By Jon Almas, AM Creative
Your report came in this morning. Traffic up 40 percent. Impressions doubled. Rankings improved for eleven keywords.
Your phone rang about the same as last month.
Most contractors read that and assume one of two things. Either the marketing is not working, or somebody is padding a report. Usually it is neither. Usually the calls are happening and nothing in the setup is recording where they came from, so they do not appear anywhere in the numbers you get sent.
Here is how to find out which situation you are in.
Why does traffic go up while the phone stays flat?
Three explanations cover almost every case.
The traffic is the wrong kind. Somebody searching how to relight a pilot light is not hiring you. If your blog picked up a bunch of do-it-yourself readers, traffic climbs and nothing else does.
The page is not making the call easy. Phone number buried in a footer, form asking for nine fields, page taking six seconds to load on a phone in a driveway. People leave.
Or the calls are landing and nobody is counting them. This is the common one, and it is the one worth chasing first, because the other two are only worth diagnosing once you can actually see your call sources.
Where are your calls actually coming from?
Most contractors have one phone number. It sits on the website, on the Google Business Profile, on the trucks, on the yard signs, on a magnet somebody stuck to a fridge in 2019.
When that phone rings, there is no way to know which of those did the work. So the marketing report shows website sessions and your call log shows calls and there is no line connecting them. Your agency cannot prove the calls came from their work, and you cannot prove they did not.
Separate numbers fix this. A different tracking number on the website, another on the Google Business Profile, another in your ads. All of them forward to the same phone, so nothing changes for you or your crew. What changes is that every call now arrives with a label on it.
Your Google Business Profile also keeps its own call history inside the profile, separate from anything else. Worth checking, because on most home service accounts it turns out to be the single biggest source, and it is invisible in a website traffic report.
Why "how did you hear about us" gives you the wrong answer
You should still ask. Just do not build decisions on the answers.
People say Google when they saw your truck at a neighbor’s house, remembered the name, and searched it. People say a friend recommended us when the friend said look them up online. What actually happened is a truck sighting plus a search, or a referral plus a search, and the customer only remembers the last step.
There is a way to spot this. Look at whether people are finding you by searching your company name versus searching for the service. Somebody typing your business name already knew you existed. Something offline sent them, and your website just closed the loop. Somebody typing furnace repair near me did not know you, and that is your marketing doing the actual work of finding new customers.
Those two get lumped together in most reports as organic traffic. They are completely different things and one of them is not new business.
What to set up so next month's numbers mean something
Four things, and none of them take long.
Tracking numbers on each source, forwarding to your existing line.
Call recording turned on, if you are comfortable with it and following your state’s rules. This one surprises people. Half the time a contractor tells us the calls are junk, we listen and the calls were fine. Somebody answered while driving, could not talk, said call back later, and the customer called the next guy.
A hidden field on your contact form that records which page the person was on when they submitted it. If your form does not do this, every inquiry looks identical and you cannot tell whether your service pages or your gallery are pulling the weight.
A simple log. A spreadsheet with date, source, and whether it turned into a job. Thirty days of that beats any dashboard, because it is the only record that connects a call to work you actually did.
What to check before you blame the marketing
Two things throw people off constantly.
Who answers the phone, and how fast. The tracking data will tell you how many calls came in. It will not tell you how many rang out or went to voicemail during a busy stretch. Look at that number before concluding the marketing failed.
And the comparison period. This one matters a lot in New England. Do not compare August to February and draw conclusions. Heating work spikes when it gets cold, exterior work stops when the ground freezes, remodel inquiries pick up after the holidays. Compare this August to last August. Month over month in a seasonal trade will make good marketing look broken and broken marketing look fine, and plenty of contractors have fired an agency in the middle of a normal seasonal dip.
Where this fits
We set up tracking on day one for every client, before any of the other work starts, because there is no point improving numbers nobody can see. You get access to the same dashboard we look at, not a monthly PDF. And you own the tracking setup, the website, and the accounts, whether you stay with us or not.
