Phil Risher calls it the data bleed: home-service businesses get leads from fragmented channels but can't see their total lead count month to month. Marketing agencies push cost per lead without revealing the client doesn't know how many leads actually came in, making it impossible to connect leads to jobs or measure real return on ad spend.
One thing I'm putting in my book that most marketing companies would never tell you is what I call the data bleed. The data bleed is when you work with a marketing company, a lot of times it boils down to leads. How many leads am I getting from this marketing company? How many leads am I getting from this channel? And the problem is that most home service businesses don't know their total leads month over month because they get calls coming in, they get web forms coming in, they get Yelp messages, Angie's List, all these things happening that they don't have a true leads number. And most marketing companies will never tell you that you don't know your leads number. They're going to keep showing you the ads that have been running and your cost per lead and the leads that they're generating you, and they don't care if that actually turns into revenue, which is the next part of this data bleed. You don't have the full picture of data. You don't have your leads to jobs to quotes to estimates to actual return on ad spend. It all comes back to leads, but you don't have the full picture, so you feel stuck, and that is the data bleed.
