“I’m spending on three things and I couldn’t tell you which one works.”
Service
Tracking & Reporting Calgary
Knowing which jobs came from where, so you can stop paying for the things that bring none.
- Decide what counts as a result
- Record those things properly
- Connect them back to the source
- Close the loop on what became work
Sound familiar?
You’re probably here because…
“I get a report every month and I don’t understand any of it.”
“Someone asked where our leads come from and I had to guess.”
What’s actually going on
Here is the situation almost every small business is in. Money goes out across two or three channels. Calls come in. Nothing connects the two, so the decision about what to cut next month is made on instinct, on whichever channel had a visible bad week, or on whoever sent the most confident report.
That gap is not a technology problem. It is a sequencing problem: tracking almost always gets added after the spend, which means there is no clean before, which means every claim about improvement afterwards is unfalsifiable. It is also why an agency can show you a chart going up while your phone does nothing — the chart is measuring what is easy to measure.
There is one more step that gets skipped almost universally, and it is the one that matters most. A lead is not a job. If you record which enquiries actually became work — thirty seconds each, on paper if you like — you can finally answer the question that decides your budget: not which channel produces the most leads, but which produces the ones worth having. Those are frequently not the same channel.
None of this is difficult. It is just unglamorous, it produces nothing to look at in week one, and it is the difference between a marketing budget you can make decisions about and one you can only have opinions about.
The work
What we’d do, in order.
- 01
Decide what counts as a result
A phone call over thirty seconds. A quote request. A booking. Not a click, not a page view, not an impression. Everything downstream depends on getting this right first.
- 02
Record those things properly
Calls, forms and bookings captured where they happen and tied back to how the person arrived. This is the unglamorous part and it is the part that makes every other decision possible.
- 03
Connect them back to the source
Which channel, which campaign, which page. Not perfectly — nobody manages that — but well enough to stop guessing which half of the budget to cut.
- 04
Close the loop on what became work
The step almost everyone skips. A lead is not a job. Thirty seconds per enquiry marking what happened is what turns a lead count into something you can actually make decisions with.
- 05
Report it in language you already use
One page. What came in, where from, what it cost, what it became. If you need a glossary to read it, it is not doing its job.
What you actually get
Every deliverable, and how often.
No bundles, no “strategy” line item you can’t inspect. If it isn’t on this list, we didn’t promise it.
- Measurement plan What counts as a result, agreed in writing before anything is installed, so we are not redefining success later. One-time
- Call & form tracking Enquiries recorded and attributed to how the person found you. One-time
- Analytics setup Configured around your actual conversion points rather than left on defaults. Tags added only when you supply the accounts. One-time
- Source attribution Campaign and channel tagging so the numbers reconcile instead of contradicting each other. One-time
- Outcome log A simple way to record which enquiries became work, because lead volume without outcomes measures the wrong thing. You, ~30 seconds per lead
- Monthly report One page: what came in, from where, what it cost, what it became, and what we would change. Monthly
The difference
How this usually gets done, and how we run it.
How it usually goes
How we run it
A dashboard with twenty metrics, sent monthly, read by nobody.
One page in plain language, ending in a recommendation. If it does not change a decision, it does not go in.
Success is measured in clicks, sessions and impressions — the things the platform reports by default.
Success is calls and jobs. Everything else is diagnostic detail, not the headline.
Reporting stops at "lead generated".
We set up the step after: which leads became work. Without it you can only ever compare volume, never quality.
Tracking gets added later, once something looks wrong.
Tracking goes in before the spend, so there is a genuine before to compare against rather than a story told afterwards.
What this doesn’t fix
Worth saying plainly, because paying for the wrong thing is the most expensive mistake on this list.
Measurement does not create demand. It tells you the truth about what you have, and sometimes that truth is that there is not enough of it yet — which is a different problem with a different answer.
Google AdsIf the numbers turn out to be fine and the problem is that enquiries go unanswered, the fix is downstream of anything a report can show you.
Follow-up & automationHow you’ll know it’s working
Agreed before any money is spent, so there is something to hold us to.
- Every enquiry attributed to a source, rather than a large bucket labelled “direct”.
- Cost per enquiry by channel, and cost per enquiry that became actual work.
- Which channel you would cut first if you had to — answerable in one sentence.
- The report itself is the deliverable. If you cannot read it in five minutes it has failed, and that is on us.
What you won’t get from us is a promised ranking, a promised number of leads or a promised date. Nobody controls those, and quoting them before the work starts is guessing with your money.
What it costs, and who does it
A fixed number before anything starts, agreed with you first — not an hourly rate that drifts. What the number is depends on what we find, and we would rather look before quoting than quote and revise.
10+ years of digital marketing experience. How we work, in full →
Before you ask
The questions we actually get.
Do I need this if I am only doing one thing?
Even then, yes — because the first real question is whether that one thing is working at all, and without measurement the answer is a feeling. It gets more valuable the moment you add a second channel.
Is this just Google Analytics?
Analytics is one part. The parts that matter more are call tracking, the link between a lead and where it came from, and the record of which leads became work — and that last one no analytics tool can do for you.
Will you need my accounts?
Yes, and everything is set up under your ownership. If we stop working together the data and the configuration stay with you.
Can you track phone calls?
Taps on the number, immediately and for free. Actual calls need a tracking number, which is worth doing once phone volume matters — there is a right and a wrong way to set that up without damaging your local listing, and we will explain both.
What do I have to do?
About thirty seconds per enquiry, marking what happened to it. That is the only ongoing ask, and it is the single highest-value habit on this page.
What if the numbers show your work is not working?
Then you will see that, because the measurement is yours and it was agreed before we started. An agency that controls the scoreboard should not be trusted with it.