How do you compare Google Ads, Local Services Ads, Meta and SEO fairly?
You cannot compare them on the same metric, because they capture demand at different stages. Compare each against its own affordable ceiling for the job types it produces, and compare across channels only on outcomes they all share: booked jobs, revenue and gross profit. Ranking channels by cost per lead compares four different products by their price tags and ignores what you got.
Put the channels on an intent gradient first
Local Services Ads and search ads intercept demand that already exists — someone has a problem now. Organic search spans both, depending on the query. Social and display create demand or accelerate it, reaching people who were not looking today.
Once you sort channels this way, the comparison problem becomes obvious. Demand capture channels convert quickly and are capped by how much demand exists. Demand creation channels convert slowly and are capped by budget and creative. Holding them to the same conversion window guarantees the second group loses.
The metrics that are actually comparable
- Booked jobs. Same definition everywhere, taken from the operational system.
- Gross profit produced. Accounts for the fact that channels produce different job mixes.
- Cost per booked job against that channel's job mix ceiling. Not against each other's.
The overlap that ruins naive rankings
Channels feed each other. A social campaign creates awareness, the person searches your brand a week later, and branded search takes the credit. An organic article gets read, the visitor calls the number on a paid landing page later. Last-touch reporting will consistently over-reward the last, cheapest channel in the chain.
That is why the ranking table should never be the only artifact. Pair it with a total-demand view: when you changed spend in one channel, what happened to total booked jobs, not just that channel's booked jobs. Marketing intelligence work spends more time on that question than on refining attribution models.
A practical scorecard
For each channel, report fully loaded spend, leads, real opportunities, booked jobs, completed revenue, gross profit, cost per booked job, and the ceiling for the job mix it produced. Eight columns, one row per channel, refreshed on a window long enough for jobs to mature.
It is unglamorous and it ends most channel arguments, because every column comes from a system with a clear owner. Building it is mostly integration work across ad platforms, call tracking and the field service system — see the integrations that feed it.
Two operational notes. Give every channel the same lead-handling quality before comparing them, because a source routed to voicemail after hours will always lose to one answered live, for reasons that have nothing to do with the media. And keep the comparison window long enough that a slow-converting channel is not judged on jobs that have not booked yet.
Topics: channel comparison · paid media · SEO · allocation
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.