shrink between quote and invoice is worth knowing about before it gets cut for producing small work it did not produce.

Every quote costs time — a site visit, a measure-up, an evening writing it — and that cost lands whether or not the job is won.

Excluded from the file, a channel that generates ten quotes for one job looks identical to one that generates two, and the difference is a week of unpaid work.

Keeping the declines in makes the real cost per won job visible, which is the number a trade business actually spends.

It is also the finding that most often ends a marketplace subscription, because the cost per lead was never the cost. A source charging twenty pounds a lead at a one-in-ten acceptance rate is charging two hundred pounds a job, plus ten evenings of quoting nobody paid for.

Heating, roofing and drainage work move with the weather, and their marketing does too.

A channel measured across one season is being measured against demand rather than against another channel, and the ranking will reverse when the season does.

A full year on both sides removes it, and the report groups revenue by when the lead arrived rather than by when the invoice was raised.

That grouping is what makes next season's budget decidable, which is the actual purpose of the exercise. Knowing a channel takes six weeks from enquiry to accepted quote also tells you when to start spending, which is a question no conversion rate answers, and it is the difference between a busy spring and an empty one. A channel with a short lag can be turned on late; one with a long lag cannot, and buying it late is the same as not buying it.