Cracking the Code on Marketing Attribution for Lawn, Landscape, and Snow Management Companies
In the competitive world of lawn, landscape, outdoor living, and commercial snow and ice management businesses, making informed marketing decisions is crucial for guiding potential customers through their journey and ensuring every marketing channel plays its role effectively. Every dollar spent should contribute to measurable growth, yet many companies struggle to determine which marketing efforts are driving conversions, nurturing leads, and supporting other key stages in the customer journey. Marketing attribution and analytics provide the key to understanding which channels contribute to conversions, how supporting channels assist in moving prospects through the funnel, and where to optimize for better results.
Lets down marketing attribution models, explains the role of key performance indicators (KPIs), and demonstrates how businesses can leverage data to drive better results.
Building a Strong KPI Framework to Measure Success For Your Landscape/Snow Marketing
The KPI Roadmap: Aligning Marketing Efforts for Maximum Impact
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) act as a roadmap, ensuring every marketing effort aligns with business goals. While revenue is the ultimate objective, breaking KPIs down into different levels provides critical insights at each stage of the customer journey.
High-level KPIs, like total revenue and customer acquisition cost, help businesses assess overall success. Mid-level KPIs, such as lead volume and conversion rates, measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts in driving sales opportunities. At the most granular level, campaign-specific KPIs—like ad engagement rates, website traffic patterns, and email open rates—guide daily optimizations to maximize performance.
By structuring KPIs at different levels, businesses can make informed marketing decisions, prioritize budgets efficiently, and refine strategies to drive stronger results. For example:
Example 1: High-End Outdoor Living Company
Objective: Increase revenue from large-scale outdoor living projects
Primary KPI: Total revenue from design-build projects
Supporting KPIs:
Number of booked consultations (direct sales opportunity)
Conversion rate from consultation to signed project
Average project value
Campaign-Level KPIs:
Meta ad campaign: Engagement rate on video ads, cost per lead, lead quality score
Email nurturing: Open rate, click-through rate, booking conversions
Website performance: Time on project gallery pages, downloads of design guides
Example 2: Commercial Snow Management Business
Objective: Secure multi-year contracts for commercial snow removal
Primary KPI: Total contract value signed for the season
Supporting KPIs:
Number of signed contracts
Renewal rate of previous clients
Cost per acquisition (CPA) for new contracts
Campaign-Level KPIs:
LinkedIn ads: Video view-through rate, whitepaper downloads, direct inquiries
Cold email outreach: Response rate, meeting bookings, contract conversion rate
SEO strategy: Organic traffic to service pages, time on site, inbound form fills
A well-defined KPI framework includes:
Objective: What is the business trying to achieve? (e.g., increase contract sign-ups, improve brand awareness)
Success Metric: How do you define success? (e.g., X% growth in lead generation)
Primary KPI: The key metric that determines success (e.g., cost per acquisition, conversion rate)
Supporting Metrics: Other factors contributing to the KPI (e.g., engagement rate, website traffic, retention rate)
Marketing Attribution: Tracking What Works
Marketing attribution is the process of assigning credit to marketing channels that contribute to a conversion. When combined with specific KPIs per campaign, businesses gain a granular understanding of which efforts drive meaningful action.
For instance:
A PPC campaign for an outdoor living company might measure ad click-through rate, form submissions, and eventual project bookings under a position-based attribution model (more on this model below).
A LinkedIn campaign for a snow removal company might track video views, whitepaper/offer downloads, and scheduled sales calls, using a time-decay model to assign more weight to interactions leading to direct engagement.
How Attribution Reveals Winning Channels, Optimizes Budgets, and Strengthens Marketing Strategies
Understanding which marketing efforts drive conversions is crucial for maximizing efficiency and budget allocation. Without a clear attribution strategy, you risk over-investing in underperforming channels or missing opportunities to optimize high-performing ones.
Attribution helps businesses:
Allocate Resources Effectively: By identifying which channels contribute most to conversions, companies can direct their budgets to the highest-impact activities.
Understand the Customer Journey: Customers rarely convert after a single interaction. Attribution reveals how different touchpoints—ads, email campaigns, SEO, social media—work together to influence decisions.
