Pest Control KPIs: The Complete Guide to Tracking Your Numbers

Pest control KPIs (key performance indicators) are the numbers that tell you whether your marketing, sales, technicians and profit are working. The scorecard below lists 23 of them, each with a formula, a target and how often to check it. If you track nothing yet, start with five: close rate (50% or better, ideally 60-70%), customer acquisition cost (judged against lifetime gross profit, where 3 to 1 is the usual benchmark), production per day per technician, cancellations and net profit margin (10-15% is good, 25%+ is excellent). Check ads and tech reports daily, the scorecard weekly and the P&L monthly. I’m Jonas Olson. I built Pest Badger in Wisconsin to over $20 million a year in about six years, and I’m in these numbers every day.

The 23 Pest Control KPIs to Track

Here’s the whole scorecard. Rows 1-7 cover marketing and sales, 8-9 profit, 10-19 technicians and 20-23 the executive scorecard. The targets come from running Pest Badger and from the many owners I’ve interviewed and coached; where the right number depends on your market, the target is your own trend.

#	KPI	What it measures	Formula	Target	How often
1	Close rate (start here)	Leads that become customers	New customers ÷ leads × 100, by source and rep	50%+; 60-70% is the sweet spot; 80%+ means raise prices	Weekly
2	Customer acquisition cost (CAC) (start here)	What it costs to win one customer	Ad spend plus sales commissions ÷ new customers, by channel	No fixed ceiling; judge it against LTV and payback ($95.86 blended at Pest Badger)	Weekly
3	Return on ad spend (ROAS)	Revenue back per ad dollar	Revenue from ad-sourced customers ÷ ad spend	Track the trend	Weekly
4	Missed calls	Paid-for calls nobody answered	Missed calls ÷ inbound calls, by person and ad	Zero	Daily
5	Lifetime value (LTV)	The gross profit a customer brings over the relationship	Average yearly contract value × years they stay × gross margin	Track the trend	Weekly
6	LTV to CAC ratio	What each acquisition dollar returns	LTV ÷ CAC	3:1 is the usual benchmark; 5:1+ means push harder (Pest Badger runs 8.8:1 blended)	Monthly
7	CAC payback	How fast a new customer pays back their CAC	Revenue from a new customer in the first 30 days ÷ CAC	2x CAC within 30 days	Monthly
8	Net profit margin (start here)	What’s left after every expense	(Revenue minus all expenses) ÷ revenue × 100	10-15% good; 15-20% really good; 25%+ excellent	Monthly
9	Cost of goods sold (COGS) %	Direct cost of doing the work	Technician labor and product ÷ revenue × 100, by branch	Track the trend; dig into any branch that jumps	Weekly
10	Production per day (start here)	Value of the work each tech completes	Completed services ($) ÷ tech days, vs. what was scheduled	Track the trend against the schedule	Daily
11	Stops per day	Jobs each tech completes	Completed stops ÷ tech days	Track the trend with production	Daily
12	Completion ratio	Scheduled jobs that got done	Completed jobs ÷ scheduled jobs × 100	100%	Daily
13	Callback rate	Jobs redone for free	Callbacks ÷ completed services, by tech	Track the trend; ride along with anyone above the team average	Daily
14	Skips and reschedules	Stops that didn’t happen as planned	(Skips + reschedules) ÷ scheduled stops, by tech	Track the trend	Daily
15	Cancellations (start here)	Customers who stop service	Cancellations ÷ active customers, by tech, route and branch	Track the trend; investigate any spike	Weekly
16	Average value per stop	Revenue per completed stop	Production ÷ completed stops	Track the trend; a low stop usually means a pricing or measuring error	Daily
17	Upsells per technician	Add-ons techs sell on their route	Upsells sold per tech per week	At least 1 per tech per week	Weekly
18	Reviews per technician	Reviews each tech earns	New reviews credited to each tech	Track the trend	Weekly
19	Referrals per technician	Leads each tech brings in	Referral leads credited to each tech	Track the trend	Weekly
20	Total sales	New business sold, inside and outside	New sales for the week, by branch	Track the trend against your weekly goal	Weekly
21	Jobs remaining this month	Work left vs. the techs you have	Scheduled jobs left this month vs. what your techs can complete	No rollover (a day or two at most)	Weekly
22	Revenue collected	Serviced revenue you actually collected	Revenue collected ÷ revenue serviced × 100	90%+ (commercial work can pull it lower)	Weekly
23	Accounts receivable (AR) aging	Money owed to you, by age	Unpaid invoices at 30, 60 and 90 days	Near zero; stop service at 60 days unpaid	Weekly

