Which ads produced jobs, not just calls?

Home services has the widest spread between a small job and a large one of almost any local industry. A drain clear and a sewer line replacement come from the same phone number and the same ad, and averaging them together tells you nothing you can act on.

Ranking channels by invoiced value rather than call count usually reorders them. It is common for a channel producing a third of the calls to produce most of the revenue, and for the channel everyone assumed was best to be producing volume at the bottom of the ticket range.

A furnace that fails in January produces a call within the hour, and click-based attribution handles that case fine. The problem is the other half of the business: the quote given in October that is approved in March, the maintenance customer who comes back for a replacement two years later.

Because CloseRev matches on the customer rather than a browser session, both cases work the same way. The March approval is credited to the ad that produced the October call, which is usually the difference between a channel looking break-even and looking like your best one.

Almost every home services company runs two economies at once. Service calls are frequent, small and easy to attribute: somebody has a problem today and calls today. Replacements are rare, large and slow, and they are where the year's profit actually is.

The awkward part is that the same campaign produces both. A keyword that generates cheap emergency calls looks excellent on cost per lead and may produce almost no replacement revenue; a keyword that generates a handful of expensive inquiries looks wasteful and may carry the quarter.

Ranking channels on invoiced revenue rather than on jobs booked separates them without anybody having to guess. It is also why a job-type column is worth adding to the export: with it, the report can rank channels twice and show that the two rankings are not the same list.

Two findings come up again and again. The unattributed share is larger than expected — commonly a third or more — because repeat customers, neighbors and van signage genuinely do produce work that no advertisement can be credited with. Reporting that honestly is the point; spreading it across the paid channels would make every other number on the page untrustworthy.

The second is that the channel producing the most jobs is rarely the channel producing the most revenue. That is not a reason to switch anything off. It is a reason to bid differently, because the two keyword sets are doing different jobs and have been funded as though they were the same one.