Marketing Shouldn’t Be a Mystery
If you're spending money on marketing (ads, SEO, website work, a marketing agency) you deserve to know if it's actually helping your business grow. Yet most home service business owners don’t have a clear answer when asked, “Is your marketing working?”
That’s not because you’re not smart. It’s because most marketing efforts don’t come with clear scorecards, and many agencies prefer it that way. But guesswork isn’t a strategy. You’re running a business, not playing the lottery.
This guide is here to change that. You’ll learn how to evaluate your marketing in plain English, using real numbers and simple checks that any owner can understand, without needing a marketing degree or a dozen dashboards.
1. Start With the End: What Does “Working” Actually Mean?
Before you can decide if something’s working, you have to define what success looks like. For a home service business, marketing success should show up in one or more of these ways:
- More quality leads coming in consistently
- More of those leads turning into booked jobs
- Better customers, higher ticket, fewer no-shows
- Improved brand presence and local visibility
- Stable or growing revenue with positive ROI
If you're only getting more activity (clicks, views, traffic) but not more results, then the marketing might look good on paper, but it’s not truly helping your business.
2. Track Leads by Source. Not Just in Total
Too often, contractors look at lead volume as a whole. “We got 70 calls this month” sounds great, until you realize 55 of those came from repeat customers or yard signs.
If you're paying for marketing, you need to know which leads came from where. That means tracking leads by channel: Google Ads, organic search, Google Business Profile, social media, etc.
What to do:
- Use unique phone numbers (call tracking) for each marketing source
- Track form submissions with source tagging or CRM tools
- Ask every caller: “How did you hear about us?”, and log it
You can’t fix what you can’t measure. If a lead source isn’t pulling its weight, you’ll spot it quickly.
3. Know Your Cost Per Lead (and Cost Per Booked Job)
One of the most useful numbers in marketing is cost per lead. But more important is cost per booked job, because a lead isn’t valuable unless it converts.
Say you spend $2,000 on ads and get 40 leads. That’s $50 per lead. Sounds good. But if only 10 of those leads become jobs, your actual cost per booked job is $200.
That’s a much more useful number to know.
Healthy benchmarks vary, but in home services, a $25–$100 cost per lead and a $100–$300 cost per booked job are common. If you're way above that, it’s time to dig in.
4. Watch the Phones and Forms
You don’t just want leads. You want to answer them. Missed calls, unreturned voicemails, or contact forms that go to a black hole can make good marketing look broken.
Call tracking tools can show:
- How many calls went unanswered
- Which calls came from ads vs. organic search
- What percentage of calls were real opportunities
Website forms should:
- Be tested regularly
- Go to someone who checks them daily
- Trigger an auto-response or fast follow-up
You can’t measure marketing success without knowing what happens after someone tries to contact you.
5. Don’t Get Distracted by Vanity Metrics
It’s easy to be impressed by marketing reports that say things like:
- “Your website traffic is up 38%!”
- “You had 7,000 ad impressions this week!”
- “Your bounce rate dropped 8%!”
Those numbers sound exciting, but if they’re not translating into booked jobs, they don’t matter.
The real questions to ask are:
- Are we getting more qualified calls?
- Are we converting those calls into jobs?
- Are we making more than we’re spending?
Everything else is window dressing.
Marketing Should Pay for Itself (and Then Some)
You don’t need to be a marketing expert to hold your strategy accountable. You just need to define success clearly, track the right numbers, and ask the right questions.
Great marketing should show up in your business. More calls. More jobs. More control over your growth. If that’s not happening, it’s not working. No matter what the reports say.
Start measuring what matters, and you’ll never feel left in the dark again.
