How to tell if your marketing is making money

The only question that matters

Every marketing report eventually runs into the same question from the owner: “so did it make money?” A map that turned greener is good news. It is not revenue. Between someone seeing you on Google and money in the bank there are three more steps, and each one leaks.

Why most contractors cannot answer it

• The source is never recorded. The office takes the call, books the job and never asks how the customer found you.
• The data lives in two places. Rankings are in a marketing report. Jobs and invoices are in your job software. Nobody puts them side by side.
• “Leads” get counted instead of jobs. Twenty calls about a warranty issue are twenty leads and zero revenue.

The good news is that the second half of the answer already exists. Your job software, whether that is a field-service app or an accounting system with job costing, already knows which jobs were booked and what they were worth. The missing piece is where each one came from.

Four steps that work with the software you already run

1. Agree a short list of sources

   Five or six, no more: Google Maps, website, referral, repeat customer, truck or yard sign, other.

   A long list gets filled in badly. A short one gets filled in.

2. Capture it at the first call

   “How did you find us?” as a required field on the new-client or new-job form.

   Most job software has a lead-source field, or lets you add one. The person answering the phone fills it in before the job is booked.

3. Export once a month

   Jobs or invoices for the month, with the client's phone number, the lead source, the status and the value.

   A spreadsheet export is enough. Nothing has to be connected to anything.

4. Put it beside the map

   Booked jobs and revenue by source, month by month, next to the same month's coverage.

   Now a change in the map can be checked against a change in the work, instead of argued about.

Reading the numbers

Here is what a quarter might look like for an HVAC company. The numbers are made up to show the reading, not taken from a client.

Three things jump out of a table like this, and none of them is visible in a ranking report:

• “Unknown” is a quarter of everything. Fix the capture before you judge any channel.
• Referrals convert best. Normal, and a reason to keep your reviews and past-customer contact in good shape.
• Maps enquiries book at a healthy rate. Worth protecting, and worth growing in the towns where you are missing.

For commercial work

A commercial cleaning contract or a fire protection service agreement does not start with a phone call from the map. It starts with an enquiry, a site visit, a quote and weeks of back and forth. The same idea still works, with a different unit: record the source on the enquiry, then close each one out when it is won or lost, with the contract value. A short closeout form, filled in when a quote is decided, does the job when there is no system to export from.

What about call tracking?

Call tracking gives each channel its own phone number, so calls are sorted by source automatically. It works, and it has costs: a monthly fee, and a number on your Google profile that differs from your real one. If you use it, keep your real number as an additional phone on the profile and keep the listing details consistent. If you do not, a well-used lead-source field gets you most of the way for nothing.

Who has to do what

This only works if it costs the office almost nothing. The person answering the phone picks one option from a short list. Someone exports one file a month. Everything after that, the matching and the monthly table, is work that does not need to happen in the office at all. If a process needs more than that from a busy dispatcher in October, it will stop being done by November.

Honest limits

• Customers misremember. “Google” can mean the map, an ad or your website. Treat sources as good, not perfect.
• Big jobs take months to book. A quarter is a better window than a month.
• More visibility does not automatically mean more work. Price, reviews and how fast you answer decide a lot of it.

Even with those limits, a monthly table of booked jobs by source, from your own records, beats any number a marketing provider can produce on its own. For where it fits in a budget, see what local SEO costs in Canada.