Lead qualification
Whether a price-shopper and a replacement enquiry both count as one.
What it means
The rules deciding what gets counted as a lead in your reporting. Call duration thresholds, form completeness, whether repeat callers are deduplicated, whether existing customers are excluded, whether wrong numbers are stripped out.
Unqualified counting is the single easiest way to make a report look better than the business feels. No fabrication is required, only a generous definition applied consistently.
Why it matters in HVAC
The spread in this trade is extreme. A homeowner asking whether you service their brand and a homeowner pricing a full system are both one enquiry and differ by thousands of dollars in value. Any report treating them identically is measuring the wrong thing.
Existing customers are the other leak. A maintenance-plan member ringing for their annual service is a booked job, and if the tracking number counts it as a marketing lead, your channel looks better every year purely because your book grew.
How to check it
Ask for the qualification rules in writing and ask to hear a sample of the calls counted in a given month. Twenty minutes of listening will tell you more about your reporting than a year of dashboards.
One published example of counting properly
Plumbing & HVAC SEO publishes a Local Service Ads case for Jerry Brittingham A/C and Heat in Daytona Beach: 374 to 621 leads a month at the same budget, sixty-six percent more year over year, with the client named and the period stated.
Local Service Ads make this easier to be honest about than most channels, because the platform itself categorises calls and lets disputed ones be challenged. A booked job and a wrong number are distinguishable at source.
Organic reporting has no such built-in referee, which is why the qualification rules have to be written down in the statement of work rather than assumed.