The long answers: guides for trades owners

What should a lead cost?

Short answer: it depends on your margin per job and how many leads you book, and the lead cost guide shows you how to calculate your own ceiling.

This guide works through cost per lead, cost per booked job and payback with worked numbers for different kinds of trades work: an urgent service call, a mid-sized repair and a large replacement or project. It explains why a $150 lead can be cheap and a $30 lead expensive, and what to fix when your numbers don't add up. Read it if:

• you've been quoted a lead price and don't know if it's fair
• you're comparing ads, directories and lead-selling services
• you want to set a monthly marketing budget from first principles

What should I ask before I hire a marketing agency?

Short answer: ask questions that force specific answers about ownership, tracking, reporting and contracts, and the agency hiring guide lists them, with what a good answer sounds like.

Many trades owners have had at least one bad agency experience. This guide is a checklist for the next one, including us. It covers who owns the accounts, what gets tracked, what reports should show, how contracts end, and the warning signs in a sales pitch. Read it if:

• you're about to sign with a new provider
• you're unhappy with your current one and want to know whether to stay
• you want to understand what you're actually paying for

How do I know if my marketing is working?

Short answer: count enquiries by source and match them to booked jobs, and the tracking and reporting guide shows how to do it with tools you probably already have.

This guide covers call tracking, simple spreadsheets, what Google Business Profile and Google Ads can and can't tell you, and how to read an agency report critically. It's the guide I'd most like every trades owner to read, because without tracking, every other marketing decision is a guess. Read it if:

• you can't say which channel brought last month's jobs
• your reports are full of numbers but you don't know what they mean
• you want to judge your marketing on booked work, not clicks

How do the guides connect to the rest of the site?

Short answer: the guides explain the thinking, the services pages explain the work, and the regional pages explain what's different where you are.

If a guide raises a question about a specific channel, the services overview links to a page for each one. If your question is about your province or territory, start on the areas page. And if you'd like the guide's method applied to your own business, get in touch. The first 30-minute consultation is free for eligible trades businesses.

How should I use a guide?

Short answer: read it with your own numbers next to you.

Each guide includes worked examples. Swap our illustrative figures for your own job values, close rates and monthly enquiries, and the conclusions become yours rather than ours.

Who writes the guides?

Short answer: Ali Sedighi, MBA, drawing on 17+ years in digital marketing and 150+ live HVAC websites.

The guides describe his approach. Where they mention results, they're named results from our HVAC work, linked so you can check them; see the results page. Where they mention rules or programs, they link to official sources. Nothing in them is a client quote or an invented example.