You can tell me your monthly spend on every channel to the dollar. Google, the marketplace, the boosted posts, the van wrap, the sponsorship of the little league team.
Now tell me how many booked jobs came from each one last month. Not leads. Jobs, with revenue attached.
Almost nobody can, and it is not a discipline failure. It is a plumbing failure. The lead arrives with its source attached, and somewhere between the form and the invoice that information gets dropped, because nothing was ever built to carry it through.
Cost per lead is a vanity number. Cost per booked job is the only one that decides where next month's budget goes.
What guessing costs
Here is what a real month looks like once you can see it. The numbers below are the shape I see most often in home services.
| Source | Spend | Leads | Booked | Cost per job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Local Services | $1,800 | 22 | 8 | $225 |
| Google Ads | $2,400 | 30 | 7 | $343 |
| Marketplace leads | $1,200 | 26 | 4 | $300 |
| $600 | 18 | 2 | $300 | |
| Referral | $0 | 9 | 6 | $0 |
| Total | $6,000 | 105 | 27 | $222 |
Read it by cost per lead and Facebook looks like your cheapest channel at $33 a lead. Read it by cost per booked job and Facebook costs the same as the marketplace and books a quarter as much work. Meanwhile Google Ads generates the most leads and the second-worst cost per job, which is exactly the trap that keeps budgets pointed the wrong way.
And look at referral. Nine leads, six jobs, no spend. That is the channel nobody has a plan for, because it never appears on an invoice.
The tracking build, step by step
Attribution in a service business is not hard. It is just five things nobody bothers to connect.
Where attribution usually breaks
Phone calls. The biggest hole in every service business. A call has no hidden field, so unless each channel has its own tracked number, every phone lead becomes untagged. Tracked numbers cost a few dollars a month and fix a third of the problem on their own.
Referrals. They come in by name, get typed into a job, and never get tagged, which is how the best-performing source in most service businesses stays invisible. Add Referral to the dropdown and ask on the intake question.
Repeat customers. If a repeat job gets tagged with the channel that won them two years ago, you will overstate that channel forever. Repeat gets its own value, and the original source stays on the contact rather than the job.
Multi-touch reality. Somebody sees the van, searches your name, then clicks the ad. Do not build a weighted attribution model for a service business, it is not worth the complexity. Take first-touch, be consistent about it, and read the trend rather than the decimal.
What changes once it is in
Before: budget decisions made on lead volume, gut feel, and whichever rep called you most recently.
After: one table, updated monthly without anybody assembling it, that tells you where the next dollar goes. Channels that were quietly subsidised by better ones get cut. Referral finally gets a plan, because you can see it is your best-performing source and it has never had a single dollar or process behind it.
Half your marketing budget works. Attribution is just the part where you find out which half, in under a month.
The measurable: the percentage of booked jobs with a source attached. Below 90% and you are still guessing with extra steps. Above it, the budget conversation gets very short and very easy.