Weekly vs Monthly Metrics: What to Watch and When

These are the marketing and sales KPIs, the scoreboard for every channel in your pest control marketing. I’m in our dashboard probably ten times a day, so I know what every ad costs, what it converts at and which ones to push or pull. Most owners are winging it, and that’s how you burn money without noticing.

Daily, watch ad performance and missed calls. Weekly, review leads versus sales, close rate, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and return on ad spend. Monthly, check the LTV to CAC ratio, which moves slower. If you can’t do daily, do weekly, and never go longer than a month.

Live data is what makes this pay. Our marketing and sales teams watch the same real-time numbers, so when sales dip on a given day, we can put a new offer live that same day and add spend behind the ads that are working.

The Daily Dashboard

Daily is about marketing performance: which ads work, which don’t and where to move money. Some locations always run a higher CAC because more competitors bid there, so you need to see it in real time.

Weekly Metrics: The Non-Negotiables

Every week, review leads versus sales, close rate, CAC and return on ad spend, and if CAC creeps up, find out why that week. Lifetime value takes a couple of years of data to calculate, but once you have it, watch it every week, and check LTV to CAC monthly; maximizing LTV has its own guide.

How to Segment Your Data

Never look only at totals. We segment by location, then by ad, offer, service and source (organic versus paid, Facebook versus Google, and which funnel), all in GoHighLevel.

The Lead Volume and Close Rate Balance

I want a close rate of at least 50%, with 60-70% the sweet spot, because people call with a bug problem they want fixed now; above 80%, raise your prices. Facebook lead ads close lower, and 20-30% is good there (we run 22-25% at Pest Badger). Closing only 20-30% of Google Ads leads is a process problem, usually an owner answering from the field and sending estimates when a CSR could close on the phone.

The Sales Call Listening Strategy

Record sales calls and listen to the ones that didn’t close. Our sales manager reviews random calls weekly and the team role-plays daily, and a new rep gets someone beside them every day until their close rate is good.

The Round Robin Problem

Rotating leads evenly feels fair, but your best closer should get your best leads, like Google calls, so track each rep’s close rate by source. When nobody owned the lead at Pest Badger, it added up to a $3 million leak until we built a dedicated inside sales team.

Phone Systems Matter More Than You Think

Track who misses calls, who answers the most and who makes outbound calls. Get a phone system that rings you once, then transfers, and shows every missed call in the app; my friend Chase owns Lawn Phone, which works really well.

Operational KPIs That Affect Long-Term Growth

Outside marketing, watch service quality, stops per day, skipped jobs and above all cancellations, where you can really get hurt. The technician section covers each one.

Real-Time Dashboards Change Everything

We feed everything into Databox, from ad spend to sales, so it’s live all day. GoHighLevel can do most of the same.

KPIs You Shouldn’t Obsess Over

Cost per lead, click-through rate, impressions and traffic are worth a look, but I manage by conversions and CAC, because a million visitors or a viral post on social media means nothing without revenue. Kirk Slack ran his $3M lawn care company on five KPIs, with one rule: if a metric isn’t easy to calculate and easy to track, you’ll quietly stop tracking it.

Read the full guide to pest control marketing KPIs for how we segment the data and train the sales team.

Customer Acquisition Cost: The Number That Changes Everything

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is what you spend to win one new customer, sales commissions included. My mentor beat it into my head for years before I really got it. Here’s the math that made it click.

