Offline conversion tracking for home services: estimate booked, job won, with the value

Roofers, solar installers, HVAC, remodelers, plumbers. If you run paid ads for a home-services business, your funnel probably looks like this: someone fills in a form or calls, you book an estimate, the estimate happens, and a few days later, maybe, they sign a job.

Every one of those steps happens away from the website. The ad platform sees the form and nothing else. So let me walk through what changes when you send the later steps back.

First, what's different about home services. The value per sale is high and varies enormously. A small repair and a full re-roof are the same form fill and wildly different revenue. That makes value the most valuable thing you can send, and most businesses send none.

Second, the cycle is short enough to work. A signed job typically follows an estimate by days or weeks, which is inside every platform's window. So you can send the real sale, not just an earlier proxy.

Third, the leads are noisy. Lots of price-shoppers, wrong numbers, and out-of-area enquiries. Sending later stages filters most of them without you doing anything clever.

What to send, in order of usefulness.

Estimate booked: fast and high volume. It removes people who never answer.

Estimate completed: a real prospect who let you into their home or onto their roof. A much better signal.

Job won, with the value: the truest signal. It teaches the platform which clicks bring the big jobs.

Job paid: the profit check, useful when deposits and final payments differ.

A made-up example. 200 form fills a month. 80 estimates booked. 55 estimates completed. 20 jobs won, averaging some thousands each. If the ads only see 200 forms, they chase cheap leads. If the 20 wins come back with their values, the platform learns to find the kind of person who signs a big job, and campaigns that bring small repairs look as small as they are.

Some practical points that matter in this trade. Phone calls are a big source of leads, so make sure a call outcome ends up on the same contact as the ad click. Storm-season spikes can distort a campaign, so judge over a longer window. And the crew or the office needs one status they update the same day: estimate done, job signed, job paid.

Two things unique to home services. First, seasonality and territory. Demand for roofing, HVAC and solar swings with weather and incentives, so judge a campaign over a full cycle, not a bad week. And leads outside your service area are common, so a "qualified" stage that includes "in our area" removes a lot of noise.

Second, call handling. Many of your leads call rather than fill in a form. Make sure the call outcome (answered, estimate booked) is logged against the same contact that carries the ad click. If your phone system creates its own contact, the outcome lands on someone with no click.

A simple weekly review that works: every Monday, look at last week's booked estimates, completed estimates and signed jobs, by campaign. Twenty minutes, and it tells you which campaigns bring jobs, not just leads.

Do you send job values back to your ads today?