The home service marketing glossary.
Agencies talk in acronyms. These are the terms you will hear about your ads and tracking, each defined in a sentence or two, with what it means for your business.
Ads and bidding
- Google Ads
- Google’s advertising platform. For contractors it mostly means search campaigns: text ads shown for searches like “water heater repair near me”, paid per click.
- Local Services Ads (LSA)
- Google’s pay-per-lead ads that appear above search ads, showing a verification badge and review score. You pay for leads, not clicks. See Google Ads vs. Local Services Ads.
- Google Guaranteed
- The badge shown on Local Services Ads for many home-service trades once a business passes Google’s license, insurance and background checks.
- Meta Ads
- Ads on Facebook and Instagram. Better for reaching homeowners before they search — seasonal tune-ups, financing offers — than for emergency calls.
- Cost per click (CPC)
- What you pay each time someone clicks a search ad. A high CPC is fine if those clicks book jobs.
- Negative keyword
- A word that stops your ad showing, such as “DIY”, “jobs” or “parts”. The main tool for cutting wasted spend in search.
- Search terms report
- The list of the actual searches that triggered your ads. Where negative keywords come from.
- Service area
- The locations your ads are allowed to show in. Too wide wastes money on long drives and rare jobs.
Measurement
- Lead
- Any contact that might become a job: a call, form or message. Includes wrong numbers and spam unless they are filtered out.
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Ad spend divided by leads. Easy to report and easy to game, because cheaper leads are often worse leads.
- Booked job
- A lead that turned into an appointment on the calendar. The point where marketing becomes revenue.
- Cost per booked job
- Ad spend divided by booked jobs. The number DirectiveNow reports, because it is what marketing actually costs you. See how to lower it.
- Booking rate
- The share of real leads that become booked jobs. Driven by how calls are answered and handled, not only by the ads.
- Break-even cost per job
- Average ticket times gross margin: the most you could pay to book a job without losing money on it. Work yours out with the cost per lead calculator.
- Average ticket
- Average revenue per completed job, ideally split by service line, since repairs and replacements differ widely.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Revenue from ads divided by ad spend. Useful, but it ignores margin, so a high ROAS can still lose money on low-margin work.
Tracking
- Call tracking
- Giving each channel its own phone number so every call is credited to where it came from, usually with a recording.
- Dynamic number insertion
- Call tracking that swaps the number shown on your website depending on how the visitor arrived, so web calls are credited too.
- Conversion tracking
- Telling the ad platform when an ad produced a valuable action. Feeding it booked jobs rather than every call helps it find more of the right customers.
- Attribution
- Deciding which channel gets credit for a job when a customer touched more than one.
- Missed call rate
- The share of calls during ad hours that nobody answers. Each one is a lead you paid for and lost; the missed call calculator prices it.
Local search
- Google Business Profile
- Your free listing on Google Maps and local search, with hours, photos and reviews. Separate from ads, but reviews here also feed Local Services Ads.
- Map pack
- The block of three map listings in local results. Ranked on relevance, distance and prominence, not on ad spend.
- Landing page
- The page an ad sends people to. One page per job type, matching the ad, converts far better than sending everyone to a home page.
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