Cometly
AcademyModule 02 · Sales-Led Growth Reports
SLGReportLesson 2.7·6 min read

No-show and cancellation rate by source

The metric your AEs already track in their head.

No-show rate is the unglamorous metric that quietly determines whether a paid channel is profitable. A 50% no-show rate doubles your effective Cost-per-Demo and quietly destroys channel economics — and the only way to surface it is to track it explicitly.

Why this matters

Your AEs already know which channels ghost. Translating that intuition into a report turns it from a complaint into a budget decision. Once you can see no-show rate by source in the same table as Cost-per-Demo, you can rank channels by Cost-per-Attended-Demo — which is the number that actually predicts pipeline.

Section 01

Wiring the events

Most schedulers fire webhooks for cancellations, no-shows, and reschedules. Calendly has them out of the box; Chili Piper and HubSpot Meetings expose them via their integrations. Create one Cometly event per signal: Demo Cancelled, Demo Rescheduled, Demo No-Show.

Cometly attaches each event back to the original visitor identity, so the source attribution carries through from the ad click to the no-show event automatically.

Section 02

Acting on the report

The most common interventions for high-no-show channels are: shorter SLAs to the meeting (book it within 7 days, not 21), a confirmation email + SMS sequence, a 5-minute pre-call survey to filter out tire-kickers, and a 15-minute prep call before the longer demo.

If a channel’s no-show rate stays above 40% after those interventions, the channel is probably attracting the wrong audience. Either narrow the targeting or move the optimization event deeper in the funnel.

  • No-Show event — fires when the meeting time passes without attendance
  • Cancellation event — fires when the invitee cancels
  • Reschedule event — fires when the invitee reschedules (optional)
  • Pair with Demo Attended for a complete picture of meeting outcomes
Common pitfalls

What to watch for.

  • Not separating no-shows from cancellations

    These have different causes — fatigue vs. fit — and different fixes. Track them as separate events.

  • Reporting only at the channel level

    Drill down to campaign and creative. The no-show rate is often driven by a specific creative or audience, not the whole channel.

  • Scaling a channel before fixing the no-show problem

    Adding budget to a 50% no-show channel just doubles your wasted spend. Fix the funnel first.

Key takeaways

Recap.

  • Create No-Show and Cancellation events from your scheduling tool (Calendly, Chili Piper, OnceHub)
  • Track them on the same source as the original Demo Booked event
  • Surface no-show rate as a column on the source-funnel report
  • Use the data to set channel-specific qualification rules in your CRM
  • Pair high no-show channels with stronger pre-call sequences before scaling spend
Put it into practice

Build this report inside your own Cometly workspace.

Most lessons can be wired up in a single 30-minute onboarding call. Connect your stack live and walk away with a working dashboard.