Stop Spending Money on Marketing You Can't Track

"We're spending $1,900 a month on it."

This was a client telling me about their digital advertising. Radio streaming, connected TV, Meta ads—all managed by an outside agency. Cumulus Radio was running the campaigns.

"Have you seen if that has actually generated any leads?" I asked.

"Hell no. I don't think so."

Nineteen hundred dollars a month. Nearly $23,000 a year. And they had no idea if it was working.

This isn't unusual. This is normal. This is how most small businesses do marketing.

The Confidence Gap

Here's a stat that should scare you: According to research from WhatConverts, 95% of small businesses say they measure their ad ROI. But only 25% are doing it consistently.

The gap between "I measure my results" and "I actually know what's working" is enormous. Most business owners check their ad dashboard, see some impressions and clicks, and assume that means something is happening.

But impressions don't pay your bills. Clicks don't show up as revenue in QuickBooks. The only metric that matters is: Did this ad create a customer?

If you can't answer that question for every marketing dollar you spend, you're not measuring ROI. You're measuring activity. They're not the same thing.

The Attribution Problem

The technical term for connecting marketing spend to actual revenue is "attribution." And most small businesses don't have any.

Here's how it usually works:

A prospect sees your ad. They think about it for a few days. They Google your company name. They click on your website. They fill out a contact form. Someone calls them back. They book a job.

At that point, your CRM shows a new customer. But where did they come from? The form says "website." But they only found your website because of the ad they saw three days ago.

If you're not tracking that full journey, the ad gets zero credit. Your website gets all of it. You decide ads don't work and cut the budget. Meanwhile, your lead flow mysteriously drops and you can't figure out why.

Industry data shows that 44% of digital advertising spend is wasted due to inaccurate attribution. Almost half. That's not a rounding error—that's a structural failure.

The $1,900 Question

Let's go back to my client.

They're paying $1,900 a month for advertising they can't track. They just started 30 days ago, so the data is limited. But here's the question I asked them:

"How are we tracking that leads that come from them into House Call Pro so that we can attribute that spend to actual leads converted?"

They didn't know. The agency hadn't set that up. There was no tracking pixel, no UTM parameters, no call tracking number, no way to see if the people calling were the same people seeing the ads.

This is the standard setup for most agency-managed campaigns. They show you a dashboard with impressions and reach and frequency. They talk about "brand awareness" and "top of funnel." But they don't connect the spend to actual jobs booked.

Because if they did, you might realize the spend isn't working.

What Trackable Marketing Looks Like

The difference between traceable marketing and hope-based marketing comes down to one thing: closed-loop reporting.

That means every lead can be traced back to its source, all the way through to becoming (or not becoming) a customer.

Here's what that requires:

Unique tracking for each channel. Different phone numbers for Google ads, Facebook ads, and your website. Different landing pages. Different offer codes. Whatever it takes to know where someone came from.

CRM integration. When a lead comes in, the source gets recorded. Not just "web form" but "Facebook ad for spring AC special."

Revenue attribution. When that lead becomes a customer, you can see the full picture: This ad generated this lead, which became this job, which generated this revenue.

Once you have that, you can do real math. You spent $500 on Facebook ads this month. Those ads generated 8 leads. Three of those leads became customers. Those three customers generated $2,400 in revenue.

Now you know: Your ROI on Facebook was nearly 5x. That's worth continuing.

Without that data? You're guessing.

The Agency Problem

A lot of small businesses outsource their marketing to agencies because they don't have time to learn it themselves. That makes sense. But it creates a dangerous dynamic.

The agency's job is to spend your budget. The more they spend, often the more they make. Their incentive is not to prove ROI—it's to justify continued spending.

I'm not saying all agencies are bad. Some are excellent. But the good ones will set up attribution tracking before they spend a dime. The good ones will show you cost per lead and cost per acquired customer, not just impressions and clicks.

If your agency can't tell you exactly how many customers your ad spend generated, you need a different agency. Or you need to stop spending until you can track it yourself.

Start With What You Can Measure

If you're running marketing you can't track, you have two choices: make it trackable or stop spending.

For my client, here's what we're doing:

First, I'm logging into their advertising dashboard to see what tracking exists. If leads aren't being tagged with source information, we need to fix that before anything else.

Second, we're connecting leads directly to House Call Pro. When someone calls or fills out a form, the system should record where they came from. That way, when the job closes, we can trace the revenue back to the ad.

Third, if the current setup can't be tracked properly, I'm going to recommend they pause the spend. $1,900 a month is real money. It could be going into channels where we can actually measure results—like Google Local Services ads, which track calls directly, or Facebook lead forms that integrate with CRM.

The money isn't wasted if it's generating customers. But we don't know if it's generating customers. And that's the problem.

The Rule I Follow

Here's my rule: Don't spend money on any marketing channel unless you can answer one question within 30 days: "How many customers did this create?"

Not leads. Customers. Revenue.

If the channel can't give you that answer—either because tracking isn't set up or because the platform doesn't support it—then you're taking the spend on faith. And faith is not a business strategy.

There's a reason "brand awareness" campaigns are popular with agencies: they're impossible to disprove. You can always claim the ads are "working" because awareness is hard to measure.

Stick with channels where the math is clear. Spend more on what works. Cut what doesn't. That's how you build a marketing system instead of a marketing expense.

If you can't track it, don't spend on it. Simple as that.