Tracking and reporting for plumbers
One page. Calls, not impressions.
Most plumbers who have worked with an agency have a folder of forty page PDFs full of impressions, sessions and bounce rates, and not one of them says how many people rang. This is the part I care most about, and it goes in before anything else.
Illustration. That is the whole report. If it needs a glossary, it has failed.
What should a plumber's marketing report show?
A plumber's monthly report should show phone calls and where each one came from, form enquiries, cost per enquiry, and which suburbs and job types the work came from. Impressions, sessions and bounce rate do not tell you whether the phone rang, which is the only question that matters.
Why it goes in first
Without a baseline, every claim I make later is unfalsifiable.
If tracking goes in during month one, then month three has something honest to compare against. If it goes in during month three, the only thing anybody can do is tell you a story about how things feel better now, and you have no way to check.
That asymmetry is exactly why some agencies are slow to set it up. Vague beats specific when the work has not gone well. I would rather be measurable and occasionally have to explain a bad month than be unmeasurable and never be held to anything.
It also changes what we do next. Once you can see that thirty of last month's calls came from the map pack and six came from the ads, the decision about where next month's money goes stops being an argument about opinions.
Tracking is included in every plan from the first month, and it is not an add on or an extra line. If I cannot count it, I cannot tell you whether any of this worked, and then you are paying me on faith.
What gets measured
Four things, and deliberately not much else.
A report you will actually read beats a complete one you will not. Everything here connects to a decision you might make.
Phone calls, and where they came from
A tracking number shows which calls came from the map pack, which from the website, and which from ads. Your real number still appears everywhere a human looks, so nothing changes for the customer. Without this you are guessing at the single most important number in a plumbing business.
Form enquiries, by source
Same idea for anything submitted through the site. Fewer than the calls in most plumbing businesses, but they tend to be the planned work rather than the emergencies, which often means the better margin jobs.
Cost per enquiry
Everything you spent, divided by everything that came in. This is the number that tells you whether to spend more or less next month, and it is the one most reports leave out because it invites an awkward question.
Which suburbs and which jobs
Where the work is coming from and what type it is. Useful when you want more bathroom renovations and fewer 2am blocked drains, because it tells us which pages and which ads to push and which to quietly stop feeding.
What you will not get
No forty page PDF. No dashboard login.
Long reports exist to look like value. Dashboards exist so nobody has to write anything. Neither tells you whether last month was good. You get one page on the first of the month, in plain English, and a ten minute call if you want to talk about it.
If a month goes badly, the report says so and explains why. That is the whole point of setting it up honestly in the first place.
Call and form tracking installed, baseline recorded.
One page, first of the month, plain English.
The data is yours and stays in your accounts.
FAQs
Questions about tracking.
Mostly about the phone number, which is the bit that sounds alarming and is not.
Does a tracking number mess up my Google ranking?
Not when it is set up properly. Your real number stays as the one listed on your profile and visible on the site, and the tracking number is swapped in only for the specific sources being measured. Done badly it can cause problems, which is why it is worth doing carefully rather than skipping.
Will I have to log into anything?
No. You get one page a month by email. If you want access to the underlying accounts you can have it, since they are yours, but nothing about this requires you to learn a dashboard.
What if the numbers are bad?
Then the report says they are bad and explains what I think is causing it. A month that goes badly is information. A report that hides it is just a slower way of wasting your money.
Do I keep the data if I leave?
Yes. The tracking, the analytics and the history all sit in accounts in your name. You remove my access and everything stays exactly where it is.
Other services
The rest of what moves the needle.
Most plumbers need two or three of these, not all five. I will tell you which on the first call.
Get started
Ask me what your last agency could not answer.
How many phone calls did your marketing produce last month, and what did each one cost? If nobody can tell you, that is the problem worth fixing before you spend anything else.