From Anonymous Visitor to Booked Job: The Tracking Stack Top Home Service Companies Are Using in 2025

For every 100 people who visit your website, 96 leave without doing anything. No form filled, no phone call, no chat.

Your Google Analytics shows the traffic, but the people behind those sessions are invisible. You know someone looked at your AC repair page for three minutes. You have no idea who they were or whether they called your competitor instead.

The four stages of a website visitor’s journey

Every visitor to your site moves through four stages, whether the visit lasts 30 seconds or 10 minutes.

Stage 1: Anonymous visit. They land on your AC repair page from a Google search. At this point, they’re just a session ID in your analytics.

Stage 2: Engagement signals. They scroll, click your service areas, check pricing, maybe read a review or two. These actions reveal intent, but most contractors never see them.

Stage 3: Decision point. They either call, fill out your form, or close the tab. This is the moment that determines whether they become a lead or a ghost.

Stage 4: Follow-up window. For the next 24-48 hours, they’re still in buying mode. They haven’t hired anyone yet. They’re waiting to hear back from whoever they contacted, or they’re still comparing options.

Most contractors only have tools for Stage 3. The form submission. The phone call. Everything before and after that moment is a blind spot.

Stage 1 - Know where they came from with Google Analytics 4

GA4 is free. It’s already installed on most contractor websites. If you haven’t set up conversion tracking, do it now.

The critical metric most contractors miss is which traffic sources produce leads that actually close into jobs, not just clicks or form fills. A Google Ads campaign that generates 50 clicks and 3 form fills looks decent on paper. But if none of those 3 leads close, that campaign is burning money.

John Wilson of Wilson Companies has talked about this on the Owned and Operated podcast repeatedly. He tracks marketing spend all the way to booked revenue - not just to the lead. That’s the difference between knowing your cost per click and knowing your cost per job.

GA4 gives you the starting data to build that pipeline, but you have to connect it to your CRM to close the loop.

LocaliQ analyzed 3,211 home service campaigns in 2025 and found that HVAC companies pay $5.31 per click with a $45.27 cost per lead. If you’re not tracking which of those leads actually become revenue, you’re flying blind on the most expensive line item in your budget.

Stage 2 - See what they did on your site with Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is free. Unlimited heatmaps, unlimited session recordings, rage click detection, and AI-powered insights. There’s no reason not to install it.

What you’re watching for: do mobile visitors struggle to find your phone number? Do people scroll right past your reviews section? Are visitors clicking on elements that aren’t actually clickable?

Session recordings of people who almost converted are more valuable than recordings of people who did. The visitor who spent four minutes on your site, scrolled to reviews, checked your service area, but then left without calling - that recording tells you exactly where the experience broke down.

Tommy Mello built A1 Garage Door Service into a $200M+ company by tracking every single call back to the keyword that generated it. He spends heavily on Google Ads but knows exactly which dollars produce booked jobs. That level of tracking precision is what separates companies that scale from companies that plateau.

Hotjar is another option for behavior analytics, though it caps free plans at a limited number of sessions per month. For most contractors, Clarity’s unlimited free tier is more than enough.

Stage 3 - Track the actual conversion with CallRail and form tracking

65% of home service leads come in by phone. If you’re not tracking calls, you’re missing most of your conversion data.

CallRail’s dynamic number insertion attributes every phone call to the specific ad, keyword, or page that drove it. A visitor who Googled “emergency AC repair” and clicked your ad gets a unique tracking number. When they call, you know exactly which campaign produced that lead.

Track form submissions with UTM parameters to get the same level of detail on your web leads. The goal is knowing which campaigns generate $500 drain cleanings versus $15,000 HVAC installs. A campaign with a high cost per lead might actually be your most profitable if it’s driving high-ticket jobs.

CallRail starts at roughly $50/month. For the data it provides, that’s a fraction of what you’re spending on the ads themselves.

