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A family-owned HVAC and plumbing company in the Midwest was spending $19,898 a month across multiple marketing vendors. Two agencies were sending monthly reports. Nobody was connecting the spend to actual booked jobs.
Five vendors. $19,898 a month. No single person looking at whether any of it was working.
| Vendor / Channel | Monthly Spend |
|---|---|
| SEO and website hosting | $3,400 |
| Google Ads and LSA management | $3,000 |
| Google Ads spend (ad budget) | $5,300 |
| Angi / HomeAdvisor | $7,783 |
| Print advertising | $415 |
| Total Monthly Spend | $19,898 |
Each vendor was reporting on their own channel in isolation. The SEO agency reported rankings. The PPC agency reported conversions. Angi reported leads delivered. Nobody was sitting in the seat where all of those numbers connect to actual revenue.
Four findings. Each one had been hiding in plain sight for months. None of them appeared in any agency report.
The PPC agency's monthly report showed 16,962 conversions over three months. That number was used to justify the $3,000 management fee and $5,300 in ad spend every month.
What we found
The company was spending $7,783 a month on Angi and HomeAdvisor. The Angi account manager was reporting leads delivered. The number looked reasonable on paper.
For every dollar spent on Angi, the company was recovering six cents in revenue. This had been running for 8 months.
Why nobody caught it
The Angi account manager tracked leads delivered. Revenue data lived in the dispatch software. No one was connecting the two. The agency's job was to deliver leads, not to verify whether those leads turned into profitable jobs.
The SEO agency was sending monthly reports showing keyword rankings. What the reports didn't show was that Google couldn't actually find most of the site.
Additional findings
Call tracking data showed 4,009 total calls over six months. That sounds like strong volume. The breakdown told a different story.
Why nobody flagged it
The remaining 96.7% of calls were repeat customers, vendors, suppliers, and spam. No agency was analyzing call composition because that sits at the intersection of marketing and operations. Each agency was responsible for their channel. Nobody was responsible for the full picture.
None of these findings required special access or advanced tools. They required someone willing to look at the whole picture instead of just their slice of it.
| What We Found | Who Should Have Caught It | Why They Didn't |
|---|---|---|
| 16,962 phantom conversions in Google Ads | PPC agency | They were reporting on the numbers, not auditing whether the numbers were real. |
| Dead LSA account running for months | PPC agency | Duplicate accounts weren't in the scope of their monthly reporting. |
| LSA set to business hours only | PPC agency | Default settings were never reviewed against the company's actual call patterns. |
| $7,783/mo Angi spend at -94% ROI | Angi account manager / any agency | Revenue data lived in dispatch software. No one was connecting spend to booked jobs. |
| 265 pages not indexed | SEO agency | Reporting focused on rankings for indexed pages, not coverage gaps. |
| Sitemap pointing to staging server | SEO agency / web developer | Post-migration checklist either didn't exist or wasn't followed. |
| GBP offline for a full month | SEO agency / GBP manager | No monitoring alert was set. Nobody checked GBP status after the migration. |
| 3.3% new customer call rate | Any agency with call tracking access | Call composition analysis sits between marketing and operations. No agency claimed that seat. |
The gap wasn't effort or budget.
The gap was that nobody was sitting in the seat where marketing, operations, and revenue all connect. That seat is what we fill.
We look at every dollar of marketing spend against actual booked jobs and revenue, not leads delivered.
We verify that tracking is accurate before trusting any number in any report.
We sit at the intersection of marketing, operations, and revenue because that's the only place where the real problems show up.
If you're spending $5K to $20K a month on marketing and can't tell which channel is actually producing revenue, this is where we start.