Phil Risher calls it the "silent bleed": spending on marketing without tracking returns. A $10 million plumbing company spent $2,500 monthly on Google Local Service Ads and got a 5× return. When they doubled the spend to $5,000, it returned 8×. They'd worked with an agency for two years without checking these numbers, missing $28,000 per month in potential revenue.
I almost didn't include this in my book, and it's the silent bleed that people don't realize is happening. It's the bleed of spending money on something that's working, but you don't know that it's working, so you're losing money on all the upside. You're already doing all the work, you just don't know if it doesn't work. The reason that I thought of this was because we have a plumbing company that we work with. They're $10 million. They were spending $2,500 a month on Google Local Service Ads. When we pulled the data, first month they generated 5x return, so $12,000. And we're like, all right, we need to spend more money on this. The thing is, is that they were with a marketing company for 2 years before this, and they never looked at that number once. So we said, let's double it from $2,500 ad spend to $5,000, and they generated an 8x return. So $5,000, they made $40,000 off of that. That difference of $12,000 to $40,000, they could have been making for the last 2 years. The problem is that no one looks at it, and this is the silent bleed of not knowing your numbers and knowing what's working or what's not, because you don't know how to make more money because you don't know the data.
