Quick thread in response to @garyvee biggest challenge getting ppl to execute his advice. I hope this helps many of you. 2 yrs ago I started to get bad anxiety. Stuck in my job. Wanted to do more. Randomly put on GV + he spoke about garage sales as a start-now way to build skills

Nexus literally pays for itself and we are tracking lead ratings, reasons, outcomes and estimated credits available now in your report library searchlightdigital.io/nexus

LSA spend per contractor is up 30% year over year. Google Ads is up 9%. And on October 1, Google started charging for more of those calls: missed calls over 20 seconds and follow-up calls are now billable. So we looked at what contractors are actually paying for. Across 23,031 graded LSA calls and messages in September: → 41% of LSA leads were unbookable → 8.9% qualify for a credit from Google: service not offered, out of service area, wrong numbers, sales calls → That's $8.90 of every $100 in LSA spend → The West has the most to claim back, at $10.86 per $100 Google credits some of these on its own. Most of it, you have to ask for. That's why we built it into SearchLight Nexus. As of this week, Nexus grades every LSA lead from the call transcript and rates the unbookable ones back to Google every day. In the first run, Google credited 122 of 158 ratings. For one operator, Nexus got 30 credits back. Google's own review gave 12. Full benchmarks, regional breakdown, and an October preview in The Data-Driven Trades newsletter here: thedatadriventrades.substack… Want to see what your LSA account could get back? Book a Nexus demo: SearchLightdigital.io/nexus

CPL for contractors is more deceiving than I thought it was. Usually, CPL was at least a nice directional benchmark that could help for ad budgeting purposes, but when you factor in bookability and price out the cost per bookable conversion, the data looks much different. Paying customer rate and average tickets play a role here too, but I just can’t reason about continuing to use CPL as a metric going forward. In this sample of data, that metric would tell you pay per lead marketplaces are the third most efficient channel when in reality, it was the most expensive to generate bookable opportunities. thedatadriventrades.substack…

Introducing the SearchLight Spend Index. We tracked weekly ad spend for the same 550 home services contractors, September 2025 vs. September 2026. LSA spend per contractor: up 30%. Google Ads: up 9%. The top 10% of contractors raised LSA spend 25%, to more than $7,300 a week. On Google Ads, that same group cut back 3%. What data would you like to see featured in this index?

Most SaaS marketers think B2C is easy. Justin Schmidt spent 17 years in tech, including managing $120M a year in Facebook and Google spend. Then he joined @HoffmannBros and learned what makes home services different: "You can't service a home if you don't have the human to service the home." In the first SearchLight Creators profile, Justin talks about: → Why marketing in the trades is "a logistical miracle" → The 3 numbers he checks every single morning → Why Google throws every ad unit it has at high-intent searches, while top-of-funnel goes to AI Overviews → How his team uses Claude agents on SearchLight data to answer questions a dashboard can't Read the full profile here: searchlightdigital.io/creato…

This is how we built AI access at SearchLight. Clara only sees what a user's permissions allow. Every query is logged. Bring any model through our MCP. And the numbers are computed by our data layer, not generated by the model. Trust the model the least. Searchlightdigital.io/nexus

SearchLight now lets our clients chat with their data with guardrails and our codified expertise. Today was my first-ever primarily AI written newsletter (human in the loop to check accuracy) based on my prompting of some data across our client base. Nexus launching Nov 1: searchlightdigital.io/nexus/

Stoked with how our lead grading product is progressing and the benefits to contractors - to help capture more of the bookable conversions they're missing! searchlightdigital.io/lead-g…

Customer-scoped book rates paint a much different story for your business, especially when you isolate that to bookable opportunities only. Of the conversions we graded in May and June that ClaraT identified as bookable, a little over half booked at the time of the conversion. Most of the time, the bookable opportunities that did not book at the time of conversion were due to planned follow-up on the agent's side. The problem is that over half of those bookable unbooked opportunities remained unbooked weeks and months after the conversion occurred. The 'eventual' book rate (of bookable opportunities ONLY) was 72.5%. Book rate is thrown around A LOT in our industry, but is usually poorly defined - I could think of at least a dozen different ways to measure book rate. It's one thing to have data points, but another entirely to ensure there's a shared understanding of what they mean, how they're calculated, and what they impact for your business. Eventual book rate is a fascinating KPI because it measures at the customer level over longer time horizons vs. at the time of the conversion, which can skew your data. Read our full analysis at thedatadriventrades dot substack dot com #hvacmarketing #hvac #trades #homeservices

Just launched: roofing-specific digital marketing trade benchmarks! Unbranded Google Ads CAC is expensive for roofers! roofingdata.substack.com/p/b…

The SearchLight Data Lab is my favorite AI-enabled project I've done this year. The SearchLight Data Lab is my favorite AI-enabled project I took on this year. It's not done at the snap of a finger and still requires a lot of context, understanding of data, trends, taxonomy, etc. but without Claude, I wouldn't be able to do this. See how your Google Ads CPL stacks up in your region: searchlightdigital.io/google…