How to Tie Your Ad Spend to Revenue (So You Know What to Scale)

If you feel like you're throwing money at Google and it's just going into a black hole and you can't tell me your true revenue per ad channel every single month, you do not have a lead problem, you have a tracking problem. Since 2018, I've worked with $1 million to $10 million home service businesses, and the pattern is always the same. They have leads coming in, they have revenue coming in, but no one can put the two together and confidently say this is our return on ad spend. In this video, I'm going to walk you through a simple 3-part revenue link system that ties ad spend to quoted revenue and invoice revenue, even if you have longer sales cycle. Because until you prove what became revenue, every marketing decision feels like a gamble. The big elephant in the room is that you're spending money on ads and you have revenue coming in, but there's a revenue blind spot. Whether you have long sales cycles and attribution blurs out, or you have a bunch of lead sources and everything blends together, everyone just puts it on Google. This is exactly what happened at my home service business. The CSR just put Google, Google, Google, and then I had no attribution. Or there's no clean path from the source to the quote to the invoice, and you haven't built this out, or you just can't answer what created revenue. Revenue's coming in. This is the revenue blind spot that you are probably facing. There's two main things that I face at my home service business. I was brought in as director of business development. We were stuck at $2.7 million. The first thing was the business owner capacity. You can guess your way to $1 million. You can figure it out. You can get referrals coming in. You could do some Google Ads. You can work with some cookie-cutter agencies and figure that out. The problem is that when you go to scale the business from $1 to $3 million, $1 to $10 million, the volume exposes the system gaps and you don't have this system. And I'm going to give you the system of exactly how to do this. But this is what we faced was that we were doing so much volume, we saw gaps in our process. And the last one is that channels get cut too early because of gut feeling. I would go to a business owner and I'll be like, hey, Tom, we need to scale this up because I have the data right here. And he'd say, no, no, no, no, this isn't working. These are just people in there. In their apartments that don't need our services. And I'm like, I have the data right here. So gut feeling plays a part into cutting things before it actually works and you don't know what's working and you're just gambling. The second piece that I faced was marketing agency issues. And the biggest issue that I had was that wrong channels got scaled because of misaligned incentives. So when you work with a marketing agency, if they get paid a percentage of your ad spend, guess what? They want you to spend more on ads and they're going to do everything that they can to show you that those ads are working. When I say everything that they can, they're going to show you clicks and cost per lead, but we know that that doesn't mean profit. If you just look at the Google Ads channels and you say the cost per click, cost per conversion, cost per lead, that doesn't tell you about lead quality. And lead quality is a big thing. As you know, in home service, this is what I faced was that you can give me leads all day long, but do they speak English? Are they in my area? Are they, you know, the most affluent people or they just cheap leads? And this is the problem is that the marketing companies that I was working with, they were reporting on this stuff They were not tying it all the way through onto revenue. And so we didn't know what to scale and we had misaligned incentives. The CRM without enforced source discipline. So my CSRs were just putting in Google, Google, Google. We had no process to figure out, okay, well, where did this lead actually come from? And let's make sure that we stack this together so that way when I pull this report, it shows where the source is because we didn't have source on our forms. And I'm gonna talk about this in a second. Next, long quote forms equal friction. We would send out a quote, we'd get it back, and then it wouldn't get done until 4 months. And there was different parts of it. We'd have to go and do phase 1, and then the customer would call back in, and then phase 2. And slowly we'd lose attribution throughout this entire process because the sales cycle was so long. And then last thing is mental tracking doesn't scale. Oh, in your mind, you know, oh, I'm spending $2,000 on Yelp, I'm spending $3,000 over here on LSA, I'm spending this on search ads, and you're trying to keep track of this stuff, but it doesn't scale. And you're going to be the bottleneck on your business. And specifically, if you don't have an agency that cares about all this stuff, you're going to get stuck. So this is exactly what I faced. So I'm going to walk you through the 3-pillar revenue link system of what I built in my home service business and now what we do for home service businesses. And what I can tell you is that if you do this system, you will never feel like you're gambling again. This is how we scale home service businesses through ads, is that we link it together. And I'm going to walk you through that system. So the first thing is set up tracking. So you set up a landing page for the ad platform that you want. So I'm gonna show you an example of a landing page. Here's an example of a landing page. Couple things to highlight here. Notice there's nothing up top here. There's no like services, abouts. This is called your menu. None of that on a landing page. You have a tracking phone number here. So when they click this phone number, this is gonna say that this call is from this ad in particular. Next, we have a form. This is called a tracking form. This form is attached directly to this ad, and you can see this is for their landing page, landscape lighting. Someone comes here when they want landscape lighting. This tracking form and this tracking phone number are linked to this landing page. So the first thing is you need to set up your tracking. And when I say tracking, you pick the different ad channels that you have and you set up these tracking metrics. Now with Google search ads, that's usually where people are throwing money at the Google gods and they don't know what's going on. This is the stack. You set up a landing page, you set up a tracking