The kitchen was saved in February and paid for in September.

In most channels the lag is a nuisance to be handled. Here it is the property that defines the channel, and reporting it is more useful than reporting a conversion rate.

A campaign whose leads close in a median of four months is a working campaign that any quarterly review would have killed twice.

Because the report keeps both dates, it gives that interval per campaign, which tells you how far ahead of the season to spend as well as whether to spend at all.

It also identifies the rare campaigns here that close quickly, which are usually the ones catching somebody at the end of a project rather than the start.

Somebody collecting ideas for a bathroom is a genuine future customer who is not currently in the market, which is an uncomfortable combination for any measurement built on sessions.

Treated as a failed conversion, that person is evidence the channel does not work. Treated as a lead with a long fuse, they are the channel working exactly as it should.

The distinction cannot be made inside a platform report, because the platform stops watching long before the decision happens.

Matching to invoices over a year makes it, and it is the difference between a channel being cut and a channel being scheduled.

Planning peaks and buying peaks are both seasonal here and they are offset from each other, so a quarter's spend and a quarter's revenue are almost never about the same customers.

Comparing them produces a ratio that moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the marketing, and moves hardest exactly when somebody is reviewing the budget.

A full year on both sides removes the problem, and the report groups revenue by when the lead arrived rather than by when the money did.

That grouping is what makes a spending decision possible: you are choosing what to buy next season, and last season's revenue is about the season before.

An emergency trade — a burst pipe, a lockout, an urgent repair — has no planning stage, and nothing in this method will manufacture one.

The report will show leads and no revenue, over a long window, which is a clean answer and worth reaching quickly rather than slowly.

The channel's fit is with considered, visual, planned purchases: remodels, weddings, treatments, furniture, landscaping.

Saying that plainly is more useful than a page that implies every business should be advertising here.