Glossary

Marketing Glossary for Home-Service Growth

The vocabulary this industry uses, defined plainly. Each term is written to be useful on its own, and where a concept has a fuller explanation elsewhere on this site, the definition links to it. Terms are grouped by what they do rather than sorted alphabetically, because a list from A to Z does not teach anybody how the ideas connect.

Core growth concepts

The handful of ideas that decide whether a growth programme is aimed at the right thing.

AI growth marketing: AI growth marketing is the use of machine learning over a company’s own customer and campaign data to inform targeting, messaging, budget allocation and follow-up, with human strategists making the judgement calls. The machine handles pattern detection and repetition at a scale people cannot maintain.; AI growth marketing
Customer intelligence: Customer intelligence is the practice of turning a company’s own customer, job and lead records into decisions about who to market to and what they are worth. It usually means segmenting by job history, ticket value, property location, service type and repeat behaviour, rather than treating every past customer the same.; Customer intelligence
Growth marketing: Growth marketing is marketing organised around measurable movement in a business metric, such as revenue, retained customers or cost per acquired customer, rather than around activity like impressions or content volume. The measure of success is the business outcome, not the amount produced.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Customer acquisition cost is the total marketing and sales cost of acquiring one customer, calculated as the spend in a period divided by the customers acquired in it. Blended CAC hides the difference between channels, so it is most useful when calculated per channel and per service line.; Marketing budget calculator
Customer lifetime value (LTV): Customer lifetime value is the gross profit a customer is expected to produce over the whole time they remain a customer. For recurring businesses such as pool service or maintenance agreements, it is the figure that determines what may reasonably be paid to acquire one customer.
Service mix: Service mix is the set of distinct services a home-service company sells. It matters because different services inside one company can carry very different ticket values, buying questions and search volumes, which is what justifies separate campaigns, pages and targets.
Route density: Route density describes how concentrated a recurring service business’s customers are geographically. Higher density reduces drive time between stops, which raises gross margin per customer and therefore raises the acquisition cost a business can justify.

Acquisition and paid media

The vocabulary of buying attention and turning it into enquiries.

PPC (pay-per-click): PPC is advertising where the advertiser pays when a user clicks the ad, most commonly on search engines and social platforms. In home services it is mainly used to capture existing demand from people already searching for a service.; Google Ads management
Search intent: Search intent is what a person is actually trying to accomplish with a query. Two searches containing the same words can carry different intent, such as researching a method versus looking for somebody to do it today, and intent determines what page should answer the query.
Conversion: A conversion is any completed action a business counts as valuable, such as a call, a form submission, a booked appointment or a purchase. What counts as a conversion is a choice, and a business that counts only form fills will optimise toward form fills.
Conversion rate: Conversion rate is the share of visitors or leads who complete the desired action, expressed as a percentage. It is the multiplier that decides how many enquiries are needed to produce a given number of customers, which is why it changes a marketing budget more than most people expect.
Cost per lead: Cost per lead is the marketing spend divided by the number of leads it produced. It is useful as a working figure within one channel and one lead type, and misleading when compared across services, because leads with the same cost can be worth very different amounts.; Lead quality in home services
Cost per acquisition: Cost per acquisition is the spend divided by the number of customers or jobs actually won, not the number of leads generated. It is the figure that answers whether marketing is affordable, because it survives the close rate.
ROAS (return on ad spend): Return on ad spend is the revenue attributed to advertising divided by the advertising spend, usually expressed as a multiple. A ROAS of 4 means four in revenue for every one spent, before costs. It says nothing about profit unless margin is applied to it.
Negative keyword: A negative keyword tells an advertising platform not to show an ad for searches containing that term. In home services they are used mainly to exclude job seekers, do-it-yourself researchers and product shoppers, none of whom are customers.
Retargeting: Retargeting is advertising shown to people who have already interacted with the business, such as previous site visitors or past customers. Because the audience already knows the company, retargeting typically costs less per response than reaching a cold audience.
Lookalike audience: A lookalike audience is a set of new people the advertising platform identifies as resembling an existing audience, usually built from customer data. It is only as good as the audience it is modelled on, so a lookalike built from past customers behaves differently from one built from all leads.
Landing page: A landing page is the page an advertisement or campaign sends visitors to. It converts better when it answers the specific question the advertisement promised to answer, which is why separate services usually justify separate pages.
Call tracking: Call tracking uses a different phone number per channel or campaign so phone enquiries can be attributed. In trades where most leads arrive by phone, it is often the only way to know which advertising produced the work.
UTM parameter: A UTM parameter is a tag added to a link that records its source, medium and campaign in analytics. It is the mechanism that lets a business see which channel a website visit or form submission came from.

Measurement and attribution

The definitions that decide whether performance is being judged honestly.

