Every word on your report, defined.
Silver Leaf Agency reports marketing in a fixed vocabulary — lead, qualified lead, booked appointment, cost per booked job, attribution, matchback, offline conversion import, AI citation — and defines every term on this page. If a word is not defined here, it does not appear on a report.
In short
- Eighteen terms in four groups: counting, cost, crediting, and being found.
- Every term links to itself, so a definition can be cited on its own.
- Cost per booked job = spend ÷ booked appointments — the one number worth managing.
Updated
How spend becomes cost per booked job.
- Spend
- Clicks
- Leads
- Qualified leads
- Booked appointments
- Revenue
Cost per booked job = spend ÷ booked appointments. Written out: cost per click × clicks per lead × leads per booked job. Any one of the three can be the one to improve, and the report shows which.
We are accountable through booked appointment. Close rate, ticket size and repeat business are yours — we report them when you share them, and we never estimate them.
The units we count.
- Lead #
- A call or form submission from a person who could plausibly buy. Every one is recorded or logged and traced to the click that produced it.
- Qualified lead #
- A lead that passed review: a real person, in your service area, asking about something you sell. Spam, wrong numbers and existing customers are excluded before anything is reported.
- Booked appointment #
- A qualified lead that resulted in a time on your calendar. This is the last thing Silver Leaf is accountable for.
- Qualified-lead rate #
- Qualified leads divided by all leads. A low rate usually means spam or the wrong searches; a high rate with few leads means the net is too small.
- Booked rate #
- Booked appointments divided by qualified leads. The first number that depends on you: how the phone is answered and how fast a form is called back.
The costs we report.
- Cost per lead #
- Spend divided by qualified leads for the same period and channel. We do not report it against unqualified volume.
- Cost per booked job #
- Spend divided by booked appointments. The number worth managing, because it accounts for lead quality. The same as cost per click × clicks per lead × leads per booked job.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) #
- Revenue credited to a channel divided by what was spent on it. We report it only where revenue is actually recorded — from your job list or CRM — never estimated.
How revenue is credited.
- Attribution #
- The record of which channel produced a lead. Where a source cannot be traced, we report a dash, never a guess: printing zero would claim it happened.
- Matchback #
- Comparing your closed job list against campaign records to credit revenue that never touched a form — walk-ins, phone calls, offline media.
- Matchback window #
- How long after a campaign a closed job can still be credited to it. Set per business — a furnace replacement decides in days, a water system in months — and stated on the report.
- Offline conversion import #
- Sending outcomes from your CRM back to the ad platforms, so bidding optimizes toward jobs you actually booked rather than raw leads.
- First-party data #
- Records you own — calls, forms, jobs, customers — as opposed to what a platform reports about itself. Every number we report is checked against yours.
Where you are found, and how we count it.
- AI citation #
- An instance of an assistant — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Overviews — naming your business or linking your page in its answer to a tracked question.
- AI Overview #
- The AI-generated summary Google shows above some results. Being cited in it is tracked separately from ranking beneath it.
- Map pack #
- The block of three local business listings Google shows with a map. Position here depends on the Business Profile more than the website.
- Local Services Ads #
- Google's pay-per-lead ads for local service businesses, shown above search ads with a Google Guaranteed badge. Reported in booked appointments and disputed leads, not clicks.
- Performance Max #
- A Google Ads campaign type that places ads across Search, YouTube, Display, Maps and Gmail from one budget. We report it by the leads it produces and watch it daily, because it will spend wherever it is allowed to.
Questions about how we count.
Because we report qualified leads. Spam, wrong numbers, job seekers and existing customers are removed before the count, so the number is smaller and the cost per lead looks higher — and both are true.
Cost per lead divides spend by qualified leads. Cost per booked job divides spend by appointments actually on your calendar. The second is the one worth managing, because it accounts for lead quality and for how the phone is answered.
That the source could not be traced. We print a dash rather than a zero or a guess, because a zero would claim we know something we do not.
Yes. Every number in the portal opens to the calls, forms and jobs behind it, and every account it draws from is in your name.
Tell us about your business. We'll tell you what we'd do.
Or call (717) 220-3332. A written recommendation and a quote, free and with no obligation — including telling you if we're not the right fit.
Or call (717) 220-3332. Free and with no obligation.