Spend $500 on Facebook, Google or anything else and get ten leads. Close 50% and you have five customers, so your CAC is $100. If each pays $1,000 a year, your $500 brought in $5,000 the first year. But lifetime value is gross profit, not revenue, because you still have to service those customers. At Pest Badger, a customer is worth about $840 in lifetime gross profit against a $95.86 blended CAC, or 8.8 to 1. How many times would you play that game? I’d play it every day.

There’s no fixed CAC ceiling. What you can pay depends on the customer’s gross profit and how fast you get it back, and I want every new customer paying back double their CAC within 30 days.

Why CAC Is Everything

Think of marketing as a giant Coke machine. Every dollar in should bring customers out, and CAC tells you what each one costs, which tells you how hard you can push.

The LTV to CAC Ratio

3 to 1 is the usual benchmark. Under it, look hard before you spend more; around it, a channel can work with little room for mistakes; at 5 to 1 or better, push harder; and around 8 to 1, ask how much more you can buy. Our blend at Pest Badger is 8.8 to 1, but door-to-door alone is 1.75 to 1. It isn’t a magic law, because cash flow, payback, churn, overhead and capacity matter too.

The “I Can’t Afford It” Objection

The 30-day rule is how you afford it. With a $100 CAC and a $300 initial you’re $200 ahead, and after about $100 for the tech, fuel and product, you have $100 left to win the next customer.

The Discounting Problem

A 50%-off first service makes it very hard to get double your CAC back. If you can’t charge a $300 initial, lower your CAC, raise your close rate or raise the initial.

The Follow-Up Service Strategy

That’s why door-to-door companies do the first quarterly 30 days after the initial, sometimes two weeks, instead of three months. They lose money on the first service, so they pull the next payment forward.

Calculating CAC Across Multiple Channels

The math is the same everywhere: what you spent on a channel, sales commissions included, divided by the customers it brought in. The hard part is tracking both by channel, which we do in GoHighLevel with Databox on top.

What’s a Healthy CAC Range?

There’s no fixed range. At Pest Badger we pay about $95 per customer on Local Services Ads, $130 on Google PPC, $150 on Meta and $480 door-to-door, $95.86 blended. Door-to-door costs the most, but it builds a new market faster than anything else, so we keep spending on it. CAC also climbs as you spend more, from $100 to $120, $150 and past $200, until the economics say stop. Expect more in competitive traditional markets like Dallas or Florida and less in the Midwest and rural areas.

The “We Don’t Spend on Marketing” Trap

If you haven’t advertised in 20 years, you still have a CAC; you just don’t see the growth you skipped. One owner doing about $1.2 million a year was proud he hadn’t spent a dollar on marketing in years, and when I ran the math, 5% of revenue over the last 20 years would have made him about $3 million more.

Marketing Budget Percentages Are Misleading

I don’t set the marketing budget as a percentage of revenue. People ask me whether it should be 5% or 10%, and the low numbers you hear mostly come from franchise rules. If your CAC pays itself back, I don’t care if it’s 30% or 40%, as long as you have the cash, get the money back fast enough and can service the customers.

Seasonal Impact on CAC

CAC climbs in the off season, with snow on the ground in the Midwest or a 70-degree winter down south, because people stop thinking about bugs. Watch it closely and adjust spend and offers.

Tracking Organic vs Paid

Track organic and paid separately, because they run on different clocks. An SEO company at $1,000 a month is $12,000 a year, and you can’t judge it like a month of Facebook ads; SEO is Dan Leibrandt’s world, not mine, but it pays off once you show up at the top of the page.

When CAC Becomes Unstable

A jump in CAC usually means something broke. Spend $1,000, miss the calls because you’re in an attic, close one deal, and that customer cost $1,000. One of our CallRail numbers once got disconnected and dead-ended, and we lost about 30 leads that week; regular checks are the only reason we caught it.

The Biggest CAC Mistakes

Not knowing your CAC, and not tracking it closely enough. I’m a freak about it and update it constantly.

