Marketing Consulting
Marketing Performance Reviews
Compares every channel on the same terms: cost per booked job
- Timeline
- Two to three weeks per review
Call (714) 823-3164 or ask a question. Clear recommendations, even if we never work together.
A marketing performance review is a scheduled deep read of your marketing numbers across every channel. It compares spend, leads, booked jobs, and cost per job against the plan. It also checks whether the tracking is telling the truth. You end up with a short list of changes for the next quarter.
The problem
Marketing reports are written by the people being graded. The ads report shows conversions, which include form fills from job seekers and calls that lasted eight seconds. The SEO report shows keyword positions for terms nobody searches. The social report shows reach. None of them show cost per booked job, because none of the vendors can see your calendar. So the owner reads four documents that all claim success while the bank account says otherwise, and has no way to reconcile them. The gap is not usually dishonesty. It is that nobody is measuring the same thing, and nobody is measuring the thing that pays the bills.
What it is
A marketing performance review puts every channel on one page with one denominator: booked work. We start by checking the tracking, because a review of bad data produces confident wrong decisions. That means reading GA4 conversion definitions for duplicates and junk, confirming call tracking credits the right source, and testing that forms still deliver. Then we pull the real numbers. Spend by channel, leads by channel, and how many of those leads became jobs, matched against your CRM or invoicing records instead of vendor dashboards. We work out cost per lead, then cost per booked job. That last number is what decides whether a channel stays. We also read lead quality. A channel with a low cost per lead and a fifteen percent close rate can be worse than an expensive channel closing at sixty. Seasonality gets accounted for too, so a summer dip in a heating business is not treated as a failure. The output is short: what worked, what did not, what the tracking got wrong, and three to five changes to make before the next review.
Signs you need this
- Every vendor report says things are going well and revenue disagrees
- You have never seen cost per booked job for any channel
- Conversions in your ads account do not match leads your office remembers
- You are about to renew several contracts and have no basis to judge them
What is included
- Tracking validation with a written list of any measurement defects found
- Spend, leads, and booked jobs by channel for the review period
- Cost per lead and cost per booked job calculated on the same basis for every channel
- Lead quality read including close rate and average job value by source
- Year over year and previous period comparison adjusted for seasonality
- Vendor performance summary against what each was hired to do
- Three to five recommended changes with expected effect and effort
- Recorded walkthrough plus a one page summary for your team
Our process
Validate the tracking first
Week 1Before any number gets used we check conversion definitions, call tracking attribution, and form delivery. On roughly half the accounts we review, something is miscounted badly enough to change a conclusion, so this step comes before everything else.
Pull spend and lead data
Week 1 to 2Every channel, from the platforms directly rather than from vendor reports. Where a vendor's number disagrees with the platform, we note both and ask them to explain the difference, which is often the most informative conversation of the quarter.
Match leads to booked work
Week 2Leads get traced into your CRM or invoicing records to find which became jobs and what those jobs were worth. This is the step vendors cannot do for you, and it is what turns a traffic report into a business report.
Compare channels on one basis
Week 2 to 3Cost per booked job and close rate by source, side by side, with seasonality accounted for. Ranking channels on cost per lead alone is how businesses keep funding a source that generates cheap leads nobody closes.
Recommend and present
Week 3Three to five changes, each with an expected effect and the effort required. Presented on a recorded call with a one page summary you can hand to a vendor without sending them the whole document.
Realistic timeline: Two to three weeks per review. Quarterly is the right cadence for most service businesses. Monthly is too frequent to separate signal from seasonal noise in low volume categories, and annual reviews find problems eleven months after they started.
Tracking Defects We Check For First
A review built on bad data produces confident wrong decisions. These are the faults worth finding before you trust a single number in the report.
Duplicate conversion events
One form fires both a submit event and a thank you page view, so every lead counts twice.
Junk counted as a lead
Job applications, vendor pitches, and eight second calls sitting in the same total as real customers.
Call tracking pointed at the wrong source
Calls credited to direct because a number was typed straight into the page instead of swapped in.
Forms that quietly stopped delivering
A plugin update breaks the email and nobody notices until someone tests it.
Your own traffic never filtered out
Office staff and your web person inflating sessions on the pages you care about most.
Ad platform and analytics disagree
Different attribution windows, so both numbers are right and neither one matches.
No lead source field on the intake
Nothing to match leads back to, so booked work cannot be traced to a channel at all.
Why Cheap Leads Can Cost the Most
This is the whole argument for cost per booked job in one table. The numbers below are made up so the math is easy to follow, but the pattern shows up constantly.
| Channel | Spend | Leads | Cost per lead | Close rate | Cost per booked job |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lead marketplace | 2,000 | 80 | 25 | 10 percent | 250 |
| Google Ads | 3,000 | 40 | 75 | 35 percent | 214 |
| Local SEO | 1,500 | 22 | 68 | 45 percent | 152 |
| Facebook ads | 1,200 | 60 | 20 | 5 percent | 400 |
The two cheapest sources of leads here produce the two most expensive jobs. Only the last column decides anything.
Reading a Quarter Without Fooling Yourself
Seasonality ruins more comparisons than bad tracking does. A heating company always beats its spring numbers in the fourth quarter. Comparing the two proves only that it gets cold.
So we compare a quarter to the same quarter last year first. Then we compare it to the quarter just before it. If both point the same direction, that is a real trend. If they disagree, the change is probably seasonal.
Low volume makes this harder. A shop that books thirty jobs a quarter can swing twenty percent on the back of two large commercial jobs. When volume is that thin we read leads and close rate on their own, because both move less than revenue does.
One rule saves a lot of arguing. Decide before the review how big a change has to be before it counts as real. Anything under that gets watched, not acted on.
What the Recommended Changes Look Like
The output is three to five changes, and most of them are small. A quarter where every channel gets rebuilt is a quarter nobody can measure.
A typical set looks like this. Move a third of the ad budget from one campaign to another. Fix two conversion definitions. Add a lead source field to the intake form. Give one vendor a written scope with dates on it.
Each change gets an expected effect and a date to check it. Writing down what you expect is what keeps the next review honest, because you can see who guessed right.
Resist changing five things inside one channel at once. If leads improve, you will not know which change did it, and you will keep paying for all five.
A report you cannot argue with is not a report. It is a press release written by the person being graded.