Most home service owners I talk to can tell me exactly what they spend on Google Ads each month. Fewer can tell me what that spend produced — and that’s less about the owner than about how the reporting is built.
Google’s dashboard is designed to show activity, and activity looks like progress. Impressions are up. Clicks are up. Conversions have a number beside them. None of that is wrong, it’s just not the same as booked jobs.
So here are the seven numbers I pull first in every account I take over, in the order I check them, what each one is telling you, and where to find it. You can run this yourself in an afternoon, and I’d genuinely rather you knew how than took my word for it.
1. What counts as a conversion
This one isn’t a number — it’s the question that gives every other number meaning, which is why it goes first. In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary, and read the list of conversion actions along with the “Include in Conversions” column.
What I commonly find: page views counted as leads, clicks on a phone number that never connected to a call, or the same lead counted twice through two different tags. Just as often I find the reverse — real form submissions that were never tracked, which means the platform never learned what a good click looks like.
What good looks like: every action in that column is something a real potential customer did — a form submitted, a call that connected and lasted long enough to be a conversation, a booked appointment. Nothing else. If anything on that list isn’t a genuine lead, every cost-per-lead figure you’ve been shown is measuring the wrong thing, so this is worth fixing before touching a budget.
2. Cost per lead, by campaign — not by account
An account-level cost per lead is an average, and averages hide the useful information. In one account with a perfectly reasonable-looking blended number, one campaign was producing leads at $75 and another at $359. The average described neither.
Add the Conversions and Cost/Conv. columns to your campaign view and read it line by line. Then judge each campaign against what a job is worth to you rather than a benchmark from an article. Here’s the math I’d want you to have: take your average job value, multiply by your close rate, and that’s the revenue an average lead is worth. A $6,000 job at a 30 percent close rate makes a lead worth about $1,800 in revenue — which puts a $180 lead in a very different light than it first appears.
3. Conversion rate
Cost per lead moves for one of two reasons: you’re paying more per click, or fewer clicks are becoming leads. Those have completely different fixes, and conversion rate is how you tell them apart.
In one account I track, cost per lead went $139, then $221, then back to $90 over four months while spend stayed essentially flat. That whole swing was conversion rate. The bidding never needed touching — the landing page and the call handling did.
How to read it: if cost per click is steady and conversion rate dropped, look at the page and the phone. If conversion rate held and cost per click rose, that’s competitive pressure in the auction.
4. Search terms, not keywords
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. They’re two different lists, and the space between them is where budget quietly goes.
“Foundation repair near me” is a customer. “How to fix a cracked foundation yourself” is someone who was never going to call. Both cost the same click. Negative keyword lists tend to be thin simply because nothing in the platform prompts you to maintain them, and in my experience that gap runs 20 to 40 percent of a budget.
Go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. Set the date range to the last 90 days, sort by cost, and read the top 50. Ten minutes will tell you whether this is your problem. Watch for the recurring words: “DIY,” “how to,” “salary,” “jobs,” “free,” “cost calculator,” and the names of cities you don’t serve.
5. Impression share, and why you’re losing it
Impression share is how often your ad showed out of the times it could have. The genuinely useful part is the two columns beside it: share lost to budget and share lost to rank.
Lost to budget means the demand is there and your daily budget runs out partway through the day, so your ads stop showing until tomorrow. It does not mean customers chose a competitor. Lost to rank means your ads and landing pages aren’t winning the auction, and in that case more money mostly buys more expensive clicks.
That single distinction decides whether “raise the budget” is good advice or bad advice. In one account, lost-to-budget fell from 60 percent to 30 percent over six months while lost-to-rank climbed toward 48 percent — a clear signal to improve the ads and pages rather than spend more.
6. Your booking rate on the leads you already paid for
This number usually isn’t in Google Ads at all, which is exactly why it goes unwatched. Of the leads that came in last month, how many became a scheduled appointment?
If that’s 65 percent, moving it to 85 percent is worth more than any bidding change I could make, and it costs nothing in media. One client needed over 550 leads a month to reach their appointment target at their existing booking rate — an unbuyable number at any cost per lead. Improving the booking rate closed most of that gap for free.
7. Speed to first contact
A lead called back within five minutes converts several times better than one called back the next morning. Almost everyone agrees with this and almost nobody measures it, because there’s no report that hands it to you.
Pull ten leads from last week and check the time between the form submission and the first real conversation. If it’s measured in hours, that’s likely the cheapest improvement available to you, and no amount of ad optimization substitutes for it.
The two numbers to remember
If you keep only two things from this list, keep cost per lead and cost per booked job. Cost per lead tells you how efficiently you’re buying interest. Cost per booked job tells you how efficiently you’re turning interest into work, and it’s the one that connects marketing to revenue. Once you know both by heart, you can listen to any vendor’s report and judge it yourself.
Where to start
You don’t need all seven at once. Check number one, then number four. Between them, conversion tracking and unmanaged search terms account for most of the waste I find in contractor accounts.
And if you go looking and can’t tell what you’re seeing, that’s normal — these reports aren’t built for owners. That’s what an audit is for. I’ll go through the account and walk you through what’s working, what’s being wasted, and what I’d do about it, in plain English. No obligation afterward.