Read the full guide to customer acquisition cost for pest control for the 30-day payback model step by step.

Profit Margins: What Actually Matters at the End of the Day

Two owners once asked me back to back in an online forum what good margins are and what a profit margin even is. Fifteen years ago I couldn’t have answered either. These are the net profit margin tiers I use:

• 10-15% is good
• 15-20% is really good
• 25% or more means you’re knocking it out of the park

A buddy of mine does big revenue at 29% profit, and large pest control companies can hit 30-40% because they buy product cheaper and get group rates. I shoot for 15-20%. A solo operator might run 80% because it’s just him, until he adds employees, trucks and overhead.

Revenue is vanity. A $500,000 company at 50% profit makes $250,000, while a $1 million company at 1% makes $10,000.

What Profit Margins Actually Are

Profit is all your revenue minus all your expenses, and margin is that profit as a share of revenue. When you sell a pest control company, buyers talk about EBITDA, which is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

What Profit Margins Should You Aim For?

Use the tiers above. Anything from 10% up is a good spot, and a $2 million company running 1% isn’t a valuable business.

Growth vs Profitability

Pushing for growth costs margin, and that’s a choice. A lifestyle business doing $600,000 to $800,000 at 40% profit pays its owner $240,000 to $320,000 a year with a lead tech running two or three guys, while a legacy business reinvests to build something to pass on or sell. One tech making $80,000 to $100,000 off his own route is fine too if he invests it, because that business won’t be worth much at the end.

How Recurring Plans Affect Margins

You pay the same $100 CAC either way. Sell a one-time $500 ant treatment (a one-time job should cost at least double a quarterly visit) and you brought in $400 after CAC; put that customer on a $1,000-a-year quarterly plan and year one alone brings in $900 after CAC. That’s why selling recurring plans matters, and buyers pay a higher valuation for recurring revenue.

High-Profit Services

Bed bugs, termites, exclusions, insulation, encapsulations and mosquitoes carry the highest margins; we’ve done $20,000-plus exclusions that take a day. Turn one-time jobs into recurring ones, like a checkup plan after a cockroach cleanout or aeration every year.

How Pricing, Bundling, and Upselling Improve Margins

Your cost to do the job barely changes with the price, so add-ons are mostly profit. Bundling flea, tick and mosquito into a quarterly visit takes a $150 ticket to $300 for a few more minutes on site. Add $40 of upsells to each of 20 stops at $100 and a $2,000 day becomes $2,800 on the same route.

If Your Margins Are Low

You can only raise prices or cut costs. Start with your prices, then route density: four stops a day at $150 with half the day spent driving is a routing problem that tighter routes fix.

Profit vs Revenue

Profit, every time. Lifestyle businesses earn more along the way; fast-growing companies earn less now and are worth more when they’re done.

Read the full guide to pest control profit margins for the lifestyle and legacy models and where margins leak.

Technician KPIs: Tracking What Actually Moves the Needle

Operations is where profit lives or dies. These are the key performance indicators for pest control operations, tracked per technician, truck and route. A lot of pest control software automates them, and whatever it can’t pull, we put in a spreadsheet.

The two hard targets are a 100% completion ratio and at least one upsell per tech per week. Judge the rest against your own trend and the team. The reports land in my inbox every morning.

Here’s why it matters. When I paid hourly, I had one tech who worked his tail off and another who finished his route but spent two hours in a Target parking lot watching YouTube. Without the data you can’t tell them apart, which is why I switched to performance pay.

Production Per Day

This is the number one technician KPI: production per day, per truck, technician and route, comparing what was on the route with what got serviced. Added up by branch, it’s total production on the executive scorecard.

Number of Stops

Read stops with production, since a day of big jobs means fewer stops and a day of small ones means more. For reference, one of our trucks did over $330,000 in technician revenue in a year at about 12 stops a day.

Completion Ratio

It should be 100%. Customers cancel and trucks break, but everyone should get their scheduled jobs done, so track it every day.