Revenue attribution: Revenue attribution connects a marketing activity to the revenue it eventually produced, following a customer from the first recorded source through the CRM to a booked job and its invoiced value. It is the difference between knowing what was clicked and knowing what was earned.; Revenue attribution
Marketing attribution: Marketing attribution is the broader practice of assigning credit for an outcome to the marketing touchpoints involved. Where more than one channel contributes, the business has to choose a model, and the model itself changes which channel looks best.
Offline conversion: An offline conversion is a sale that happened outside the platform, such as a job booked by phone and recorded in a CRM, sent back to the advertising platform so bidding can optimise toward real revenue rather than toward clicks or forms.
Lead-to-sale rate: Lead-to-sale rate is the share of leads that become paying customers. It converts a target number of customers into the number of leads required, and it is the single fastest way to reduce the marketing budget needed for a given growth target.
Estimate-to-sale rate: Estimate-to-sale rate is the share of written estimates that become sold work. In high-ticket trades it separates a marketing problem from a follow-up and pricing problem, because good leads lost after the estimate are not a lead generation issue.
Lead quality: Lead quality describes how closely an enquiry matches the work a business wants to sell, measured by what it becomes: a qualified opportunity, an appointment, an estimate and a sold job. Two leads can cost the same and be worth very different amounts.
Qualified lead: A qualified lead is an enquiry that matches the company’s service area, service type and eligibility expectations and has a genuine need the business can serve. Qualification criteria differ by trade, so the term means different things in different industries.
Marketing qualified lead (MQL): A marketing qualified lead is an enquiry that meets engagement or fit criteria set by the marketing team, before sales has assessed it. The definition is company-specific, and the term is only useful if the criteria are written down and the same people apply them every time.
Sales qualified lead (SQL): A sales qualified lead is an enquiry that has been assessed as ready for a sales conversation, such as a homeowner with a confirmed need, a defined service area match and a realistic timeline. Where the definition is not written down, the label usually means little.
First-party data: First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own customers and visitors, such as job history, contact details and service records. It is the most reliable data a company holds, and in home services it is usually the most under-used asset in the business.

Customer lifecycle

Terms about the revenue that comes from customers a business already has.

Customer reactivation: Customer reactivation is marketing aimed at people who already have a relationship with a business but are not currently buying: past customers, lapsed accounts, unclosed estimates and old leads. Because those audiences were acquired once already, reactivation usually produces work at a lower cost per sale than new acquisition.; Customer reactivation
Lead nurturing: Lead nurturing is the sequence of follow-up a business runs with an enquiry that is not ready to buy yet, using reminders, useful information and timely offers. In trades with long decision cycles it is what prevents a paid-for lead from being forgotten.
CRM (customer relationship management): A CRM is the system that records leads, customers, jobs, estimates and their outcomes. For marketing it matters because it holds the source and the final value of each opportunity, which is what makes attribution and reactivation possible.; CRM automation
Cross-sell: A cross-sell is additional work sold to a customer who is already buying something else, such as equipment replacement sold to a recurring service customer. Cross-sell revenue is the cheapest revenue a business has, because no new acquisition cost was paid for it.
Customer retention: Customer retention is the share of customers who stay. In recurring service businesses it is the multiplier on acquisition spend, because the same acquisition cost supports a very different budget depending on how long the customer remains.

Local and organic visibility

How a service business becomes findable in the places people search locally.

SEO (search engine optimisation): SEO is the practice of making a website and its content easier for search engines to understand and more likely to answer a searcher’s question well, so it earns organic visibility without paying for each click.; SEO and local search
Local SEO: Local SEO is the practice of appearing in location-based results and map listings, driven mainly by accurate business information, an actively maintained business profile, reviews, local content and consistent details across every listing.
Google Business Profile: The Google Business Profile is the free listing that appears in Google local results and maps. For service businesses it is often the first thing a customer sees, and it is judged on accuracy, photographs, services listed, hours and the recency of reviews.
Service area page: A service area page states the towns and areas a business genuinely serves, in one place, with honest detail such as conditions or typical work in those areas. It establishes local relevance without generating a thin page for every town name.
Doorway page: A doorway page exists to capture a search term rather than to help a reader, typically a near-identical page repeated with different place names or service combinations. Search engines treat them as spam, and they also compete with the legitimate pages they duplicate.
Topical authority: Topical authority is the extent to which a site is recognised as covering a subject thoroughly and accurately. It is earned by covering each distinct question or service on its own page, with real evidence, rather than by publishing a large number of similar pages.
Entity authority: Entity authority is the strength of a business as a recognised entity: consistent naming, a clear category, verifiable details, accurate profiles that corroborate one another, and a body of work that other sources reference. It is what allows search and AI systems to resolve mentions of a company to one real business.

AI search and machine readability

The vocabulary of being understood, and quoted, by AI systems.

AI search visibility: AI search visibility is how readily an AI assistant or answer engine can find, trust and quote a business when answering a question. It depends on content that answers questions directly, definitions that stand alone, consistent facts about the business, and supporting evidence such as reviews, case studies and original data.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO): Generative engine optimisation is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines can extract and cite it accurately: direct answers near the top, descriptive headings, comparisons in tables, plain definitions, and factual consistency across the whole site.
Answer-first writing: Answer-first writing states the answer to a question in the first sentence or two and then explains the reasoning. It serves human readers who are scanning, and it gives AI systems a complete claim they can quote without distorting it.
Structured data: Structured data is machine-readable information placed in a page’s code that describes what the page contains, such as a service, an article, a question and answer, or a business. It only helps where it accurately reflects the visible content on the page.

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