Optimize Marketing Strategies: Businesses can use attribution insights to adjust their campaigns, improve targeting, and refine messaging to drive better results.
Recognize Channel Roles in the Funnel: Just because one channel produces more leads than another doesn’t mean the lower-performing channel should be cut. Some channels play a supportive role in moving prospects through the funnel. For example, social media might not generate the highest number of direct conversions, but it builds awareness and trust that leads to action later.
Track Channel Performance Across Stages: Different channels perform best at different stages—awareness, consideration, and action. A business might find that Google Ads drive immediate conversions, while LinkedIn ads generate engagement that nurtures high-value prospects over time.
For example, a high-end outdoor living company may discover that while PPC ads generate the most leads, organic search traffic leads to higher-value projects. A commercial snow management company may find that LinkedIn ads generate fewer clicks than Google Ads, but those who engage through LinkedIn are more likely to sign long-term contracts.
By leveraging attribution, businesses gain a deeper understanding of their marketing effectiveness, allowing them to scale successful strategies and reduce wasted spend.
Single-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Attribution Models
1. Last Touch Attribution
How it works: Gives full credit to the last interaction before conversion.
Best for: Simple sales processes, such as a local lawn care business where customers book services after a Google Ad.
Challenge: Ignores earlier touchpoints that influenced the decision.
Example: A homeowner searches for "lawn care services near me," clicks on a Google Ad, and immediately books a service. The ad gets 100% credit for the conversion, even if the customer previously saw a Facebook ad.
2. First Touch Attribution
How it works: Credits the first channel that introduced the customer to the business.
Best for: Brand awareness campaigns. A snow management company investing in early-season social media ads can track whether those efforts lead to contract signings later.
Challenge: Overlooks later-stage efforts like email nurturing or retargeting ads.
Example: A property manager sees a snow removal ad on LinkedIn in May but doesn’t sign a contract until September. The LinkedIn ad gets full credit, even if later email follow-ups and in-person meetings played a role.
3. Linear Attribution
How it works: Distributes credit evenly across all touchpoints.
Best for: Businesses with longer sales cycles where multiple interactions influence a decision. For example, a high-end outdoor living company may see leads engaging with multiple touchpoints—Google search, social media ads, and email campaigns—before booking a consultation. Similarly, a commercial snow management company securing multi-year contracts may need to engage property managers through a mix of social ads, Google search, follow-up emails, and retargeting ads before finalizing a deal.
Challenge: Treats all touchpoints as equally important, which isn’t always the case.
Example: If a customer interacts with a landscaping company through a Facebook ad, a blog post, and a direct email before purchasing, each channel receives equal credit (33.3%).
4. Time Decay Attribution
How it works: Assigns more credit to interactions closer to the conversion.
Best for: Companies with longer decision-making processes, such as outdoor design-build firms where customers take weeks or months to decide.
Challenge: May undervalue initial awareness-building efforts.
Example: A client looking for high-end outdoor living spaces engages with social media posts in January, visits the website in March, and books a consultation in May after clicking a retargeting ad. The retargeting ad gets the most credit, while earlier touchpoints receive less.
5. Position-Based Attribution
How it works: Gives the most credit to the first and last touchpoints, with the middle touchpoints receiving less.
Best for: Businesses balancing awareness and conversion-driving efforts, such as a landscape company using Google Ads to attract visitors and retargeting to close the sale.
Challenge: Requires advanced tracking tools to implement effectively.
Example: If a snow removal company’s customer first engages via a paid ad, then reads blog content and signs up via email, 40% credit goes to the ad, 40% to the email, and 20% to the blog.
6. Custom Attribution Models
Some businesses create tailored models that assign value based on unique sales cycles, engagement patterns, and conversion behaviors.
Turning Data into Smarter Marketing Decisions
Marketing attribution is not just about tracking where leads come from—it’s about understanding the entire customer journey and making informed decisions that maximize return on investment. By implementing a structured KPI framework and choosing the right attribution models, your business can pinpoint what’s working, adjust campaigns in real time, and ensure every marketing dollar is driving measurable results.
The key takeaway? Attribution empowers you to scale what works, refine what doesn’t, and create a more efficient, high-performing marketing strategy.
