The Wrong Number on the Slide
Start with the leads themselves. Roughly 45% of Local Services Ads leads are unbookable: spam, wrong numbers, out-of-area calls, and duplicates you still got charged for (Blue Grid Media, 2026). So half of that headline number was never a customer in the first place. Of the leads that are real, the average contractor books about 31% of them. Run the math on “214 leads” and you are looking at closer to thirty actual jobs. The big number on the slide was mostly noise.
45% of LSA leads are unbookable. Real leads book about 31% of the time.
Blue Grid Media, 2026 via Sequoia GEO
This is why cost per lead is the wrong unit. A $69 plumbing lead sounds cheap until you remember most of them never book. The real figure, cost per booked job, averages about $168 on LSA and runs far higher on platforms like Angi, where it hits $542 (Blue Grid Media, 2026). Cost per lead measures how much you spent to make a phone ring. Cost per booked job measures how much you spent to earn revenue. Only one of those shows up in your bank account.
$168 average cost per booked job on LSA vs $542 on Angi.
Blue Grid Media, 2026
So why does everyone keep leading with lead count? Because it is the number that is easy to measure. Only 14% of marketing teams have tracking that connects spend all the way to revenue (marketing attribution benchmarks, 2026). The other 86% stop counting at the lead, because that is where their tracking stops. Not because the lead is where the value is.
There is an uncomfortable second reason. Lead volume is the metric that makes a marketing team, or an outside agency, look busy. “200 leads” is a great slide. “Here is your cost per booked job, and it went up this quarter” is a hard conversation. If the people running your marketing report leads every month and revenue almost never, it is worth asking whether the metric was chosen to inform you or to protect them.
The fix is not complicated, it is just rarely done. Insist on one number in every report: cost per booked job, broken out by channel. It quietly forces the entire chain into view, because lead quality, answer rate, follow-up speed, and close rate all show up inside that single figure. And it surfaces the thing lead count hides: the channel with the cheapest leads is often the most expensive per job. You cannot see that until you measure the job instead of the lead.
Sources: Blue Grid Media / Sequoia GEO — LSA Statistics 2026 · DigitalApplied — Marketing Attribution Statistics 2026
The Question Worth Asking on Monday
The question worth asking on Monday
Find the cost-per-booked-job line.
If it is not there, you do not have a marketing report.
Pull last month’s marketing report and find the cost-per-booked-job line. If it is not there, if the report stops at leads, or cost per lead, or “conversions” nobody ever defined, you do not have a marketing report. You have an activity report. Ask your team, or your agency, for cost per booked job by channel. The pause before they answer tells you everything.
From the team at DUO
This is the whole reason DUO exists. We don’t count leads. We count booked jobs, and we tie every marketing dollar to the revenue it actually produced, by channel, so you can cut what is expensive and double down on what works. If your current reporting stops at lead volume, we will show you what is hiding underneath it.
Show me my real cost per booked job →
