Phil Risher explains the death spiral: agencies chase cheap cost-per-lead while raising their commissions, so ad spend climbs but lead quality stays flat. The real metric is return on ad spend, like spending $100 to generate $1,000 in revenue. Without examining your full funnel, you can't fix bad leads.
If your agency has been with you for 2 years and your leads still suck, you do not have a marketing problem. You have an agency problem. The problem with agencies is that they will take your cost per lead to as low as they can get it because that is their vanity metric. They want to tell you, we're getting you $10 cost per lead, so increase your ad spend. And then they charge you more for commission because they run your ads. This is the death spiral of marketing for home service businesses. The real number that you should be looking at is your return on ad spend number. I spent $100 for a lead and I made $1,000. Let's do that again. If you don't know the full picture, all you know is that leads are bad. You don't know, is it your sales process? Is it your intake process? Are they targeting the wrong place? Are the leads really just bad? This is why you need to work with a marketing company that actually looks at the full picture and helps you make decisions based off of your data in your CRM, not just whatever Google gods tell us.
