Performance Benchmarks

Performance Benchmarks

Why Tracking Performance Matters

Consistent tracking is the best way to know whether your investment in aggregators and portals is paying off. It allows you to:

  1. Measure ROI and decide which platforms deserve ongoing investment.
  2. Identify opportunities to improve your lead follow-up practices and sales conversion.
  3. Hold team members accountable and offer training where needed. If a business development team member handles these leads, track their performance just as closely.

Consider Quality vs. Quantity

Success isn’t just about how many leads you receive. You should also be looking at how well those leads convert through each stage of the funnel:

  1. Leads → Assessments

  2. Assessments → Paying Clients


By tracking each step, you can pinpoint where drop-offs occur and apply training, coaching, or process improvements.


Consider this example:

  • Caring.com delivers 50 leads → 2 clients.

  • A Place for Mom delivers 20 leads → 4 clients.


At first glance, Caring.com looks stronger because of the higher lead volume. But A Place for Mom actually provides better value due to higher conversion efficiency. Keeping this perspective prevents misjudging success based only on lead volume.


Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

  1. Lead volume: Track how many referrals you receive each month to measure the impact of your spend.
  2. Lead Conversion Rate (Lead → Assessment): The percentage of leads that result in a booked assessment. This shows how effective your initial follow-up is at moving families to the next step.
  3. Assessment Conversion Rate (Assessment → Client): The percentage of assessments that convert into paying clients. This measures how well you demonstrate value during the assessment and close the sale.
  4. Overall Conversion Rate (Lead → Client): The percentage of total leads that ultimately become paying clients. This reflects the overall efficiency of your lead management and sales process.
  5. Client volume: Count the number of new clients attributed directly to aggregator platforms. This shows the tangible business impact.
  6. Revenue generated: Monitor the revenue tied to clients acquired through these leads to evaluate return on investment.
  7. Cost of Sale (COS): Divide your aggregator spend by the revenue earned. This tells you what percentage of revenue is consumed by marketing costs.
  8. Lifetime Value (LTV): Estimate the long-term revenue a client brings. Comparing LTV against COS gives a fuller picture of sustainability.
  9. Follow-up activity: Track how quickly and how often leads are being contacted by you or your team.
  10. Team performance: If a staff member or business development person is responsible for follow-up, measure their contact attempts, speed-to-lead, and conversion outcomes.

When to Track

  1. Ongoing: Record all data in Zoho as leads come in so you have accurate records.
  2. Weekly: Check follow-up activity, task completion, and speed-to-lead.
  3. Monthly: Calculate ROI, spot trends in conversion rates, and evaluate your budget against results.
  4. Quarterly: Take a broader view by comparing platforms and checking if your cost of sale and revenue benchmarks are on track.

This layered approach ensures both short-term accountability and long-term insight into performance.

Tracking in Zoho

Zoho is your main tool for managing the front end of the funnel. All digital leads from Caring.com, Bark, and Senior Care Finder auto-parse directly into Zoho (A Place for Mom and Care In Homes must be entered manually).

Set-up requirement: Complete the Lead Aggregator Intake Form to identify who on your team should own these leads. Only one lead owner can be assigned per lead, but you can designate different owners by source (e.g., Bark to one person, Caring.com to another).

What to track in Zoho:

  1. Leads received → All parsed automatically, except for A Place for Mom and Care in Homes lead which do not support integration at the moment and will need to be entered manually.
  2. Qualified Leads → Screened as viable for your services.
  3. Assessments Booked → Update status when in-home assessments are scheduled.
  4. Won Clients → Mark “Converted” once they start care.
  5. Reasons Lost → Capture why the lead did not convert: e.g., chose another provider, too expensive, no longer needs care.

Tools to use:

  1. Franchise Dashboard in Zoho – A high-level snapshot showing leads, deals, and conversions by source.
  2. Interactive filters – View performance by date, lead source, owner, or reason lost.
  3. Graphs & reports – Visualize leads per stage, won clients by source, and loss reasons. These help spot bottlenecks (e.g., too many leads stuck in “new”).
  4. Watch this demo of the Zoho Dashboards:


Notes
Coming Soon: Future integration will pull revenue and marketing spend into Zoho reporting.

Tracking in WellSky

WellSky is where you’ll record revenue. To evaluate ROI, you must link revenue back to the referral source.

  • During client intake, always tag the correct referral source (e.g., A Place for Mom, Caring.com, Bark, Senior Care Finder).

  • Once attached, all revenue for that client automatically rolls up under that source.

Watch this demo on how to add referral sources in Wellsky: 


Typical Budgets

A good starting point is approximately $1,000 per month in spend. Spending too little can prevent you from seeing a meaningful flow of leads to evaluate ROI properly, while overspending without strong lead follow-up can waste resources. It is best to ramp up gradually, only increasing your spend once your follow-up systems are proven and your team can consistently handle the volume. A larger budget without disciplined follow-up will likely result in wasted spend.

ROI Benchmarks

Target 10–20% Cost of Sale - A realistic benchmark is to spend between 10% and 20% of client revenue on acquiring those clients. Achieving 10% is excellent, but franchisees should generally aim for 10–15% overall cost of sale across all lead channels. Paid platforms may run higher, but the overall average should be balanced down by other lower-cost sources like referrals.

Set clear targets based on your business goals - Align your budget and conversion goals with your business objectives. As a general rule of thumb, expect to close approximately 1 client for every 10 leads, with the goal being to achieve 2 clients per 10 leads. 

As an example, if your goal is to add five new clients per quarter from aggregate sites, and your average client brings in $2,500 of monthly revenue, you should plan to purchase around 25–50 leads. That may translate into a budget of roughly $2,500–$3,000 on aggregators to target $12,500 of new monthly revenue. Having these specific goals makes it easier to measure cost of sale and determine whether to increase or decrease spend.

Measure over 6–12 months - Expect some variation month-to-month, but look for trends over a longer period of time. Some leads take weeks or months to convert, especially those in early planning stages. Give the strategy enough time to mature before scaling up or down. If results consistently underperform, review your follow-up practices before discontinuing a platform.

InfoNOTE: As a reminder, aggregator strategies are meant to complement, not replace your local referral building and community marketing. You should still prioritize generating leads from hospitals, facilities, and professional networks. Aggregators help accelerate your pipeline but must be used alongside grassroots marketing efforts.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

  1. Spending too little to see consistent results, which makes it difficult to establish reliable benchmarks.
  2. Scaling too fast: Increasing spend before you have a strong follow-up system in place, leading to wasted opportunities and higher cost of sale.
  3. Expecting instant ROI: Not all families need immediate care. Some will convert weeks or months later, so patience and structured follow-up are critical.
Notes
TOP TIP: Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed. Consistent tracking is what allows you to make informed budget decisions, and maximize your return on aggregator leads.


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