Analytics & attribution
Every agency reports clicks. Almost none can tell you what a job costs.
Connecting a dollar of ad spend to a job on the calendar is a measurement problem, not a reporting one. It is also the thing that makes every other decision on this site possible.
Sold on its own, including alongside your existing agency
Where the number has to come from
- CallsTracking numbers per campaign, not one main lineSource
- FormsWith the campaign that produced them attachedSource
- The CRMWhere an enquiry becomes an appointmentTruth
- Offline importThe booked job sent back to the ad platformThe join
- Average cost per lead
- $146A number, not an estimate
- Cost per issued appointment
- $423Where most reporting stops short
- Cost of net sales
- 15%Marketing as a share of revenue
- Platforms reconciled
- 10+Into one monthly view
These are the numbers we manage to. They come from campaigns Mathew Brown has personally managed, not from client work delivered by MAT under contract.The full breakdown is here.
What is marketing attribution, and why does it matter?
Attribution connects money spent to revenue earned — following a dollar from an ad click to a lead, an appointment and a sold job. It matters because without it you can report what marketing cost and what revenue arrived, but never whether one produced the other.
This page exists because the whole positioning of this business rests on one claim: that we report what it costs to book a job. That is either a real capability with real plumbing behind it, or it is a slogan. This is the plumbing.
It is also the most commonly broken thing we find. In most ad accounts we audit, the conversions being counted are wrong in a way nobody has noticed — thank-you page views counted as leads, four-second calls counted as calls, the same enquiry counted twice. The account then optimises toward producing more of them, which is worse than not tracking at all, because the budget is being actively steered in the wrong direction.
One page, three numbers
Improving- Cost per lead
- by channel
- Cost per issued appointment
- by channel
- Marketing as % of net sales
- in total
The measurement ladder
Most reporting stops at rung two
Clicks and sessions
What every agency reports. Useful for diagnosing a campaign, useless as a measure of whether the business made money.
Leads
Forms and calls, deduplicated and filtered so an 8-second call and a duplicate submission do not each count as a lead. Most accounts fail at exactly this step.
Qualified enquiries
Leads that were in your service area, for a service you sell, at a size you want. The gap between this and the row above is where quality problems become visible.
Booked appointments
The first number that reflects an actual commitment. For in-home sales this is the real conversion event, and almost nobody tracks cost against it.
Sold jobs and revenue
Closed-won values imported back into the ad platforms, so bidding optimises toward revenue rather than toward cheap form fills.
Every rung further down is harder to instrument and more valuable to know. The reason most agencies stop at leads is not laziness — it is that going further requires CRM access, agreed definitions and a client willing to report closed-won values. That is exactly the work.
What's included
What gets built
Conversion tracking that is actually correct
Calls over a meaningful duration, real form submissions, bookings — deduplicated and tested. Counting thank-you page views as conversions is why so many accounts look healthy and produce nothing.
Call tracking with campaign attribution
Dynamic number insertion so a call from a Google Ads click is attributable to that campaign. Most service enquiries are calls, so an account without this is measuring a minority of its leads.
Offline conversion import
Closed-won job values pushed back into Google and Meta so bidding optimises toward revenue. The single biggest unpulled lever in almost every local ad account we audit.
GA4 configured for a service business
Not the default install. Events that correspond to real business moments, channel groupings that reflect how you actually buy traffic, and internal traffic excluded so your own team is not inflating it.
Server-side and consent-aware tracking
Where it earns its complexity. Browser tracking loses a meaningful share of conversions to blockers and privacy settings, and the loss is invisible unless someone goes looking for it.
One Looker Studio dashboard
Ad platforms, analytics, call tracking and CRM in one view, refreshed automatically. Replacing the two days a month someone currently spends exporting CSVs and pasting them into a workbook.
A monthly report a busy owner reads
One page. Three numbers at the top, what changed, what changes next and why. Platform detail underneath for anyone who wants it, and nobody obliged to go looking.
A documented measurement plan
What counts as a lead, what counts as qualified, which system owns which number. Written down and agreed, because most reporting disputes are definition disputes wearing a data costume.
How it works
Definitions, audit, instrument, automate
Agree the definitions first
Week 1What counts as a lead. What counts as qualified. What "contacted" means. This is a business conversation, not a technical one, and every reporting argument later traces back to skipping it.
Audit what is currently being counted
Weeks 1–2Nearly every account we look at is over-counting conversions somewhere. Finding that first matters, because until it is fixed every optimisation decision is being made against a wrong number.
