Operating
The marketing KPIs every PE operating partner should track inside a home services portfolio
Most operating partners inherit marketing reporting that's a Google Ads dashboard pasted into a slide. The wrong metrics produce the wrong conversations and obscure the EBITDA lever the marketing function actually is. Here's the six-metric report card that should travel up to the sponsor monthly — and the leading indicators underneath that show the function is healthy.
Walk into a board meeting at a PE-backed home services platform and you'll usually see one of two patterns in the marketing section of the deck. Either a slide of ad-platform metrics — impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, conversion rate — that the operating partner can't connect to revenue. Or a single bar showing 'marketing spend was $XX this quarter' with no efficiency context at all.
Both patterns mean the operating partner can't tell whether the marketing engine is healthy, degrading, or accelerating. That makes marketing the function that gets the least scrutiny in good quarters and the most blame in bad ones — neither of which produces the EBITDA contribution the sponsor underwrote.
The six metrics that belong on the monthly report
Six metrics, structured so the headline number sits on top and the five operational leading indicators sit underneath. All reconciled to the financial system so the operating partner can read them with confidence the numbers tie.
- Marketing-sourced EBITDA contribution. The headline. Normalized for channel-mix shift and seasonality. Reported alongside the financial close so the operating partner sees marketing's contribution on the same cadence as everything else. If this number isn't on the report, marketing is being managed as a cost center instead of a value-creation lever.
- CAC trend by channel. Customer acquisition cost normalized by source, not raw blended. Shows whether the marketing engine is becoming more or less efficient over time. A rising CAC paired with rising revenue isn't bad; rising CAC paired with flat revenue is a structural problem that compounds.
- Sourced-revenue contribution by channel. What share of total revenue each channel is producing. Where to invest more, where to cut, where to test new entrants. The composition matters as much as the level — a platform with 70% revenue from one paid channel is fragile in a way the headline number won't show.
- Booked-call rate. Lead-to-appointment conversion. The leverage between marketing spend and operations performance. A declining booked-call rate paired with stable lead volume points at CSR performance or dispatch issues, not marketing inefficiency.
- Average ticket by lead source. Which channels bring high-ticket replacement work vs. low-ticket service calls. The mix that drives gross margin. If two channels deliver leads at the same CAC but one produces 2× the ticket, that's a structural reallocation decision the operating partner should be making quarterly.
- Brand investment as percentage of revenue. The investment that compounds across the hold and defends the multiple at exit. Underfunded in 80% of PE-backed home services platforms. Trending this metric over the hold tells you whether the platform is buying durability or buying short-term wins.
What doesn't belong on the report
Ad-platform metrics — impressions, clicks, CPC, CTR, conversion rate — are operational telemetry, not platform performance indicators. They belong on the marketing team's weekly review, not in the operating partner's monthly. Reporting them at the sponsor level produces conversations about why CPC went up 8% last month, instead of conversations about whether marketing-sourced EBITDA contribution is on plan for the hold.
Gross marketing spend is another metric that doesn't belong as a headline. It's a useful input to the efficiency metrics but it doesn't measure anything on its own. A platform that doubled marketing spend and tripled marketing-sourced revenue is succeeding; a platform that held marketing spend flat while platform revenue declined 15% has a worse problem than the spend number suggests.
If the marketing section of the monthly report doesn't include EBITDA contribution at the top, marketing is being managed as a cost center. The platform is leaving the value-creation lever on the table.
Cadence: monthly to operating partner, weekly inside the portco
The six-metric report is operating-partner-facing — produced monthly, tied to the financial close. Underneath it, the portco marketing team needs weekly operational metrics: paid-channel performance, lead-scoring distributions, dispatcher response time, vendor SLA tracking. These don't roll up to the operating partner but they're what makes the headline numbers move.
The platforms that compound through the hold are the ones where the operating partner can read the marketing section of the monthly deck in four minutes and answer the question 'what happens if we cut marketing spend in half' without consulting the portco. That's the bar.