Cost per booked job
Total ad spend divided by the number of jobs that actually got onto the schedule.
Meta will tell you cost per lead all day. It has no idea what a booked job is, because booking happens in your CRM, on your phone, in someone’s driveway. Cost per booked job is the number you have to build yourself, and it is the only one that corresponds to money.
Why it matters for HVAC
The gap between a lead and a job is wider in home services than almost anywhere else, and it varies enormously by campaign. A tune-up offer produces cheap leads that book at a decent rate and are worth very little each. A system replacement campaign produces expensive leads that book rarely and are worth thousands. Judged on cost per lead these look like a winner and a loser. Judged on cost per booked job they frequently swap places.
Every agency in this market reports cost per lead. Almost none report this.
How it is measured
Spend for the period divided by jobs booked from that spend in the same period, taken from the CRM rather than from Ads Manager. The honest version needs a stated lag, because a lead that arrives on the 29th books in the following month, and comparing this month’s spend against this month’s bookings understates good campaigns and flatters bad ones.
A worked example
Six thousand dollars produces 120 leads at $50. The office books 12. Cost per booked job is $500. Now split by ad set: one produced 74 leads at $38 and booked 3, which is $937 a job. The other produced 46 leads at $67 and booked 9, which is $342. The cheaper leads cost nearly three times as much once they turned into work, and an account optimised on cost per lead would have moved budget toward the worse of the two.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business.
What to ask
Ask what your cost per booked job was last month, and what lag they used. An agency reporting only cost per lead is reporting the number Meta handed them.
Where this is demonstrated
The Tracking and the Conversions API pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.