What a booked job really costs you
Most owners know what they pay per lead. Fewer know what they pay per job that actually lands on the schedule, and that is the number that decides whether a lead source stays. A $40 lead that books one time in ten costs $400 a job. A $120 lead that books one time in two costs $240.
Use one month of numbers, or the same stretch for every source. Start with your ceiling: the most a booked job can cost before it earns you nothing after the ad spend. Then put your sources next to each other. Any source above the ceiling is losing money on every job at your margin, however cheap its leads look. A source well under it is where extra budget should go first.
The ceiling uses gross margin, so it ignores rent, trucks and office wages. Your real line sits a little lower. It also counts only the first job, so a source whose customers come back every year can lose money on paper and still be worth keeping. You know which of your sources those are; this page does not.
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Your ceiling per job and per lead
Three numbers from your own books. If you are not sure of the booking share, count last month's leads and how many became jobs on the calendar.
What a typical booked job brings in.
What is left after materials and the labor on the job, before overhead and marketing.
Across all your leads, not just the good ones.
Most you can pay per booked job
Add your job value and margin
Average job value times gross margin.
Most you can pay per lead
Add your booking share too
The per job figure times the share of leads that book.
Your lead sources, side by side
Rename any source, leave the ones you do not use empty, and use the blank one for anything else: Yelp, a home show, a referral partner. Revenue is optional; leave it blank and your average job value is used for each booked job.
Google began moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads in August 2026, where they become Performance Max campaigns that are still paid per lead. If your account has moved, keep it as its own row while you can still see its leads and jobs separately; folding it into Google Ads mixes per lead and per click costs into one number.
What each source really costs
Sorted from the cheapest booked job to the most expensive. A source with leads but no booked jobs yet sits at the bottom.
Fill in at least one source's spend, leads and booked jobs to see it here.
| Source | Spend | Cost per leadspend divided by leads | Cost per booked jobspend divided by booked jobs | Booked ratebooked jobs divided by leads | Gross profit after ad costrevenue times margin, minus spend | Gross profit per $1 spentrevenue times margin, divided by spend |
|---|
The file is made in your browser and opens in any spreadsheet.
Reading a bad number
A source loses money for one of two reasons: its leads cost more than you can pay, or its leads are priced fine and too few of them book. The fix is different for each, and only the first one is about where the leads come from.
The leads cost more than you can pay
If it is a marketplace, first ask whether it credits leads that were wrong numbers or outside your area, and check how many of its leads you answered within the hour. Some owners fix a losing marketplace that way and keep it. If it still loses money, demand you own costs nothing per lead once it is built: a Business Profile that shows in the map, local search that brings calls to your own number, and Google Ads where the lead is yours alone rather than sent to several pros at once.
The leads are fine and too few book
That is a phone and follow-up problem, and you can fix most of it yourself: answer faster, call back every missed call the same hour, and follow up on every estimate more than once. Our playbook on booking more jobs from the leads you have walks through it. Software helps once the volume outgrows the person on the phone: an AI agent that answers when nobody can, or a GoHighLevel setup that texts back and chases estimates on its own.
If you do not know booked jobs per source
Most owners do not, and the leads column alone will mislead you. Three ways to start counting, from free to a small monthly cost:
- Ask every caller. "How did you find us?" on every new call, written on the job when it books. Free, and wrong now and then, because people mix up Google and the map, but far better than nothing.
- Give each source its own number. A call tracking number per source tells you which one rang, without asking. Keep your main number on your Business Profile and website so your listings stay consistent.
- Add a lead source field to your job software. Most field service software has one; if yours does not, a column in a spreadsheet works. Fill it when the job is booked, not at the end of the month from memory.
Marketplace dashboards show the leads they sent you, never which ones booked. That half is yours to mark. A month of honest counting is enough to fill in this page.
Want someone to read these numbers with you?
Send the sources you run and roughly what each one costs. We will tell you which number is the weak one, the price of the leads or how many of them book, and what we would change first. You keep the plan, and if the right move is cutting a source and doing nothing else, we will say that.
- A free consult. A real conversation about your business, your area and what is not working yet.
- An honest evaluation. Where you stand in search, ads and follow-up next to the businesses you lose customers to.
- A plan you keep. What we would fix first and why. It is yours whether or not you work with us.
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