Somebody asks how the marketing is going, and nobody can say a number

And the honest answer is: we think it is going all right. The phone has been busy. There was that job in Newcastle. Someone mentioned they found us online.

Nobody in the room can say a number, and everybody in the room knows it. Which means that when the year gets tight, the marketing spend is the easiest line on the page to cut, because it is the only one nobody can defend with evidence.

The single reason this happens

One phone number. On every page of the website, in every ad, on the trucks, on the brochures.

In this market most serious enquiries arrive by phone, because somebody with a broken machine is not filling in a form. So the majority of what your marketing produces walks in through a channel that records nothing but a missed call at 3.40pm.

Every call looks identical to every other call. The one from the ad, the one from a twelve-year-old customer, the one from the sign on the truck. Same number, same log, no difference.

What that actually costs you, twice

The obvious cost is that you cannot prove what worked. The less obvious one is worse.

You keep paying for the half that is not working. If half your spend produces calls and the other half produces nothing, and everything looks the same, you cannot switch off the wrong half. So it keeps running, month after month, and the account slowly optimises itself towards whatever is cheap rather than whatever sells.

That is not a reporting inconvenience. That is a decision you are prevented from making every single month.

What tracking a call actually means

People assume this is invasive or complicated. It is neither.

A different phone number is shown to visitors depending on how they arrived. Calls to it forward to your normal phone, ring the same handset, sound identical to whoever answers. But now the call has a source attached to it.

That is it. Nobody is recorded, nobody is tracked around the internet, and nothing changes for the person answering the phone. What changes is that at the end of the month you can say thirty-one calls, nineteen from paid search, seven from the ranking on that term, five from the brochure QR code, and mean it.

Which is why we argue about the order

The most common way an agency relationship goes wrong in this industry is that somebody sells traffic first and measurement later.

Three months in, the money has gone out, some enquiries have come in, and the honest answer to "did it work" is that nobody can tell. So it gets judged on a feeling, and in a quiet month the feeling is always the same one.

Tracking before traffic. Not because it sells better (it does not, and it is far less exciting than launching a campaign), but because it is the only version where month three is a conversation about evidence rather than a conversation about mood.

The test

Ask whoever handles your marketing this question: of last month's enquiries, how many came from each source?

If the answer is a number, you are in good shape and you can stop reading. If the answer is a story, that is the whole problem, and it is fixable in about a week.

How we help with this: Paid search →