Ad dashboards are good at showing clicks, impressions and form fills. They are not good at telling you whether anyone booked a job. If you only look at those numbers, you can spend months paying for leads that never turn into work. This article explains how to follow an ad all the way to a booked job, in terms an owner can act on.
The number that matters
The number to know is what it costs you to get one booked job from ads. Not one click, not one lead. A booked job.
Here is an example. Say a roofing company spends $2,000 in a month on ads and gets 40 form submissions. That sounds like $50 per lead. But if only 8 of those people are real, reachable and in your area, and 4 of them book, then each booked job cost $500 in ad spend. Whether that is good depends on what a job is worth to you. You cannot know that from the dashboard alone.
What to track
You need three records for every enquiry: where it came from, what happened to it, and what it was worth.
- Source: which platform, and ideally which campaign or ad. Use tagged links so this is saved with the lead.
- Status: new, contacted, quote sent, booked, lost. Update it as things change.
- Value: the quoted or invoiced amount once you have one.
- Call tracking: if many enquiries come by phone, use a tracking number so calls are counted too.
A spreadsheet can do this at a small scale. Once you have more than a few enquiries a day, a simple CRM that stores the source automatically saves hours and removes arguments about what worked.
Send results back to the platforms
Both Meta and Google let you report real outcomes back to them, such as a booked job, not only a form fill. When they know which leads were good, they can find more people like them. This is often called offline conversion tracking. It takes some setup, and it needs your lead records to be clean, but it is the difference between optimizing for form fills and optimizing for work.
Review it monthly
Once a month, list each campaign with its spend, the number of enquiries, the number of booked jobs and the cost per booked job. Turn off what is clearly not working, and put the money on what is. Keep notes on what you changed so you can tell later what made the difference.
If you want ad campaigns that are set up and measured this way from the start, see our digital marketing work.
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