Callbacks Per Technician

Log every callback by tech, part of the house and product, with notes and photos, since it isn’t always the tech’s fault (rain ten minutes after a mosquito spray). If one tech runs higher than the rest, do a ride-along and retrain on product and label application.

Skips and Reschedules

A skip is a stop you couldn’t do, like a locked gate; a reschedule is the customer moving the visit. Neither is always on the tech, so look for patterns.

Cancellations Per Route

A spike on one route often points to the tech: not knocking, not introducing himself, not showing photos, not explaining what he did, or rushing. It gets out of hand quickly.

Average Value Per Stop

When a stop comes in low, look at sales first. Often the property was measured wrong from the satellite, so a big house got a small price.

Sales Per Route

I want every tech selling at least one upsell a week, and a weekly sales report shows who did. Run competitions for techs too, not just the sales team.

Reviews Per Technician

Reviews are how a tech moves up with us. Techs who earn them talk to customers, explain the work and show photos, and they usually have fewer cancellations.

Referrals Per Technician

Is the tech asking for referrals, talking to the neighbors and handing out referral codes? What doesn’t get tracked doesn’t get done.

Tools for Tracking

Most of our technician data comes out of FieldRoutes, which ServiceTitan owns, and a reporting tool covers the rest; the reports land in my inbox every morning. GPS in every truck shows miles per day, and our insurance company gives us a break for it.

Connecting Performance to Customer Satisfaction

Our techs are on performance pay: a share of production, a share of upsells and a bonus for reviews they earn, which is fine as long as the customer never gets anything for a review (Google bans that). If a tech rushes, he redoes the job on his own time. I learned at my first carpentry job, where I outworked the veterans ten to one, that whoever does the most work should get paid the most.

Incentivizing High Performers

Run competitions with a leaderboard and let the winner pick the prize, a couple hundred dollars in cash, shoes or swag. Switch underperformers to performance pay and you’ll lose a few people, but you’ll build a culture of techs who want to work hard and make good money.

Read the full guide to technician KPIs for pest control for all 10 daily metrics and how we pay techs.

Executive KPIs: Running the Business from 30,000 Feet

Our executive team meets every Thursday at 11 o’clock, and each branch runs its own short version the same day. We follow EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System from Gino Wickman’s book Traction, which is usually my first book of the year.

The scorecard is the meat of it. Every week we go branch by branch through total sales, production, stops done and left for the month, revenue collected, cancellations, accounts receivable and leads versus sales. The targets are 90%+ collected, AR near zero and no rollover at month-end, and the P&L gets a full review every month.

Watching the same numbers weekly is how you spot what’s off. One week the cost of goods percentage in one branch looked wrong. I kept asking questions and found an initials-only truck with two people doing just twelve stops a day, because first-time services take 45 minutes to an hour. We moved that tech to a recurring route.

The Executive Meeting Structure

We open with customer and employee headlines, good or bad, then check our quarterly rocks, the big projects each executive owns for the next 90 days. Then comes the scorecard.

The Executive Scorecard

Tech numbers get checked daily; the executive scorecard looks at each branch weekly, plus a month-end review. It’s also where setting sales goals for a pest control business gets practical: a branch that needs 50 new customers and closes 50% needs 100 leads, which at a $100 CAC is $5,000 of marketing. Put that weekly sales number on the scorecard.

The Hiring Indicator

Stops done against stops left for the month tell you when to hire your next technician before you’re a month behind. Forecast the busy months, like mosquito season ramping up by May 1, even in the off season, and shift people so nothing rolls over.

The Issues List

Most of the meeting goes to issues: trucks, accidents, insurance, sales reps, technicians, equipment and AR. The numbers show where to look, and the meeting is where you fix it.

The Monthly Review

At the end of every month we go through the P&L, not once a year, because it’s hard to fix anything after the year is done. We show the whole team where profit stands.

