What is the best measure of a canvass?

Coverage completeness plus contact rate by hour. Doors knocked tells you about effort, not about whether the area was worked well.

Why not just count sales?

Sales are too rare over a single canvass to distinguish a good area from a lucky day. The intermediate measures are more informative at that timescale.

What is a good coverage percentage?

Against your own definition of the area, high. We are not going to publish a benchmark, because the denominator is something each team defines differently.

The numbers that tell you a canvass worked

Doors knocked is the weakest measure of a canvass. Better ones are coverage completeness, contact rate broken down by hour, and callbacks set against callbacks kept. Together those tell you whether the area was actually covered, whether you worked it at the right time, and whether the value you generated was collected.

Coverage completeness

What share of the addresses in the defined area have a recorded outcome. This is the measure most specific to canvassing as opposed to knocking, and almost nobody tracks it, which is why "is that area done" is usually answered with a guess.

Contact rate by hour

Aggregate contact rate hides the thing you can act on. Split by hour it tells you when to come back, which is the single most valuable output of a first pass over a new area.

Callbacks set versus kept

A canvass that generated forty callbacks and kept eight did not work, whatever the door count says. This ratio is rarely tracked and is frequently where the largest recoverable loss sits.

Common questions

What is the best measure of a canvass?: Coverage completeness plus contact rate by hour. Doors knocked tells you about effort, not about whether the area was worked well.
Why not just count sales?: Sales are too rare over a single canvass to distinguish a good area from a lucky day. The intermediate measures are more informative at that timescale.
What is a good coverage percentage?: Against your own definition of the area, high. We are not going to publish a benchmark, because the denominator is something each team defines differently.

More on canvassing

Canvassing as a discipline — planning coverage, working a neighbourhood, and the difference between canvassing and knocking.

All of canvassing