Total enquiries versus qualified enquiries
A total enquiry is anyone who fills in a form, calls or messages. A qualified enquiry is one that meets criteria you've set in advance. Keeping these as two separate numbers is the single most useful change most businesses can make to their reporting, because a campaign that doubles total enquiries while qualified enquiries stay flat hasn't improved anything — it's just created more admin.
Decide what "qualified" means before you count
Write your criteria down and apply them the same way every time. Most construction businesses will use some version of these four:
- Service-area fit — is the site somewhere you actually work?
- Project fit — is it the type and size of job you want to take on?
- Budget fit — is the indicative budget realistic for the scope described?
- Timing fit — are they ready to proceed in a timeframe you can meet, or are they a year away from plans?
An enquiry that fails one criterion isn't necessarily worthless — a "not yet" might be worth a follow-up later — but it shouldn't be counted as qualified today.
Track the stages after the enquiry
Qualification is only the start. To see which marketing actually leads to work, record each later stage separately:
- Appointment or site visit booked
- Appointment attended
- Quote issued
- Project won
These stages depend on your team recording outcomes. A simple shared spreadsheet or the stage field in your CRM is enough, as long as it's updated consistently. The gap between "quote issued" and "project won" is often driven by pricing, capacity and sales process rather than marketing, so it helps to see it clearly rather than blame or credit the ads for it.
Clean the data: deduplication and attribution
Deduplicate. The same person may fill in a form, then call, then email. Count them once. Match on phone number or email and merge the records, otherwise your enquiry numbers will be inflated and your cost per enquiry will look better than it is.
Attribute consistently. Record where each enquiry came from — a specific campaign, a referral, your website, a repeat client — using the same labels every time. Pick one rule for enquiries that touched several sources (for example "first source they mention" or "source of the first recorded contact") and stick with it. Changing the rule halfway through a quarter makes comparisons meaningless.
Calculate cost per stage
Here is a hypothetical example to show the arithmetic. These are illustrative numbers, not a benchmark or a prediction of results.
- Ad spend for the month: $1,500
- Total enquiries (after deduplication): 30
- Qualified enquiries: 10
Cost per enquiry is $1,500 ÷ 30 = $50. Cost per qualified enquiry is $1,500 ÷ 10 = $150. You can continue the same calculation down the stages: if 5 of those 10 attended an appointment, that's $300 per attended appointment, and so on.
The $150 figure is the more honest one. A campaign producing enquiries at $30 each but with very few qualified could easily cost more per qualified enquiry than this one.
Keep ad spend and fees separate
Ad spend is what's paid to the advertising platforms. Agency or management fees, content production and software are separate costs. Report cost per stage using ad spend alone, and separately using total marketing cost. Mixing them makes it hard to tell whether a change in results came from the campaigns or from a change in what you're paying for.
Review over a sensible period
Construction projects have long decision cycles. An enquiry this month might not become a quote for weeks and a signed job for months. Judge campaigns on the stages that have had time to happen, and look at trends across several months rather than reacting to a single quiet week.
A simple checklist
- Written qualification criteria for area, project, budget and timing
- One record per person, deduplicated
- A consistent source label on every enquiry
- Each stage recorded: qualified, booked, attended, quoted, won
- Ad spend reported separately from fees
This is the reporting structure we use in our construction marketing service. If you're also producing content, our guide on what to include in a construction project video covers the creative side.