September 23, 2026
Tales of Attribution Tracking: Three business outcomes measured with three different approaches.
There’s no lack of marketing tools, platforms and data in home services. So you should be able to tie an awareness campaign to conversions. Or follow a YouTube viewer all the way to the sale. Or determine which paid and organic search strategies generated qualified leads. Right?
Forget impressions and clicks and engagement rates. You need to know what marketing tactic influenced, what happened next and what that means for your business.
These three home services clients proved that the attribution method can vary but a win is a win is a win.
Golden Rule: Proving the Impact of Top-of-Funnel Marketing
A highly regarded home services company in Grimes, Iowa (part of the Des Moines market), Golden Rule Plumbing, Heating & Cooling looked to expand into Salt Lake City through acquisition of existing home services businesses. And called us in to help based on our Nexstar partnership and home services marketing expertise.
The goal? Build awareness for Golden Rule in the Salt Lake City market and increase leads through programmatic digital advertising.
At the beginning of 2026, Golden Rule was running CTV/OTT, programmatic/native video and digital display. On paper, the campaigns were generating conversions. But we dug deeper into the data and determined the budget was spread too thin.
We moved the majority of the budget into CTV/OTT, supported by a smaller display retargeting budget. Programmatic video, native video and branding display were eliminated.
The impact was significant.
CPMs decreased 50% while click-through to the website increased from 0.05% to 2.56%. More importantly, conversions increased from 21 during the entire first quarter to 24 in just the first six weeks following the change.
After 90 days, Golden Rule was consistently generating more than 30 influenced conversions every four weeks, an increase of more than 186% from where we started.
What’s an influenced conversion?
This is where attribution gets interesting. Many of these customers ultimately converted through PPC or organic search. If we looked exclusively at last-touch attribution, those channels would receive the credit.
Pixel tracking allowed us to see more of the journey.
The customer may have ultimately searched for Golden Rule on Google, but there was a traceable interaction with our CTV/OTT campaign earlier in that journey. The awareness campaign helped introduce or reinforce the brand before the customer turned to the Google Machine. Win!
Burton: Following a YouTube Campaign All the Way to Revenue
Sometimes attribution can take us even further. After a decline in HVAC revenue during the previous peak season, Burton AC, Heating, Plumbing & More in Omaha, Nebraska, needed to regain ground in one of its most profitable service lines.
But there were challenges.
Burton was fighting a market perception around price and service. At the same time, HVAC companies nationally were seeing homeowners become more hesitant to replace equipment, choosing repairs instead amid economic uncertainty.
Simply touting another replacement offer wasn’t going to solve either problem.
Our creative team answered with a ‘No Regrets’ campaign based on a simple insight: homeowners making a major HVAC decision are likely to get second options and multiple bids.
Rather than immediately asking them to buy something, Burton could give them another perspective. For free.
We chose to promote the spot on YouTube because homeowners researching an HVAC repair or replacement were likely to land there during the consideration process. Targeting focused on homeowners in houses more than 10 years old whose behaviors indicated an interest in HVAC or air conditioning repair and replacement.
YouTube’s numbers looked great: 1,903,519 impressions, 277,348 engagements and a 16.33% interaction rate. But we wanted more.
Through ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, we were able to connect campaign activity to revenue and calculate a direct campaign ROI of 1,488.94%.
Suddenly, we’re having a very different conversation. Instead of telling the client how many people saw or interacted with a video, we’re able to show how marketing activity translated into actual business revenue. Win, win.
GRmetro: Finding the Leads Behind the Platform Conversions
GRmetro Heating & Cooling in Grand Rapids faced a very different business reality.
Operational challenges in late 2025 and early 2026 made revenue actualization difficult. Marketing expenses needed to be reduced going into Q2, including cutting digital display and social advertising.
That meant paid and organic search needed to produce more leads without the support of the local brand marketing that had previously helped create demand. And there wasn’t additional budget waiting in the wings.
Changing SEO From Rankings to Local Leads
We started by reevaluating GRmetro’s SEO strategy.
Previous work had largely concentrated on increasing search engine results page visibility for seasonal keywords. Rankings can be useful, but they don’t necessarily tell you whether the people finding the website are local or actually looking to hire an HVAC company.
In April, we shifted the strategy toward local search intent, optimized the Google Business Profile, updated online listings and made technical website improvements to capture more relevant local searches. And in just a month, website health improved from 85 to 91. Google Business Profile impressions increased 17.4% and call clicks jumped 65.2%.
What else, we wondered.
SearchLight reported an 850% increase in organic leads from April to May, despite it being shoulder season. As the summer HVAC season arrived, organic leads increased another 200%. Win, win, win.
Using Attribution to Make PPC Spend Work Harder
With PPC, we analyzed brand and non-brand keywords, conversion rates, CPC, CPL and impression share lost to budget. Then we used SearchLight to compare Google’s platform conversion metrics against actual leads reaching the business.
That distinction matters. A platform conversion does not automatically equal a qualified business opportunity.
Based on the attribution data, we reduced the number of campaigns receiving spend from five to three during Q2. Money was redirected away from campaigns generating fewer leads at higher costs and into campaigns producing stronger lead yields more efficiently.
From April to May, PPC leads increased 15% on the same budget. During peak summer season, they increased another 20%.
By August, GRmetro’s attribution data started revealing something else. Those awareness and consideration campaigns that were eliminated to reduce expenses? Well, cutting them dropped brand PPC leads by 33% since April.
Those branded searches had historically produced some of GRmetro’s least expensive leads with some of the strongest revenue conversion.
Organic lead growth was still above April levels, but it had slowed considerably as demand softened heading toward the fall shoulder season.
Attribution isn’t only useful for identifying where to cut money. It can also reveal what happens when you stop spending it. Brand awareness campaigns don’t always receive direct credit for a conversion. A homeowner might see an ad, remember the company days or weeks later and eventually perform a branded Google search.
The search gets the last-touch attribution. But something had to create the search.
GRmetro’s results demonstrate why we don’t evaluate individual channels. Paid search, organic search, CTV, video, display and other tactics influence one another throughout the customer journey.
Different Tools. Different Attribution. Same Question.
These three campaigns weren’t measured the same because they couldn’t be.
For Golden Rule, pixel tracking helped us connect CTV/OTT exposure to conversions through other channels.
For Burton, ServiceTitan Marketing Pro allowed us to go from YouTube engagement all the way to revenue and ROI.
For GRmetro, SearchLight helped us look beyond platform conversions to understand which PPC and SEO efforts were producing actual leads, then identify what happened when awareness tactics disappeared.
Three different business outcomes measured through three different attribution approaches.
There isn’t one dashboard, platform or attribution model capable of telling the entire marketing story. Last-touch attribution can undervalue awareness. Platform conversions can overstate actual leads. Lead volume doesn’t automatically equal bookings. Bookings don’t automatically equal revenue.
The technology provided pieces of the story. But it’s the marketing strategist who puts those pieces together, applying what worked and tossing what didn’t.
If your attribution tracking is a jumbled up hot mess right now, call in our strategists. We love a good challenge.
