How should you compare towing lead sources?

Decide which comparison you are making

A source comparison can answer several different questions: where suitable requests came from, how expensive those requests were to acquire, whether they booked, and what the completed work contributed. Choose one primary decision before opening a report. Otherwise a channel can look good on its strongest metric while its missing outcomes disappear from view.

Use a fixed group of inquiries received during a stated period and follow that group through outcomes. This is a cohort view. A calendar cash view instead counts transactions paid during that period, including work from earlier periods. Both are useful, but they answer different questions. The comparison tool expects one inquiry cohort per source; the reconciliation lab provides a separate payment-date view.

Start with the evidence

Define what each source supplies: an observed inquiry, a shared contact opportunity, a referral, a booked request or something else. Record the period, service coverage, ownership of data, fees, media cost, tools and internal handling effort. Inspect current written terms when evaluating a vendor; do not assume all lead sellers use the same distribution or refund rules.

A worked example

Fictional comparison: Source A costs $900 and produces thirty distinct inquiries, twenty suitable requests, twelve bookings and ten completions. Source B costs $200 and produces twelve inquiries, ten suitable requests, eight bookings and seven completions. Cost per suitable request is $45 for A and $20 for B. Those figures still need collection, direct costs, capacity and an explanation of whether the windows and customer types are comparable.

Choose the next action

Use the comparison tool to enter a consistent inquiry cohort and retain blank fields for unknown outcomes. Do not select a winner from one low-volume month or from gross collection alone. Check operational demands: a shared opportunity may require a different response process, while a referral may have an availability expectation that must be understood. Keep source evidence and customer permissions within the actual agreement.

Check whether it worked

Review the comparison with known limitations beside the numbers. Decide whether to continue, investigate, test a bounded change or stop an unsuitable source. Preserve a downside case and owner-approved financial limits. If the source delivers suitable requests but they fail to book, improve the downstream process before assuming a different channel will solve the same constraint.

A worked two-source review

Referral B has a lower expense per suitable inquiry in this invented record. That does not establish it can supply the additional work the owner wants or that every referral expense was captured. Relationship time, account obligations, service mix and available capacity may differ. The final row is deliberately not called profit: direct job costs, overhead and unresolved collection risks are not included.

Suppose two Search bookings remain unresolved instead of being confirmed complete. Keep the known completed count at eight and show two unknown outcomes beside it. Do not silently treat them as failures, paid jobs or average-value sales. The denominator is still the original thirty inquiries, with twenty assessed as suitable. Document the date when the cohort was last reviewed.

Keep source labels reproducible

1. Write the source rule before inspecting the outcome: observed campaign tag, explicit referral record, provider ID, self-reported source or unknown.
2. Preserve the original source evidence. A later direct visit does not prove the earlier ad had no role.
3. Use an explicit inquiry ID to group known retries. Do not merge separate requests solely because they share a phone number.
4. Record multiple known touches separately when the evidence supports them. Do not assign the full job value to each touch and then add the values.
5. Keep “unknown” as an available source. Work on missing evidence instead of distributing unknowns to make the chart look complete.

Compare terms before buying a source

For purchased inquiries, inspect the current written definition of a billable contact, duplicate handling, shared versus exclusive distribution, dispute evidence, credit process, cancellation and export access. This guide has not tested any particular vendor’s terms. For commercial and club relationships, review agreed work, payment timing, administrative effort and capacity commitments against your own cost evidence.

For owned advertising, separate media spend from management expense and one-time website or setup work. A short test may carry setup costs that a later month will not repeat. Show both the test’s total cash requirement and its recurring cost assumption, with clear labels. Do not omit agency fees to make one channel appear cheaper.

Set a bounded next experiment

A before-and-after difference is observational. Demand, weather, hours, competitor activity and service mix can change at the same time. Small samples make apparent rates unstable. Use the comparison to make a careful operating decision rather than claim that every extra job was caused by one marketing edit.

The most useful output is a short decision record: what you knew, what remained unknown, the option chosen, the responsible person and the next review date. Export the tool’s inputs with its results so the next reviewer can reconstruct the same calculation.

1. Choose a service and coverage area the team can actually support.
2. State the maximum spend, operational capacity and period before launch.
3. Assign responsibility for answering and recording inquiry outcomes.
4. Keep one comparable baseline and document unavoidable differences.
5. Choose one important change and record why it is expected to help.
6. Review suitability first, then booking and completion evidence, then collection and specified contribution.
7. Continue, repair, reduce or stop based on the evidence and capacity; write down unresolved questions.