ROAS
Revenue attributed to advertising divided by what was spent on it.
A 6x return means six dollars of attributed revenue for each dollar spent. It is the headline metric of e-commerce advertising and it arrives in home services largely because the agencies arrived from e-commerce.
Why it is a poor fit for HVAC
Revenue is not margin. A system replacement carries equipment cost, labour, and a technician’s day; a maintenance plan carries almost none. Two campaigns reporting identical returns can contribute wildly different amounts to the business, and the metric cannot see the difference.
It also inherits every attribution problem underneath it. A return figure is attributed revenue divided by spend, and attributed revenue includes view-through credit and whatever the window allowed. A large number can describe a campaign that caused very little.
How it is measured
Where it is used at all, it should carry its attribution window and say whether the revenue figure came from the platform or from the business. The better replacement for a service business is cost per booked job compared against gross margin per job, which is arithmetic anybody in the office can check.
A worked example
A campaign reports 6.03x. On seven-day click plus one-day view, from platform-attributed revenue, over one month, on one account. Recomputed on one-day click against invoiced revenue it comes to 2.4x, and after equipment and labour it contributes less than the maintenance campaign running beside it at a reported 3.1x.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business. A published claim of exactly 6.03x carrying none of that context appears on this leaderboard, and it is why that agency scores zero on claim hygiene.
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.