How to Track Where Your Leads Come From (Click to Closed Job)

The average home service contractor can’t attribute 40% of their phone leads to a specific marketing source. Four out of ten calls come in, someone books the job, and nobody knows which ad, which postcard, or which Google search made it happen.

That means 40% of your marketing budget is a black box. You might be spending $2,000 a month on something that produces zero jobs while underfunding the channel that books half your work.

Most contractors track whether they’re getting leads. Very few track where those leads came from, which ones became jobs, and what each closed sale actually cost in marketing dollars. The gap between those two things is the gap between guessing and growing.

Why “how did you hear about us” isn’t enough

Every contractor asks this question. Almost none of them get useful answers.

Customers don’t remember. They say “Google” when they mean Google Ads, Google Maps, or organic search. They say “online” when they found you on Yelp. They forget the neighbor who mentioned your name three weeks ago and credit the yard sign they drove past yesterday.

A ContractorTalk member tracked this gap directly. He compared customer-reported sources against actual call tracking data over 90 days. The customer responses were wrong 35-40% of the time. “Google” was the catch-all answer for everything from paid ads to the local pack to organic listings, and referrals were dramatically underreported because customers forgot who originally recommended them.

You still need to ask the question. But you can’t make budget decisions based on the answers alone. You need systems that track the data automatically.

What you’re actually trying to measure

Three numbers matter more than lead count. If you track nothing else, track these.

Cost per lead (CPL) tells you how much it costs to get someone to raise their hand. Total marketing spend on a channel divided by the number of leads it produced. If you spent $1,500 on Google Ads and got 20 calls, your CPL is $75.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) tells you how much it costs to actually win a job. Total marketing spend on a channel divided by the number of closed jobs from that channel. If those 20 Google Ads leads turned into 5 booked jobs, your CAC is $300. That’s a more honest number than CPL because it accounts for the leads that went nowhere.

Lead source ROI tells you whether the money you spent came back multiplied. Revenue from a channel minus the spend, divided by the spend. If those 5 jobs totaled $25,000 in revenue on $1,500 in ad spend, your ROI is roughly 16:1. You made $16 for every $1 you invested.

CPL alone can trick you. If your Google Ads produce leads at $75 each and your mailers produce leads at $120 each, CPL says Google wins. But if Google leads close at 8% and mailer leads close at 35%, your actual cost per booked job is $937 from Google and $343 from mailers.

The “expensive” channel is cheaper where it counts. Cost per lead vs cost per booked job goes deeper on why this distinction matters.

How to track leads from click to closed job

The full path from “someone saw your ad” to “you cashed the check” has four stages. Each one needs a tracking mechanism.

Stage 1: The click

This is where the lead enters your world. It could be a Google Ads click, a Facebook ad tap, a Google Maps search, or a direct visit from a yard sign URL.

For digital channels, UTM parameters do the heavy lifting. These are tags you add to any URL you use in advertising. When someone clicks a link with UTM tags, Google Analytics records exactly which campaign, source, and medium sent them.

A Google Ads URL should look something like yoursite.com/ac-repair?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=summer_ac. That tells you exactly which campaign generated the visit.

For offline channels, unique phone numbers are the answer. A different tracking number on your yard signs than your truck wraps than your postcards. When someone calls the yard sign number, you know the yard sign produced that lead.

Tommy Mello runs 7,000+ call tracking numbers across A1 Garage Door Service. Every channel, every market, every campaign gets its own number. He attributes every lead source and acquisition cost down to the individual campaign level. That’s how he built a $200M+ company while his competitors guessed at what was working.

You don’t need 7,000 numbers. Five to ten covers most contractors. One for Google Ads, one for your Google Business Profile, one for yard signs, one for mailers, one for your main website.

Stage 2: The lead

The lead is the moment someone identifies themselves. They called, submitted a form, or sent a message.

Your CRM needs a lead source field that gets filled in at this stage. Not later. Not when someone remembers. At the moment the lead comes in.

If you’re using call tracking, this happens automatically. CallRail, WhatConverts, or the built-in tracking in ServiceTitan tags the lead with the source based on which number they called.

If you’re using web forms, the UTM parameters should pass through to your CRM automatically. Most form builders and CRMs support this. If yours doesn’t, add a hidden field to your forms that captures the UTM source.

For walk-ins and referrals, your CSR tags them manually. Train your team that every lead gets a source tag, no exceptions. An untagged lead is a wasted data point.

Stage 3: The estimate

Not every lead becomes an estimate, and not every estimate becomes a job. The drop-off between these stages tells you something important about lead quality.

If a channel produces 50 leads but only 10 of them are worth sending a tech to quote, that channel’s lead quality is low. Another channel might produce 20 leads that all convert to estimates. The second channel looks smaller but performs better.

In your CRM, track which leads progressed to an estimate and which didn’t. Tag the reason when a lead drops off. “Not in service area” and “just shopping prices” tell you different things about your targeting.

Stage 4: The closed job

This is where the math gets real. A lead turned into a signed contract, a completed job, and revenue in your bank account.

Connect the revenue back to the source. When you close a job worth $4,800 that originated from a Google Ads click, that $4,800 gets credited to Google Ads in your tracking. At the end of the month, you can see exactly how much revenue each channel generated against how much you spent.

A remodeling contractor on ContractorTalk posted his full tracking breakdown. He spent $14,247 on marketing and generated $334,299 in revenue from 38 closed jobs out of 132 total leads. His cost per lead was $107.93, his cost per acquisition was $374.92, and his marketing cost as a percentage of revenue was 4.26%. But the real insight was in the source breakdown: home shows produced 81 of his 132 leads but had a lower close rate than his 6 referral leads, which closed at nearly twice the rate despite being a fraction of the volume.

