An owner who is unhappy with their advertising has often been through an agency or two and a stretch of doing it themselves. The story tends to be the same: the spend went up, the phone rang more, the good jobs did not follow. The conclusion is that the leads are bad.
Sometimes they are. Often, nobody can actually say which leads came from where, which of them were answered, and what happened after. Without that, “the leads are bad” and “we did not work the leads” look identical on the P&L.
Two problems that look the same
A lead-quality problem shows up as calls from the wrong area, for the wrong service, from people who will not pay the rate. You can hear it on the recordings. The fix is targeting: geography, keywords, negative keywords, the hours the ads run.
An attribution problem shows up as a stack of jobs with “source: website” or “source: referral” and a marketing report that says the campaign generated 140 calls. The two documents cannot be reconciled because nothing connects them. The fix is not a new agency. It is making the chain from click to booked job visible, which is what cost per booked job measures.
Ask one question to tell them apart: for last month’s booked jobs, can you name the campaign each one came from? If the answer is a shrug, you do not yet know whether the leads were bad.
What “attributable” means in practice
You do not need a data team. You need four things to line up:
- Tracking numbers per channel, so a call from the search ad and a call from the truck wrap are distinguishable at the moment they ring. There are a few traps in setting them up.
- A record of what happened to the call: answered, missed, voicemail, callback time. This is the piece most often skipped, and it is where the money hides.
- The outcome, from the field-management system: booked, quoted, sold, ticket size.
- One join across the three, by phone number and date.
With that, “the leads are bad” becomes a claim you can check. Often the finding is narrower and more useful: the leads from one campaign are fine and were answered; the leads from another arrived after five and hit voicemail. That is not a marketing problem.
The uncomfortable version
Once the chain is visible, the ad spend can turn out to have been doing its job. The calls came. What did not happen was the next ninety seconds. That is a better problem to have, because it is inside the building and it is fixable this month.
It is also why we would start any engagement with the call log rather than the ad account. The ad account tells you what you bought. The call log tells you what you did with it.