Which Jobs Count Toward a Marketing Commission?

Repeat customers, referrals, brand searches and calls with no source. The cases that decide what a contractor pays commission on, and a rule for each.

A job counts when both sides agreed in advance that a customer arriving that way is one the marketing produced. The workable default is a new customer whose first contact with your business came through a channel the partner runs. Everything past that default is an edge case, and the edge cases are predictable: repeat customers, referrals, people who searched your business name, calls with no recorded source, and jobs that were already sitting in your pipeline on day one. Each needs a written rule before the first invoice, not a negotiation after it.

What is the default rule?

A new customer, first contact through a channel the partner runs, becomes a commissionable job when the work is sold and paid for. That sentence is doing a lot of work, so take it a piece at a time.

New matters because a commission is payment for producing demand that did not exist before. First contact matters because it is the only moment anyone can point to that separates your marketing from your reputation. And sold and paid matters because an inquiry is not revenue, and neither is a signed estimate on a job that later falls apart.

Almost every dispute in a commission relationship is a disagreement about one of those three words applied to one specific job. Settle them generally and you will spend very little time arguing specifically.

Does a repeat customer count?

Only in the way the agreement says, and this is the clause worth reading twice. A customer the marketing brought you in March who books more work in November is the most common case that nobody thought about.

There are three defensible positions. Commission on the first job only. Commission on everything that customer buys within a stated window, often twelve months. Or commission on everything that customer ever buys. The third one deserves a hard look, because it quietly turns a marketing fee into a permanent share of a customer you now service yourself, and it grows as your own crew does the work that earns the repeat business.

Name a window in months and the problem disappears. Whatever number you pick, it should be short enough that the partner is being paid for producing a customer rather than for something you did afterwards.

What about a referral from a customer the marketing brought in?

The usual answer is no, and the reasoning is that a referral is earned by the crew on the first job, not by the advertising that produced it. Your work is what made that customer recommend you.

The counter-argument is real and worth stating: without the campaign, the customer who made the referral would not have existed. If you find that persuasive, the fair version is narrow. One generation only, inside the same window as the repeat-customer rule, and not a chain that keeps paying out through referrals of referrals. A referral rule with no generation limit and no time limit compounds in a direction that is very hard to unwind later.

What about someone who searched your business name?

This is the hardest case on the list, and it is the one most likely to be claimed. Someone sees an ad in March, does not call, then types your company name into Google in June and books a job.

First contact says the marketing produced that customer. Common sense says they searched for you because they already knew who you were. Both can be true at once, and the reason it matters is that an established contractor has branded searches that have nothing to do with any campaign and would arrive with no marketing running at all. Our article on why branded search traffic hides the real problem explains why those two populations should never be averaged in a report, and the same logic applies to a fee.

The rule that survives contact with reality: brand searches are excluded unless there is a recorded earlier non-brand touch from the same person. That keeps the genuine assisted conversions in and keeps your existing name recognition out.

What about a call with no source?

Agree which way unknown falls, and agree it before there are any unknowns. The honest default is that unknown is not commissionable, because the party claiming the fee is the party who should be able to evidence it.

That default can be abused in the other direction too, so pair it with a sample audit. Once a month, take a handful of jobs marked unknown and check them against the call recordings, the form records and what the customer actually said when they booked. If the unknown pile is large and keeps resolving one way, the tracking is broken rather than the relationship. Unknown should be a small and shrinking category, not a permanent bucket that either side benefits from.

What about jobs already in your pipeline on day one?

Take a snapshot. On the day the partnership starts, list your open estimates, your active customers and anyone you are already in conversation with, and exclude that list for the duration of the agreement.

It takes an hour and it prevents the single most damaging version of this argument, which is a commission invoice in month one for a job you had already quoted in the previous quarter. The snapshot also protects the partner, because a job that genuinely came from the new campaign is not in it.

What about cancellations, refunds and jobs that never get paid?

Commission should follow collected revenue, so a job that is never paid never earns one, and a refund reverses the commission charged on the refunded amount. Anything else asks you to pay a fee on money you do not have.

Write it as one line rather than a clause. If the customer’s money comes back, the fee comes back. That rule is easy to apply in a busy month, which is the only kind of rule that gets applied.

What about a change order that doubles the job?

Treat the change order as part of the same job and recalculate at completion, which is the simplest version and the one that matches how the work actually happened. The customer was produced once; the job grew.

The place to be careful is additional work months later. A bathroom that becomes a kitchen next spring is closer to repeat business than to a change order, and it should fall under the repeat-customer window rather than the original job. Agree a boundary in time rather than leaving it to whoever is invoicing.

Who decides when you disagree?

Neither party alone, because neither party holds the whole record. You know what the customer told you and whether the job closed. Your partner knows what was clicked, called and submitted. A commission calculated from only one of those two records will be wrong in a predictable direction.

The practical structure is a monthly reconciliation on a short list rather than a per-job argument. Both sides look at the same set of completed jobs, mark the ones that are in, the ones that are out and the ones nobody is sure about, and settle the third group by an agreed default. Excluding a genuinely disputed job and noting it is a cheap outcome. A partner who wants a long relationship will not fight you over one invoice.

What do you have to report, and how often?

Enough to apply the rules above, once a month, and no more. For each inquiry: where it came from, whether it fit the work you wanted, whether someone responded, whether an estimate went out, whether it sold and what it invoiced.

That is a short record, and it is the same record that tells you whether your marketing is working at all, which is why it is worth keeping whether or not anyone is charging a commission. Our guide to cost per booked job sets out the minimum version and how to keep the source attached when a lead moves between systems. Reporting nothing and paying commission on the partner’s own count of leads is the arrangement to avoid, in both directions.

What should the agreement actually say?

Five things, and they fit on one page. The default rule for a commissionable job. The repeat-customer window in months. The treatment of referrals, brand searches and unknowns. The pipeline snapshot. And the reconciliation date with the default for disputed jobs.

Fruitful Local’s performance-based marketing page states the requirement plainly: a written agreement has to define what counts as attributable revenue, how existing customers and referrals are handled, when commission is earned, what systems provide the source of truth, and what happens when a lead cannot be tracked cleanly. Our commission partnership charges ongoing fees only on work we generate, which is exactly why those definitions come first rather than last.

If you are weighing up a commission arrangement, the broader case for it is in why a commission-based marketing partner makes sense in 2026. When you are ready to talk specifics, bring your pipeline snapshot and your repeat-customer pattern to the conversation. Those two facts about your own business decide most of this page before anyone opens a contract.