Q3 was the first quarter with every channel tracked to a booked job, not a form fill. Spend grew 8%, leads grew 21%, and the cost of a lead fell for the second quarter in a row. The gains came from two channels; the rest held or slipped, and the detail is below.
Spend is what left the account; leads are first-contact requests with a name and a phone number, deduplicated across channels. Meta and Google Search still carry two thirds of the volume, but Local Services Ads turned into the most efficient paid channel of the quarter.
Weekly volume is the cleanest signal we have, because it ignores how spend is split and only counts what came in the door. Week 29 is the only break in the line, when the Meta account sat paused for four days during the billing change.
The funnel counts every step from an impression to a paid invoice. The two conversion rates that matter are leads to booked, where the office decides, and booked to closed, where the technician decides.
Three creatives took 64% of Meta spend. The tune-up offer wins on click-through because it names a price; the testimonial piece wins on booking rate once people call, which the cards do not show.
Lead cost by zip code, matched to the service map. Green rows are areas where a lead costs less than $60 and books more than a quarter of the time. Red rows are areas we should stop paying for until the response time improves.
| Zip | Leads | CPL | Booked | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 78704 | 214 | $52 | 29% | scale |
| 78745 | 188 | $58 | 27% | scale |
| 78748 | 171 | $61 | 26% | hold |
| 78731 | 144 | $74 | 22% | hold |
| 78759 | 139 | $69 | 25% | hold |
| 78723 | 118 | $83 | 19% | cut |
Three changes that need no new budget and no new creative. Each one is a reallocation the ads manager can make in an afternoon and read in the weekly report two weeks later.
Same spend, about 140 more booked jobs over the quarter at the current booking rates.
They took 9% of the budget and produced 3% of the leads. The creative is fine; the audiences are not.
$75 per referred job. At the Q3 rate that is 196 leads for $9K, versus $14K the same leads cost on Meta.