What this is for

Paid social has a measurement problem that almost nobody selling it will explain to you. Meta counts the conversions it believes it caused, and it is generous to itself. The homeowner who was already going to replace a condenser, who happened to scroll past a tune-up ad three days earlier, shows up in the monthly report as a conversion. Reporting that as a result of the advertising is not fraud, it is just the default behaviour of the tools, and it is what most monthly reports in this industry consist of.

So the question worth asking an agency is not what your cost per lead was. It is whether anyone can show the ads caused any work. Across the nine agencies here, not one publishes evidence that they have ever tried to find out.

HVAC and plumbing owners somewhere between a couple of million and twenty million in revenue, who are being sold Meta ads or already paying for them and cannot tell whether the reporting means anything. You do not need to know any of this to run a good company, and you should not have to learn a platform's vocabulary to avoid being taken for a ride. The glossary exists so you can look up whatever your agency just said and get a straight answer with numbers on it.

• Rank anyone on results. There is no lawful way to obtain a third party's real cost per lead or managed spend, so any site claiming to rank agencies by performance is repeating their marketing back to you.
• Attach a number to a company we did not read off their own page. Every figure here traces to a source with the date we read it, and claims an agency makes about itself are recorded as their claims.
• Publish an absence we have not controlled for. We nearly got this wrong once, in public, and wrote up how.
• Take money for placement. No agency has paid to be listed or could.