Cost per Booked Job: A Worksheet for Home Service Marketing

Track marketing cost through qualified inquiries, appointments and completed work. This worksheet separates cost per lead from cost per booked job and keeps revenue claims understandable.

Use consistent definitions

Start by agreeing what each stage means. An inquiry is a contact request. A qualified inquiry meets your service and area criteria. A booked job is work scheduled according to your business definition. A completed job has actually been delivered. Revenue should have its own definition, such as payments collected.

Write those definitions next to your report. If one team calls an estimate a booking and another counts only scheduled work, their reports will disagree even when both use the same source data.

The worksheet fields

• Reporting period and campaign or source.
• Media spend during that period.
• Creative, management and other included marketing costs.
• New inquiries, deduplicated using an agreed method.
• Qualified inquiries and the reasons others were excluded.
• Appointments and booked jobs under your written definitions.
• Completed jobs and payments collected.
• Cancellations, refunds and jobs still pending.
• Direct labor, materials and other costs needed to evaluate contribution.

Three calculations to keep separate

Cost per lead = included marketing cost ÷ new inquiries.
Cost per booked job = included marketing cost ÷ booked jobs.
Cost per completed job = included marketing cost ÷ completed jobs.

If the denominator is zero, report “no jobs recorded” rather than dividing by zero or displaying a reassuring number. State whether costs mean ad spend only or all included marketing costs. Both views can be useful, but they answer different questions.

A hypothetical example

Suppose a campaign spends $1,200 on media and $800 on creative and management for the period. The office records 40 inquiries, 10 booked jobs and 8 completed jobs from those inquiries. Using $2,000 of included marketing cost, the figures are $50 per inquiry, $200 per booked job and $250 per completed job.

These numbers are invented solely to explain the calculation. They are not Lead Zone Digital client results or expected benchmarks. Whether $250 per completed job is acceptable depends on the business’s job contribution, capacity and wider costs.

Check the timing before judging the result

A lead generated in one month may book or pay in another. Separate a calendar-period report from a lead-cohort report that follows the same group of inquiries to their eventual outcome. Record pending jobs rather than treating them as failures or collected revenue.

Attribution can also be uncertain when a homeowner sees several ads, searches the brand and calls later. Preserve the source information you have, document the method and acknowledge gaps. Do not add overlapping platform totals and present the sum as independently verified revenue.