number and a tracking form, and you do this based off of your campaigns. So let's say that you do HVAC. You would have one for repairs, you'd have one for new installs, you might have one for ductless systems, and you have different campaigns, then you run them to different landing pages, and now you have this tracking set up. Couple quick pro tips on this. With the tracking numbers that you set up, you do what's called a whisper message. When someone clicks this number to call, you have a whisper message that goes to your CSRs who answer the phone that says, "This is a call from your Google Ads." Okay? And you coach the CSR, put the Google Ads thing inside of the lead source. Okay? We're going to talk about this in a second. This is going to be phase 2 of how you get this actually implemented, but you have to have a whisper message on here. And then the second thing, when someone fills out this form, you want the email to go to your email inbox where you get leads, and in the subject line, you want to say, This is a Google Ads form. So that way everyone knows, and it's not hidden in the bottom of the thing. It's just like, these are the two sources, this is the source that this came from. Here you go. This is the starting point of getting good attribution. Okay, Phil, my CSRs don't know what they're doing, blah, blah, blah. I face all these things too. They did the wrong stuff. I'm gonna walk you through the next part of this as well, so that way you can get good attribution. First thing, set up tracking. I'm beating a dead horse here, but I just wanna give you some context on this one as well. Let's say that you're running LSAs. Google Local Service Ads. You might not have a landing page because they can just call you or they can fill out a message thing. You can set up a tracking phone number. You have to actually call Google LSA and set a tracking number for it. They give you a tracking number as well. But if you want to put a whisper message or do some other automations that I'll talk about in a second, you would do that. Same thing with Yelp. With Meta, this is the same stack. Send them to a landing page, tracking number, tracking forms, the exact same thing. All right. Step 2, you need to link your CRM and coach your CSRs. When I say link CRM, what I'm saying is when someone fills out this form, you need that lead to get dumped into your CRM as a new customer with the attribution correct. This is exactly how we built it out. Someone fills out this form, it gets dropped into your jobber as a request, and the source is already correct. Someone fills out this form, it gets dropped into your ServiceTitan as a call booking with the source correct. If you do this, you eliminate the CSRs having to go in and figure out where this form came from and put the right stuff in there. Now, with the tracking phone numbers, there's a couple ways that you can slice this up. With ServiceTitan, you can use tracking numbers so that it automatically dumps your marketing source in there. With Jobber, you can link this up with a tool like CallRail or something else, or you can have the calls have whisper messages on it and then you link them up, okay? You might be hearing this and say, okay, I can't get my CSRs to do this. I'm gonna give you the third step, it's gonna be one other attribution guarantee so that solves this whole problem, okay? But this is the second part to it is link your CRM, code your CSRs, lead source attribution. You add them as a request or a new client directly into your CRM. I'll give you one other pro tip on this. You need to make sure that inside of your call script, you have a section where they make sure that they verify the lead source. Because for us, this is what happened in my business. They kept saying, "Google, Google organic, Google this, Google that." And I'm like, "Guys, this can't all be Google, okay?" So we need to have a step in there where they actually check before they book the job that they have the right source. And if they don't know the source, then they have to go and figure out where the source came from in order for the job to be completely whole and booked. All right, and then step 3 on this is that we need to do what's called monthly return on ad spend audit. Monthly, okay? If you have a marketing agency, you probably meet with them hopefully monthly, maybe not, but you should. They need to be producing this monthly report for you. Right now, they're probably sending you some generic report with some random numbers that you have no idea what it means, and then you get on the call and say, oh, this looks good, we should scale this up, scale this back, and you don't know what it means. Okay, this is what I faced. What you need is monthly return on ad spend report that says, "Hey Phil, you spent $2,000, you got 10 leads, your cost per lead was $200." A lot of times they stop at that. "You generated $20,000 in quotes and you made $10,000. So you spent $2,000 and you made $10,000. That's a 5x return. We should do more of that." This is what home service business owners want. This is what I wanted. This is why you're watching this video right now. If you do this on a monthly basis, you will fix your business and you will have a lot more confidence in what you do. So here's how you do it. These forms and these phone numbers, yes, you want them to go into your CRM. However, we just talked about there might be leak points and they put the wrong source in there. So the hidden secret here is that you want these phone numbers and these forms— someone fills out this form, someone calls this phone number— to get put into a spreadsheet. Okay? They fill out the form, call this number, drops into a spreadsheet. Now you have a source of truth. You know that this landing page produced these leads on this spreadsheet. There's no way that they can't. There's no way that they couldn't. It's— if they did this thing, they get put into the spreadsheet. And every month you get a lead list of these leads from that spreadsheet. Okay? There's no if, ands, or buts about this side of things with the CSR piece. Now, once you have this data, what we do as a business and what you should do is you take the phone numbers and the email addresses and you go into your CRM and you see what happened to those leads. And you do this on a 90-day rolling basis. So let's say that it's the end of the month and you start today. You would go in and take the phone numbers and the emails and you would, one, qualify the source attribution is correct on those people. 