Why cost per lead misleads home-service marketing, the Booked-Job Loop that replaces it, and what happens in each of the five stages.
Our operating system
The Booked-Job Loop
Three stages, run in that order, on every account. We don't raise a budget for a business that's still losing the demand it's already paying for.
01
01 — Fix the leak
Close the gaps before you widen the pipe.
Before we touch a budget we fix what happens after the click. Call tracking on every number and every channel. Lead routing, so calls and forms land where someone can act on them. Speed-to-lead measured instead of assumed. Landing pages built for one trade and one intent. Conversions imported back from your CRM, so the ad platforms optimize toward jobs instead of form fills.
Most of the first month's improvement comes from here — and none of it costs more in media.
Nothing in this stage requires another dollar of ad spend.
02
02 — Buy demand that pays
Bid against job margin, not keyword volume.
Local Services Ads, Google Search, Performance Max and Meta — segmented by service line and by what the work is worth. An emergency no-cool call and a full system replacement are different businesses with different economics. Bid them at one target and you quietly fund the cheaper half of your own company.
Budget follows booked jobs and margin. Not clicks, not impression share.
Includes the Local Services Ads → Performance Max migration now rolling out for U.S. trades.
03
03 — Prove it in jobs
One report. Monthly. In plain English.
Spend → calls → booked jobs → revenue, broken out by service line. Conversions come back from your CRM, so the number in our report is the number on your board.
When the two disagree, we fix the tracking. Not the slide.
Reported monthly, by service line.
Signal, not dashboards
When your phone rings decides what your ads cost.
Booked rate by hour and weekday, built from tracked calls. It is the single most valuable chart in a home-service account, and almost no one builds it.
Booked rate by hour × weekday
Booked rate12%47%
Saturday 8am–12pm books at 46% and costs 22% less per job. Budget was flat across all seven days when we took the account over.
The weekday lunch hour drops to 19%. That is a coverage gap, not a demand gap — the calls still come in.
Speed to lead vs booked rate
Time from the call or form to a human on the line.
Under 1 min48%
1–5 min36%
5–30 min21%
30–60 min9%
Next day4%
Answer inside sixty seconds and you book roughly one in two. Wait until the next day and you are paying full price for a customer who already called someone else.
Figures throughout this page are illustrative composites built to demonstrate the reporting format. DirectiveNow does not publish client data, account screenshots or named results.
Working together
From first email to a number you can act on.
Five stages. You should know exactly what happens in each one before you agree to any of them.
01
Free · three business days
Audit & fit call
You send read-only access to your ad accounts and, if you have it, your last 90 days of booked-job data. We read it properly rather than running it through a scanner.
What you receive
A live walkthrough of your account, a one-page written summary, and your cost per booked job, calculated. Then a 30-minute call, only if you want it: what we’d do first, which package fits, and what it would cost. If paid search can’t reach a sensible cost per job in your market, this is where we say so — so you leave with a written scope and price, or an honest no.
02
Weeks one to three
Build
Measurement stack, campaign architecture, landing pages and CRM conversion import. Everything created in your name.
What you receive
A build sheet listing every change and the reason for it, plus admin access to all of it.
03
Weeks three to four
Launch
Campaigns go live with deliberately conservative budgets until real conversion data comes back. Nobody’s first week is their best week and we don’t pretend otherwise.
What you receive
A dashboard in your own accounts from day one, updated weekly — live on The Full Loop.
04
Day 60 and day 90
Prove
First full booked-job report at day 60. First clean before-and-after on cost per booked job at day 90, once there’s enough data for the comparison to mean something.
What you receive
The report, reconciled to your CRM, and a call to go through it line by line.
05
Ongoing
Scale
Budget moves toward the service lines, markets and channels that book. New service lines and markets get added when the numbers — and your capacity to run the jobs — support it.
What you receive
The same report every month, and a business review every quarter.
Setup fee + flat monthly management.No percentage of ad spend.50% of setup upfront.Month-to-month.
The free 90-day account audit
We'll show you the leak before you pay us anything.
Three business days. A written three-fix priority list, and your real cost per booked job — calculated properly, probably for the first time.