What is a contractor marketing scoreboard?

Number 1: Spend
Total marketing spend — every dollar out, not just media. That means ad spend plus management fees plus retainers plus tools plus the answering service plus your reputation software plus whatever else is on the card. Formula: sum all marketing-related expenses for the month. Why owners get it wrong: they track ad spend but not retainers. They forget the $300/month review platform or the $150 call tracking tool. The full number is almost always higher than the owner thinks. What good looks like: you can say your total marketing spend for the month in under 10 seconds without opening a spreadsheet.

Number 2: Booked Revenue
Not leads. Not calls. Not estimates. Closed work attributed to source — booked jobs with a dollar value and a channel attached. Formula: sum all completed or committed jobs by the channel that sourced the lead. Why owners get it wrong: they track job count, not job revenue. An HVAC company booking 40 installations and 80 tune-ups is doing very different revenue than those 120 jobs suggest if you don't weight for job type. What good looks like: you know exactly how much revenue each channel produced last month.

Number 3: Cost Per Booked Job by Source
This is the number nobody calculates and everybody needs. Formula: channel spend ÷ booked jobs attributed to that channel. Why owners get it wrong: they calculate cost-per-lead, which measures the ad platform, not the business. Cost-per-booked-job measures everything — the ad, the CSR, the follow-up, the offer. A channel with a great cost-per-lead and a terrible booking rate will look fine until you run this number. What good looks like: you have this number for at least three channels, updated weekly.

Number 4: Direction
One word per channel — scale, fix, cut, or investigate. Formula: look at your cost-per-booked-job trend over the last two to four weeks and apply the decision rule (rising = fix, stable + capacity = scale, 60-day underperformance = cut, numbers don't reconcile = investigate). Why owners get it wrong: they hold channels too long because they're emotionally attached to the investment, or they cut channels too fast because one bad week spooked them. What good looks like: every channel has a one-word verdict assigned every Monday.

That's the scoreboard. Four numbers. One page. Fifteen minutes every Monday. Not 47 charts — this. If your vendor's monthly report doesn't make these four numbers obvious, the report isn't built for you.