Instrument the full path
Weeks 2–5Call tracking, form tracking, CRM stage tracking and offline conversion import. So a dollar spent can be followed through to a booked job rather than stopping at a click.
Build the dashboard and the monthly rhythm
Weeks 5–7One Looker Studio view that assembles itself, and a monthly report with the three numbers at the top. Then it maintains itself rather than costing someone two days.
Why do the numbers never match between platforms?
Because every platform counts differently: different attribution windows, different view-through rules, different deduplication, different time zones. Google, Meta, your analytics and your CRM will never agree exactly. Chasing agreement is wasted effort — picking one source of truth is not.
The practical resolution is to give each system the job it is good at. The CRM is the source of truth for revenue, because that is where a job is actually recorded as sold. The ad platforms are for optimisation, because they need their own conversion signal to bid against. Analytics is for diagnosis, because it explains behaviour the others cannot see.
Agreeing that in week one removes most of the arguments that otherwise consume monthly reporting meetings for a year. It also means nobody has to pretend the platforms are wrong when they simply measure something different.
Fit
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
This is a good fit if
- You spend on advertising and cannot confidently say what a booked job costs.
- Most of your enquiries are phone calls and none of them are attributed to a campaign.
- Someone spends days each month building a report by exporting and pasting.
- You have a CRM that records sold jobs and values, or are willing to make it do so.
- You want an independent read on what your current agency is producing.
This isn't the right fit if
- You want perfect attribution for every job. It does not exist, and anyone selling it is overstating.
- Nobody will record whether a quote closed. Then the ladder stops at leads and cannot go further.
- You have no advertising and no enquiries yet. Build demand first; measure it once there is something to measure.
- You want a dashboard as a deliverable in itself. A dashboard over wrong conversion data is a faster way to be misled.
Related
What measurement makes possible
Google & Meta Ads
Search, Local Services and paid social, judged on one number: what it costs to put a booked job on the calendar.
Business phone & call tracking
Calls that reach a person, missed calls counted, and every call attributed to the campaign that produced it.
CRM implementation
HubSpot or Salesforce set up around how your business actually sells, then adopted by the people who have to use it.
Further reading: building a Looker Studio dashboard from Google Sheets.
Questions about analytics and attribution
What is marketing attribution?
Attribution is connecting money spent to revenue earned — following a dollar from an ad click through to a lead, an appointment and a sold job. Without it you can report what marketing cost and what revenue arrived, but not whether one caused the other.
Why can we not just use GA4?
GA4 sees the website. It cannot see a phone call that converted three weeks later on a kitchen table, and for most service businesses that is where the revenue is. You need call tracking and CRM data joined to it before the picture is complete.
What is offline conversion import and why does it matter?
It sends closed-won job values from your CRM back into Google and Meta. The platforms then optimise bidding toward the kinds of leads that became revenue rather than the cheapest form fills. It is the biggest unpulled lever in most local accounts.
Our numbers never match between platforms. Why?
Because each platform counts differently — attribution windows, view-through, deduplication, time zones. They will never match exactly and chasing that is wasted effort. Pick one system as the source of truth for revenue, and use the platforms for optimisation.
Can you tell us exactly which ad produced a job?
Sometimes, and honestly not always. A customer who saw a Facebook post, searched your name three weeks later and then phoned is genuinely hard to attribute cleanly. What we can do is get considerably closer than clicks, and be explicit about the uncertainty rather than hiding it.
Do we need server-side tracking?
Sometimes. Browser-based tracking loses a meaningful share of conversions to blockers and privacy settings, and the loss is silent. Server-side recovers some of it and adds real complexity, so it earns its place at higher spend levels and not before.
Can you build us a Looker Studio dashboard?
Yes, and it is one of the more satisfying deliverables — ad platforms, analytics, call tracking and CRM in one automatically refreshing view. It typically replaces a recurring two-day monthly exercise of exporting CSVs and pasting them into a workbook.
Is this only useful if you run our marketing?
No. Measurement is sold as a standalone engagement, including for businesses with an existing agency. Plenty of clients want an independent view of what their marketing is producing, and an agency confident in its work has no reason to object.
Ask us what your conversions are actually counting.
The tracking audit is part of the free marketing audit and it is usually the section that changes the conversation. Most accounts are counting something other than what the owner believes they are counting.
You talk to Mathew.Not an account manager, and not a sales team.