Local and service businesses
The sale happens on the phone, in a van or at a counter, which is exactly where most advertising measurement gives up.
You are a trade, a clinic, a salon, a firm or an operator with a service area. Customers call, fill in a form or walk in, and a person closes the work.
The advertising reports a number of leads. Your diary reports a number of jobs. The two have never been compared and you suspect the first one is flattering.
What we keep finding
Four things that are true in almost every one of these businesses.
These apply across most service businesses. If your trade has its own page in our industries list, start there: it goes into more detail for your kind of business.
Every call counts as a lead
Including the wrong numbers, the suppliers and the nine-second hang-ups. Only count calls past a minimum length and the cost per real enquiry usually moves further in a week than a month of tweaking bids would.
Nobody knows which enquiries became jobs
The job is booked in a diary or a field service tool that never speaks to the advertising. Connecting those two is the single highest value thing most of these businesses can do.
The service area is advertised as a circle
A radius around a postcode, when the profitable work is in three suburbs and the loss making work is the long drive in the fourth.
Out-of-hours enquiries fall on the floor
A third of the calls arrive when nobody can answer, and the advertising keeps paying for them at the same rate as the ones somebody picks up.
What we measure here
The numbers this kind of business lives on.
The fundamentals are the same everywhere. These are the six that earn their keep when a person closes the sale.
- Call tracking with a minimum call length, so a wrong number is not counted as a lead
- Forms and calls counted as the same enquiry when they come from one person
- Jobs won imported back from your diary or field service tool
- Cost per job, by suburb and by service, rather than cost per click
- Hours of the day and days of the week separated, because the answer rate is not flat
- Google Business Profile treated as a channel with numbers, not as a listing
Whatever the trade, the pattern holds: the money is decided by a person, in a place the advertising has never seen.
Questions people ask
The questions we hear most.
We only spend a few hundred a month. Can you help?
Probably not on a retainer, and we would rather say that than take it. At that level the honest advice is a one-off piece of work to get the tracking right, after which you can run it yourself.
Nearly all of our work is recommendation.
Then the first job is measuring that properly, because businesses in this position routinely credit advertising for work a neighbour recommended, and then spend more on the advertising.
Do you do the Google Business Profile as well?
Yes, as part of the measurement rather than as a separate product. It is often the highest intent traffic a local business gets and the least examined.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
We showed Google which callers actually booked a ride, and it went and found more of them.
A taxi company buying phone calls with no way of knowing which became rides. This is the sector that work was built in.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click in their market
$2.10
average cost per click in their market
Where to start
The two services we usually begin with.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Find out which of your adverts bring paying customers.
Tell us about the business and the report you have stopped believing. Within a working day we will tell you what it is really saying and what it would take to fix.