Lead quality
Whether the people a campaign produced could ever have become customers.
The term gets used as if it were self-evident, which is how it survives without a definition. A lead is high quality if it reaches someone who can buy, wants what you sell, lives where you work, and answers the phone. Any one of those failing makes it worthless regardless of what it cost.
Why it matters for HVAC
Home services is unusually exposed here because so many failure modes are invisible in the ad account. Renters. People outside the service radius. People who already booked someone else. Someone pricing a job for next spring. Every one of them shows in Ads Manager as a successful conversion.
How it is measured
Only in your CRM, and only if someone records outcomes. The minimum useful version is four states per lead: unreachable, reached but unqualified, qualified, booked. Anything less and quality stays a feeling that whoever is louder in the meeting gets to define.
A worked example
Two ad sets both deliver 50 leads. The first: 31 answered, 24 qualified, 11 booked. The second: 19 answered, 15 qualified, 3 booked. Same volume, same cost per lead, and the second is quietly wasting most of a month of office time. Without outcome states in the CRM, both look identical on the report.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business.
What to ask
Ask how lead quality is measured rather than whether it is good. If the answer is a feeling, the account is being optimised on volume whatever anyone intends.
Where this is demonstrated
The Instant form campaigns pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.