Stage 4 - Identify the ones who left with visitor identification

This is the layer most contractors don’t know exists. B2C visitor identification matches anonymous website sessions to real homeowner records.

When a homeowner visits your site from their home network, identification technology cross-references their session against consumer databases. Typical match rates run 15-35% for residential traffic. That means for every 100 anonymous visitors, you could identify 15-35 of them by name and address.

For context, B2B visitor identification platforms like Warmly report up to 65% identification rates using 20+ data sources. Residential matching is harder because you’re identifying individuals rather than companies, but a 20% match rate on 500 monthly visitors still gives you 100 identified households that showed interest in your services.

78% of customers hire the first contractor to respond. The average contractor takes 47 hours to respond to web leads. If you can identify a visitor within hours of their session and follow up the next morning, you’re reaching them while they’re still deciding - and before your competitors even know they exist.

The visitors who browsed your water heater page for three minutes but didn’t call are your warmest leads. They have a need. They found you.

They just didn’t pick up the phone yet.

The complete stack with costs

Here’s what the full tracking infrastructure looks like:

Tool	Purpose	Monthly Cost
Google Analytics 4	Traffic sources, conversion tracking	$0
Microsoft Clarity	Heatmaps, session recordings, rage clicks	$0
CallRail	Phone call attribution, dynamic number insertion	~$50
Visitor ID (PipelineOn)	Identify anonymous visitors by name and address	Varies

Total: roughly $50-150/month for a complete tracking infrastructure. Compare that to your monthly ad spend. Most contractors spend $3,000-10,000/month driving traffic and have almost no tools to understand what that traffic does after it arrives.

What this stack looks like in practice

Tuesday, 2:14 PM. A homeowner in your service area Googles “AC repair near me.” They click your Google Ad and land on your AC repair page.

They spend three minutes on your site. They scroll through your reviews. They check your service area map.

They look at your pricing section. Then they close the tab.

GA4 logs the session. You can see the click came from your branded search campaign, the keyword was “AC repair near me,” and the session lasted 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

Microsoft Clarity recorded the session. You can watch the visitor scroll to reviews, hover over pricing, but never reach your contact form. The CTA button was below the fold on mobile and they never scrolled far enough to see it.

Visitor ID resolves the session to a homeowner at 123 Oak Street. You now have a name and address for someone who was actively looking for AC repair and spent three minutes evaluating your company.

Wednesday morning, your team calls. The homeowner says their AC has been struggling for a week and they were comparing a few companies. You’re the first one to actually call them.

They book a diagnostic for Thursday.

The diagnostic leads to a compressor replacement. Job closes at $4,200.

That’s a $4,200 job from a visitor who never filled out a form and never called. Without this stack, they would have been a line item in your Google Ads report - one of the 96% who “bounced.”

Where most contractors start

You don’t need to set up all four layers at once. Start with what’s free.

Week 1: Install GA4 and set up conversion tracking. If you already have GA4, configure it to track form submissions and phone clicks as conversions.

Week 2: Install Microsoft Clarity. Watch 10 session recordings of visitors who left without converting. You’ll spot problems you didn’t know existed.

Week 3: Add CallRail or another call tracking platform. Start attributing phone calls to the campaigns that drove them.

Week 4: Explore visitor identification. See how many of your anonymous visitors can be matched to real homeowner records, and build a follow-up workflow to reach them within 24 hours.

Each layer compounds the value of the others. GA4 tells you where visitors came from. Clarity tells you what they did.

CallRail tells you which ones converted. And visitor identification tells you who the rest of them were.

The contractors who build this stack aren’t spending more on marketing. They’re extracting more value from the marketing spend they already have. And in a market where every click costs $5+ and every lead costs $45+, knowing what happens after the click is the difference between profitable marketing and expensive guessing.

For a deeper look at the 96% problem, read our complete breakdown of why most traffic leaves without converting. And if you’re starting from scratch with analytics, our GA4 setup guide for home services walks you through the first layer of this stack step by step.