Without tracking by source, he would have assumed home shows were his best channel because they produced the most leads. The data showed referrals were far more profitable per dollar spent.

You’re not just buying leads. You’re buying data.

This is the part most contractors miss entirely.

When you spend $3,000 on Google Ads this month, you’re not just buying 30 leads. You’re buying information about which keywords, which neighborhoods, which times of day, and which ad messages produce customers who actually pay you.

That information makes next month’s $3,000 smarter. And the month after that. And the month after that.

A plumbing contractor who tracks his data knows that “emergency drain cleaning” keywords close at 35% while “drain cleaning cost” keywords close at 8%. Same service, wildly different intent. Without tracking, he’d never know to bid more aggressively on emergency terms and less on price-shopping terms.

The contractors who track from click to sale don’t just get more jobs. They get better at getting jobs. Their cost per acquisition drops over time because they’re constantly learning which dollars work hardest.

The contractors who don’t track are spending the same budget at the same efficiency year after year. They’re paying for leads and throwing away the intelligence that came with them.

What to do if you’re starting from zero

You don’t need ServiceTitan or a $500/month analytics stack to start tracking. You need a spreadsheet and discipline.

Week one: set up the basics.

Create a spreadsheet with these columns: date, lead source, lead name, contact info, estimate sent (yes/no), job won (yes/no), job value, and notes. Every lead goes in. Every one.

Add “how did you hear about us” to your intake process if you haven’t already. It’s imperfect, but it’s the starting point.

Week two: add phone tracking.

Get a CallRail account or similar service. It costs $50-150 per month. Set up unique numbers for your top 3-5 marketing channels. This single step will give you more attribution data than most contractors have ever had.

Month two: connect to your CRM.

If you’re using Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, or even a Google Sheet, add the lead source field and make it mandatory. No lead gets entered without a source tag. Your team will resist this for about two weeks, then it becomes habit.

Month three: run your first real report.

Pull every closed job from the past 90 days. Group them by source. Calculate CPL, CAC, and revenue for each channel. The results will surprise you.

One channel will be dramatically outperforming the others. Another will be producing leads that never close. You’ll find this every time, and you’ll wonder how you went this long without seeing it.

For a deeper walkthrough on setting up attribution systems, read marketing attribution for home service businesses.

The monthly review that saves thousands

Set aside one hour per month. Pull four numbers for each marketing channel: spend, leads, closed jobs, and revenue.

Calculate three metrics: CPL (spend divided by leads), CAC (spend divided by closed jobs), and ROI (revenue minus spend, divided by spend).

Put them side by side. The picture gets clear fast.

Look for the outliers. The channel where CAC is three times higher than every other source is your first cut candidate. The channel where ROI is 15:1 while everything else hovers around 5:1 is where your next dollar should go.

An HVAC contractor on r/sweatystartup described doing exactly this review after six months of tracking. He discovered his Nextdoor ads produced a steady drip of low-ticket maintenance calls at $180 CAC while his Google Local Services ads produced emergency replacements at $220 CAC but 4x the average ticket size. He moved $800/month from Nextdoor to LSA and saw monthly revenue climb without increasing total spend.

Read more about how to allocate your marketing budget based on the data your tracking reveals.

What the data tells you that lead count never will

Lead count tells you one thing: how loud the phone is ringing. Data from click-to-sale tracking tells you everything else.

Which neighborhoods produce your best customers. Not the most leads, but the highest-value jobs with the best close rates. You might discover that leads from zip code 75201 close at 40% with an average ticket of $6,200, while leads from 75215 close at 12% with an average ticket of $1,800. That changes your targeting.

Which keywords attract buyers vs browsers. “AC repair near me” converts differently than “how much does AC repair cost.” One is ready to book. The other is researching. Both cost you money. Only one pays it back reliably.

Which days and times your ads perform best. Maybe your Google Ads produce great leads Tuesday through Thursday but waste money on weekends. You’d never know without tracking which leads close.

Whether your close rate is the problem or your lead quality is. If every channel closes at 10%, the problem is your sales process. If one channel closes at 30% and another at 5%, the problem is lead quality from the second channel. Different problems require different fixes.

These aren’t theoretical insights. They’re the kind of intelligence that turns a $500K contractor into a $1.5M contractor without spending more on marketing. You spend better.

The data mindset

Most contractors think about marketing as a cost. Spend money, get leads, hope enough of them turn into jobs to justify the spend.

The contractors who grow fastest think about marketing as a data-producing investment. Every dollar spent generates leads AND information. The leads pay for this month. The information pays for every month after.

When you know your numbers by source, you stop asking “should I spend more on marketing?” and start asking “where should I move $500 from Channel B to Channel A?” You stop wondering if your marketing is working and start knowing exactly which parts work, which parts don’t, and what to change next.

You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. And you can’t measure what you don’t track.

Start with the spreadsheet, add call tracking, connect it to your CRM, and run the monthly review. Within 90 days, you’ll have more clarity about your marketing than 90% of your competitors will ever have.

That clarity is worth more than any single lead.

For a complete guide to setting up conversion tracking, read the no-BS conversion tracking guide. To understand how call tracking fits in, read call tracking solutions for home services. And to see how measuring intent and capturing invisible demand fills the gap between website visitors and leads, check the methodology page.