Call tracking: what to measure and what to ignore

Most marketing reports for trade businesses are full of numbers that cannot be spent. Impressions, reach, sessions, engagement rate. None of them tell you whether last month paid for itself.

The four numbers that matter

• Tracked calls by source - which channel produced the phone ringing
• Cost per lead by channel and by suburb
• Lead-to-booked-job rate, reviewed against call recordings
• Cost per booked job, compared to your average job value

Record the calls and actually listen to them

Call recordings answer the question no dashboard can: was the lead any good, and did your team convert it. Half the time a channel labelled poor is producing fine leads that are being lost on the phone. That is a fixable problem, but only if you can hear it.

Attribute at suburb level

Once you can see which suburbs produce the most profitable work, budget decisions get simple. Push into the areas that convert, pull back from the ones that do not, and staff ahead of the demand you can now see coming.