Why the loop is open by default
A homeowner clicks an ad, submits a form, talks to a person, has an estimator visit, thinks for two weeks, signs at a kitchen table and pays by cheque. Every step after the form is invisible to the ad platform. Left alone, the platform's best information about that customer is that a form was filled in — the same information it has about the person who typed a fake number.
So the platform optimises toward form fills, and the business gets more form fills. The loop being open is not a reporting inconvenience; it actively steers spend toward the wrong people.
What closing it requires
- The click identifier captured at first contact and stored durably on the record.
- An identity thread that survives lead → customer → job, so the outcome can find its origin.
- A verified outcome with a date and a value — contract signed, job sold, invoice collected.
- A deliberate export or upload of those outcomes back to the platform, on a defined cadence.
- A consent and privacy review, because outcome data is customer data.
What it changes and what it does not
The benefit is not a prettier report. It is that the platform starts optimising toward people who resemble buyers rather than people who resemble form-fillers. That shift usually shows up as fewer leads at a higher cost per lead and a lower cost per sold job — which will look like a regression to anyone watching only the top of the ladder.
What it does not do is make attribution exact. Uploaded outcomes only match where an identifier survived; calls, cross-device journeys and word of mouth still fall outside the loop, and a share of revenue will always sit in an unattributed bucket.
Windows: the quiet distortion
Every attribution system has a window — the maximum age of a touch that can still be credited. If the window is thirty days and the average decision takes fifty, most of the revenue is being measured as if the advertising never happened.
Set the window against the real, measured sales cycle, and state it on every report. Two reports with different windows are not comparable, and a window change is a bigger deal than most people treat it as.