(Part 2 in a series) Remember I told you about a dealer on the East Coast running a $5 million flooring business almost entirely on his own two hands? The first thing we did was not to launch a new campaign. It was turn on the lights so he could finally see what his marketing was actually doing.
Here’s what that meant in practice:
Half the story
When I asked my client which channel was working best, he had to guess at the answer. Every vendor he worked with sent him a dashboard that made their channel look good, but, as I pointed out to him, it didn’t tell him if those channels were actually profitable.
Take his Google Ads, for example. The ads dashboard showed impressions. It showed clicks. It showed click-through rate. It showed conversions: a form filled out, or a phone call made. All real numbers. All useful. And all supplied by the same company that was cashing his check every month. But it was only half the story.
That dashboard stops the moment the form gets submitted or the phone rings. It has no idea what happens after that. It doesn’t know whether that lead ever turned into a scheduled appointment. If it turned into a closed sale. If it was a bottom-feeding price shopper. Google can’t tell you that. Neither can Angi, Thumbtack or any other vendor sending you a monthly report. They’re built to measure their half of the funnel, the half that happens on their turf, not yours.
The real damage
A channel can look terrific on a vendor’s dashboard and be quietly losing you money once you follow the lead the rest of the way. From the vendor’s side, that channel is a star performer. On the dealer’s side, it’s a giant time and money suck with lousy return on ad spend (ROAS).
The opposite happens just as often. A channel can look unimpressive by vendor standards (modest clicks, modest form fills, modest number of appointments set) and still be the best channel in the business, because the leads that do come through book appointments at a high rate, close at a high rate and happily pay full margin. If all you’re looking at is the vendor’s numbers, you would cut that channel and never know what you lost.
Building the other half
We built a tracker that didn’t stop where the vendor’s dashboard stopped. For every channel, we followed the same lead all the way from spend to sale: leads, cost per lead, appointment-set ratio, close ratio, revenue, average ticket, cost per sale and ROAS.
That’s the piece no vendor will ever hand you, because no vendor has visibility past their own slice of the process. You have to build it yourself, or have an expert build it for you. Once it exists, you stop guessing which channels are growing your business and which ones are just sucking money away like a turbo-charged Hoover.
My client finally had the whole picture. The actual, unglamorous truth of where every dollar went and what came back. In part three we’ll look at what we did with that picture.
Marketing leadership. Jim Augustus Armstrong is the founder of Armstrong Marketing Systems, providing fractional CMO leadership to flooring and home service companies. He takes ownership of his clients’ marketing — building the strategy, installing the systems and managing the KPIs that drive predictable, profitable growth. Reach him at connect@ armstrongmarketingsystems.com or visit ArmstrongMarketingSystems.com.
