What we found across 7,218 home-services businesses
Most reporting on ad measurement is based on surveys - asking marketers what they think is installed. We did it the other way round. We loaded 7,218 home-services business websites in a real browser, looked at what was actually running, and cross-referenced which of those businesses were confirmed to be buying ads.
Of the businesses we could confirm were actively running ads, 29% had no conversion tracking of any kind. Not misconfigured. Not partially firing. Nothing on the page that could record a lead.
That is 29% of advertisers spending money with no mechanism to know what it produced.
The headline numbers
- 7,218 home-services business websites rendered and inspected
- 1,613 confirmed to be running ads at the time of the scan
- 434 of those 1,613 - 29% - had no conversion tracking
- 4,742 of all 7,218 - 65% - had no conversion tracking at all, whether they were advertising or not
- 28% of all sites had GA4 installed
- 24% had a Google Ads conversion tag
- 20% had Google Tag Manager
It varies enormously by trade
The rate of blind advertisers is not evenly distributed. Some trades are close to a coin flip.
| Trade | Advertisers checked | No tracking | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Painting | 17 | 9 | 53% |
| Electrician | 42 | 22 | 52% |
| Carpet Repair | 21 | 10 | 48% |
| Countertop | 15 | 6 | 40% |
| Tree Service | 26 | 10 | 38% |
| Home Security | 36 | 13 | 36% |
| Patio Contractor | 37 | 13 | 35% |
| Locksmith | 20 | 7 | 35% |
| Gutter Installation | 20 | 7 | 35% |
| Solar Installer | 38 | 12 | 32% |
| Glass | 34 | 11 | 32% |
| Fencing | 35 | 11 | 31% |
| Roofing | 77 | 23 | 30% |
| Plumbing | 68 | 19 | 28% |
| Wholesale Real Estate | 18 | 5 | 28% |
| Cabinets | 30 | 8 | 27% |
| HVAC | 70 | 18 | 26% |
| Pool Service | 35 | 9 | 26% |
| Pest Control | 31 | 8 | 26% |
| Tile Installation | 20 | 5 | 25% |
| Remodeling | 44 | 10 | 23% |
| Pool Resurfacing | 30 | 7 | 23% |
| IV Therapy | 26 | 6 | 23% |
| Landscaping | 19 | 4 | 21% |
| Artificial Turf | 41 | 8 | 20% |
| Barn Doors | 21 | 4 | 19% |
| Water Heater Repair | 22 | 4 | 18% |
| Windows | 41 | 7 | 17% |
| Restoration | 36 | 6 | 17% |
| Garage Door | 26 | 4 | 15% |
| Property Management | 17 | 2 | 12% |
Read the "advertisers checked" column before drawing conclusions from any single row. A trade with 15 advertisers gives a useful signal, not a precise national figure, and the difference between 53% and 52% at that sample size is noise. A trade appears here only if it has at least 15 confirmed advertisers, so no rate is built on a handful. The pattern that survives the small numbers is the spread: the gap between the top of this table and the bottom is real, and it is large.
Why flooring and restoration sit at the bottom is worth a hypothesis rather than a claim. Both tend to involve longer consideration and higher ticket values, which usually means someone has already been forced to justify the spend - and justifying spend is what makes people install tracking.
What "no tracking" means here, precisely
This is the part most reports skip, so we will be specific about what the number can and cannot support.
We counted a site as having no tracking when a real browser loaded the page and found no Google Tag Manager container, no GA4, no Google Ads conversion tag, no Meta pixel, no Microsoft UET, and no call-tracking script. A rendered browser session - not a raw HTML fetch, which misses anything injected by a tag manager at runtime.
The 28% is a ceiling, not an exact figure, and it is almost certainly slightly too high. Three reasons:
- Server-side tagging is invisible to this method. A business running a server-side container can be fully tracked while a page scan sees nothing. We recognise several server-side setups explicitly, but not all of them.
- Consent-gated tags may not fire for an automated visitor that never clicks accept.
- A site can track leads without any of the above - a phone number and a notepad is a measurement system, just not one you can optimize a campaign against.
Confirmed advertising means the business had live ads visible in Google's Ads Transparency Center at the time of the scan. The absence of ads there is not proof a business isn't advertising - they may run under a different account name, or on a platform it doesn't cover - so businesses we could not confirm are excluded from the 1,613 entirely rather than counted as non-advertisers.
Sample and method
- Sample: 7,218 home-services businesses, drawn from metropolitan areas in Arizona and California. The largest concentrations are Phoenix, San Diego, Scottsdale, Bakersfield, Palm Springs and Tempe.
- Method: each site was loaded in a real headless browser, allowed to execute JavaScript, and its rendered DOM inspected for tracking signals. Detection is deterministic pattern-matching, not a model - the same site produces the same verdict every time.
- Advertising status was checked against Google's Ads Transparency Center.
- This is not a national random sample. It is a large, systematically collected sample of home-services businesses in two US states, and it should be read as that.
Why this matters more than it sounds
An advertiser with no conversion tracking is not measuring badly. They are not measuring at all. Every decision in that account - which keyword to raise, which campaign to cut, whether the whole channel is working - is being made on clicks. That is the first thing we rebuild when we take over a Google Ads account, and it is where every engagement we write up starts.
Clicks and jobs are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where the money goes. A campaign producing expensive clicks and cheap jobs looks like a failure. A campaign producing cheap clicks and no jobs looks like a success. Without conversion data, both mistakes are invisible, and the second one can run for years.
The 29% figure is the part of the industry that cannot tell those two apart.
Methodology notes and updates
This page is updated in place as the dataset grows. Figures reflect the sample as of the date shown above. If you want to cite this research, link to this page rather than quoting a figure in isolation, so the number a reader sees is the current one.
If you would like to know which side of the 29% you are on, run our free conversion tracking checker for an instant look at what is firing on your site, or send us your site directly. No charge, no pitch.