Why Media Quality, Not Media Volume, Drives Home Services Growth

For home services marketers, digital advertising offers abundant signals but limited certainty about what actually drives bookings.

Over the past decade, digital advertising has become exceptionally good at generating measurable activity. Platforms can efficiently deliver impressions, clicks, and engagement at scale and those signals are useful for optimization. But they don’t necessarily reflect intent or revenue impact.

Research into local and mobile behaviour shows that more than 70% of service-based mobile searches lead to action within 24 hours, with phone calls among the highest-converting outcomes in high-urgency categories like home services. When the need is immediate, consumers are far more likely to call than complete a long web journey.

At the same time, data from eMarketer highlights a growing disconnect between activity and outcomes. As digital ad investment and programmatic volume have continued to rise, conversion rates and post-click engagement have largely flattened across performance-driven verticals. Media performance remains steady, but business outcomes haven’t scaled alongside it.

For brands, this creates both a risk and an opportunity. Campaigns can appear highly optimized at the media level while underperforming where it matters most. The brands that outperform are the ones that move beyond surface-level efficiency and evaluate success based on intent-driven outcomes such as qualified calls, call quality, and booked jobs.

The takeaway is simple: media activity alone is not a reliable indicator of demand. Without tying performance back to calls, bookings, and revenue, it’s easy to mistake engagement for intent and efficiency for growth.

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Why Media Efficiency Doesn’t Always Translate to Calls

One of the most common reasons performance looks strong while results lag is where ads actually appear.

Some media environments are designed to generate engagement rather than intent. Made-for-Advertising (MFA) style sites and arbitrage placements are optimized to deliver impressions and clicks at scale and they do exactly that. The problem is that activity doesn’t guarantee demand.

Industry studies have found that roughly 20–40% of programmatic ad spend delivers little to no incremental value, even though impressions and clicks are recorded. The activity shows up in reports. The impact doesn’t show up in revenue.

For operators, this gap becomes obvious once performance is evaluated beyond the click. Campaigns may post healthy CTRs while driving fewer calls than expected. When calls do come in, they’re often short, frequently under 30 seconds, and rarely turn into booked jobs. On the surface, media looks efficient. Downstream, demand never materializes.

This is how media waste scales quietly. Volume increases. Dashboards look healthy. But the outcomes that matter like calls, conversations, and revenue, fall behind. Brands that recognize this early can pull budget back from low-intent environments and refocus on placements that consistently produce engaged calls and real business value.

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Why Calls Reveal Real Intent

Phone calls cut through media noise faster than any other signal because they require real effort from the consumer.

Someone doesn’t call a home services provider by accident. They call because they need help and they’re ready to talk to a real person.

Industry benchmarks consistently show just how strong that signal is. In home services, phone leads convert two to three times higher than web form leads, and calls lasting longer than 60 seconds are far more likely to turn into booked jobs. Just as importantly, call quality varies widely by media source even when click costs look nearly identical.

This is why two placements can generate the same number of clicks and deliver completely different revenue outcomes. One may drive short, low-intent interactions. The other may drive fewer calls overall, but the kind that turn into real conversations, real bookings, and real revenue.

Media quality becomes visible almost immediately when calls are part of the measurement. Poor placements expose themselves through short calls and weak follow-through. Strong placements don’t need volume to prove their value - the calls speak for themselves.
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When Media Optimization Undermines Business Efficiency

Most marketers aren’t chasing clicks - they’re chasing business results. The risk comes when platform-level efficiency metrics are mistaken for business effectiveness.

Ad platforms are designed to optimize toward what they can measure most easily: impressions, clicks, and conversions. Over time, this can push spend toward inventory that delivers activity efficiently, but not outcomes. As a result, campaigns may look optimized while cost per booked job quietly rises.

Across digital channels, click volume has increased while conversion performance has largely stalled. In home services, this shows up clearly: healthy CTRs paired with fewer calls, shorter conversations, and lower booking rates. The clicks are there but the jobs aren’t.

When teams evaluate performance across the full journey, the efficiency difference becomes measurable. Marketers using outcome-based or multi-touch measurement models are up to 20% more efficient in how they allocate budget than teams relying on last-click metrics alone. Once calls, bookings, and revenue are part of the equation, low-intent placements stop winning by default.

For home services brands, this doesn’t show up in cost per click. It shows up in cost per booked job.  Platform efficiency doesn’t always equal business efficiency. When performance is evaluated beyond clicks and engagement, rising cost per booked job becomes visible early, giving marketers the opportunity to correct course before wasted spend compounds.
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Media Quality Is a Measurable Revenue Lever

When brands shift their focus from media metrics to business outcomes, performance clarity improves quickly.

Call tracking attribution and 1st party-data integration make it easier to see which placements are driving real demand and which ones are simply generating activity. High-performing operators look beyond surface-level signals and track what happens after the interaction: the cost of qualified calls, call duration and engagement, booking rates by media source, and revenue per call.

When those signals are tied back to media quality, the differences between placements become obvious even when click costs look similar.

As budget is pulled away from low-intent environments and concentrated in placements that consistently produce engaged calls, real marketing efficiency improves. Brands see lower cost per booked job, higher close rates, and more revenue generated from the same spend and not because they’re buying more media, but because they’re buying better media.

In home services, performance isn’t about who clicked, it’s about who booked. 

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What This Means for Home Services Marketers

The path to better performance isn’t about abandoning media metrics but about aligning them with business outcomes. Clicks and engagement can signal interest, but calls reveal intent. When success is evaluated based on the quality of calls and the bookings they generate, inefficiencies surface quickly and budgets start working harder.

Brands that make this shift gain clearer visibility into what’s actually driving growth, reduce wasted spend, and focus investment on placements that generate real conversations, real jobs, and real revenue. In a category defined by urgency, media quality isn’t just a planning consideration, it’s a measurable revenue lever.

At Other., we help marketers connect media quality to real business outcomes. By tying performance back to calls, bookings, and revenue, we help teams see where spend is working, where it’s being wasted, and how to reallocate budget toward placements that consistently drive high-intent demand.

To see how we help home services organizations click here. 

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Sources: eMarketer; Google local and mobile search behavior research; CallRail industry benchmarks; HubSpot attribution research; ANA programmatic transparency studies.

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