2, go to the report inside of your CRM for lead source and make sure that it all lines up. But 3, what we do is we actually pull the data out into a spreadsheet. For some CRMs, we pull it out into a spreadsheet so that way we have a rolling average. We have an API built with Jobber, for example, that does this whole process automatically. But in ServiceTitan, we would go through and make sure that the sources are correct in the campaign summary report so that way we have all the data clean. This part right here is the part that a lot of people miss. And the reason is because it's very tedious, right? You got to get all this stuff set up, then you got to go in and actually do the reports and make sure that it all works. But this 3-pillar revenue link system allows you to link your ad spend all the way into your revenue and have a system to know what you're actually spending money on so you don't feel like you're gambling. So here's the 30-day cycle fix that I'm going to walk you through. Once you implement this, here's what you should do in the next 30 days. 1, start with the bottom of the funnel lead source. So whether that's Google LSAs, Google search ads, or Yelp, Pick one or two of these and say, okay, I'm going to set up a landing page, a tracking number, and a tracking form. So like with Yelp, you do it just a tracking phone number, and with LSA, tracking phone number, search ads, tracking form, tracking phone number, tracking a landing page. So set this up, then set up your landing page with all this stuff. So pick one, set up the landing page, then get the data and analyze it monthly. After 90 days, you will know what to fix, and I'm going to walk you through these last three because this is very important if you're watching this, okay? Because people will set this up, but they'll do this part wrong, which is this thing. So once you get to this point, every single month you're going to have the data. What you do with the data is the most important piece. This is why the marketing and the actual CRM data are disconnected and how you make this better. First, let's say that you spent $2,000 and you made $2,000. Okay. And you're like, okay, great, Phil, got the information. Cool. Thanks. That doesn't mean I'm going to grow my business, right? How do I fix this? How do I make this better? Because these are the ad platforms right now that are bottom of the funnel for home service businesses. First is lead quality. So we had a company, for example, that was getting $32 leads on LSAs, but they were not converting them. $32 a lead on LSA, which is the best leads that you can get. $32 a lead. So what we did was we listened to the calls, and what we found was that the call handling was poor. The woman's English wasn't her first language. She did not have a call script to follow. People literally hung up the phone because they couldn't understand her. So what do we do? On our monthly meeting with the client, we said, "Hey, big opportunity here. You need to fix your call script and work with your CSR because we're getting $32 leads and we can generate a bunch of money off this." So if you're analyzing your data, then you need to go first to your lead quality. Is the lead quality good? If they're good calls or good forms, then you go second to your call handling. Call handling would mean what I just mentioned with the CSR script. If the lead quality is low, You need to go back and say, how do I tighten this up? So with LSAs, maybe you only serve your LSA ads to specific zip codes that you want to target that are higher affluency opposed to everyone, or you just target specific types of services. Same thing with search ads, same thing with Yelp. You need to tighten up the lead quality. Second, call handling. I just mentioned that. And then the third one is conversion rate, which plays hand in hand in both of these. So conversion rate means if you're driving traffic to your landing page like this, There are ways to tighten your lead quality. For example, in this one, he added zip code. Zip code tightens your lead quality. You might add budget, tightens your lead quality because someone has to take more steps to put more information in, so you're making it harder for them to become a customer to give you more information. So your lead quality goes up because you have more information that you require them to fill out. That is, that is what this conversion rate is. The second thing is you might add a promo like this one, which is limited time offer, Schedule today, get $250 off landscape lighting. So you might add an offer on top to sweeten the pot so that way you get higher conversions on this landing page. This is how you take the data, make better decisions, and then ultimately track what you're doing every single month to get better return on ad spend. The reason that I picked this landing page, for example, is because this landing page generated a 27x return last month. 27x return, okay? So this was not just like, oh, This is some random landing page that we just picked. This one actually works and converts 27x return on ad spend last month. All right, so you just heard all this stuff. So first, you need to stop guessing. If you're adding $1 million and you're trying to get to $3 million plus, it's— this is the unlock. I guarantee you need to figure out where your money's coming from, and then you need to double down on what's working and produce a better return on ad spend. This alone will generate $250,000 to $1 million in home service businesses. We do this all day, every day. It's our bread and butter. More leads won't fix a broken tracking system. This is the cycle that we see over and over is that you think that, okay, I'm just going to dump more money into marketing, but you don't have the tracking. So then it's just gut feeling and you feel stuck. This is why revenue clarity equals confidence scaling. Small percent gains equals big dollar jumps once you know the numbers. If this is helpful for you, I'll put a link down below. You can schedule some time to talk with us if you're like, hey, I want someone to fix this in my business. If you're like, hey, I'm just looking for ways to grow my business, We put together a guide, 11 Ways to Get More Customers for Home Service Businesses. It's 29 pages. People ask me this over and over again, so I put it together. It's free. It goes in-depth like this as well. Hopefully this was helpful. If you have a comment, drop it below. If you have a question, drop it below. I go live every Friday and I'd love to answer your question, and I'll see you in the next video.