The Open Book Philosophy

I use the hundred pennies exercise, which isn’t my idea. Put 100 pennies on the table, slide 50 aside for overhead and 30 for cost of goods, marketing and everything else, and show the team the 20 left as profit, or 10 in a bad month. We do a monthly profit share, so everyone wants more pennies left.

Building Culture Through Transparency

These meetings track everything that affects profit and build culture at the same time. Most techs don’t come from a finance background and assume the owner keeps all the money until they see where every penny goes.

The Biggest Tracking Mistakes

Not knowing your numbers, and not tracking anything at all. If finance isn’t your thing, get help (I have a full-time CFO), and start while you’re small, because it doesn’t get easier.

Read the full guide to executive KPIs for pest control for the full Thursday agenda and scorecard.

How Pest Control KPIs Connect

None of these numbers lives alone. CAC drives profit margin. Technician performance drives cancellations, cancellations drive lifetime value, and lifetime value drives LTV to CAC. Route density drives production per day, and production drives profit.

Track them together and you see problems before they become disasters. You know when to hire, when to raise prices, which techs to promote and whether your marketing works. That’s how we built Pest Badger past $20 million, and it’s the difference between running a business and owning a job.

Start with the five starter KPIs, track them weekly, then add more until the full scorecard is routine. If you’re writing a pest control business plan, build it on these same numbers. Our book, Zip Code Kings, covers the rest of the system.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the most important KPIs for a pest control business?

Start with five: close rate (50%+, ideally 60-70%), customer acquisition cost (judged against lifetime gross profit, where 3 to 1 is the usual benchmark), production per day per technician, cancellations and net profit margin (10-15% is good, 25%+ is excellent). Then add the other 18 on the scorecard.

What is a good close rate for pest control?

At least 50%, with 60-70% the sweet spot, because people call with a problem they want fixed now. Facebook lead ads close lower, and 20-30% is good there. If you close 80% or more, raise your prices.

What is a healthy customer acquisition cost for pest control?

There’s no fixed ceiling. What you can pay depends on a customer’s lifetime gross profit and how fast you get it back, and competitive markets like Dallas or Florida run higher. Pest Badger pays about $95 per customer on Local Services Ads, $130 on Google PPC, $150 on Meta and $480 door-to-door, $95.86 blended. Whatever the number, aim to get double your CAC back from each new customer within 30 days.

How do I calculate customer lifetime value for pest control?

Multiply what an average customer pays per year by the years they stay, then by the gross margin from your P&L, because LTV is lifetime gross profit, not revenue. A Pest Badger customer is worth about $840, 8.8 to 1 against our $95.86 blended CAC; 3 to 1 is the usual benchmark.

What customer retention rate should pest control companies target?

Aim for 80% or better. Average churn in our industry is about 20%, so under that you’re doing well, but every market is different, so measure your own and push it up. Track cancellations weekly by technician, route and branch, and dig into any spike; on one route it often means a tech who rushes or doesn’t explain his work.

What is a good revenue per route per day for pest control?

It depends on your prices, service mix and route density, so track each tech’s production per day against what was on the route. For reference, one Pest Badger truck did over $330,000 in technician revenue in a year at about 12 stops a day.

Which pest control KPI signals trouble fastest?

Missed calls and leads by source, checked daily. A disconnected CallRail tracking number once cost Pest Badger about 30 leads in a week, and only regular checks caught it.

How often should I review pest control business KPIs?

Daily for ad performance, missed calls and technician reports; weekly for the scorecard (close rate, CAC, lifetime value, cancellations, sales, production, collections and AR); monthly for the P&L, profit margin and LTV to CAC. Quarterly, set the big projects for the next 90 days.

How often should pest control owners review the P&L?

Every month, not once a year, because it’s hard to fix anything after the year is done. Pest Badger reviews the P&L monthly and shows the whole team where profit stands.

How do I set sales goals for a pest control business?

Work backward from your KPIs. A branch that needs 50 new customers and closes 50% of its leads needs 100 leads, and at a $100 CAC that’s $5,000 of marketing. Put the weekly sales number on your scorecard.

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