A contractor added up what a year with one agency cost him. His numbers, his post:
"$1k month retainer, $200 in call tracking, 2k/month spend, 7k website build. Not a single inquiry through the channel I needed... they walked away with over 30k."
Thirty thousand dollars. And when he explained why he didn't catch it sooner, he mentioned "no clarity on invoices" and spelling mistakes on the website.
That's the part worth staring at. He wasn't asleep. He got reports. They just weren't reports about anything.
Somebody else in the same thread had the fix in one line: "if they can't show you exactly which keywords you'll rank for and how many estimated calls that brings, walk away."
What a bad report looks like
You've seen this document. Eleven pages. Nice charts.
- Impressions. How many times a thing appeared on a screen. Includes people who scrolled past it in a quarter second.
- A green arrow. Up 34%. From what to what is on a different page, in a smaller font.
- "Domain authority." A score invented by a software company to sell software. Google does not use it.
- Social reach. On a plumbing business.
- Tasks completed. Twelve of them. Nine were "content optimization."
None of that is lying, exactly. It's just built so that no number in it connects to a number in your bank account. Eleven pages, zero phone calls mentioned.
The four that actually matter
1. How many calls came from search, and from where
Not traffic. Calls. And split between your Google Business Profile and your website, because those are two different machines and they fail in different ways.
This is the number. If it's flat for four months, nothing else on the report matters.
2. How many form submissions, and did somebody answer them
Form fills is half the number. The other half is response time. Ten submissions where four never got a callback is not ten leads, it's six, and you paid for ten.
A marketing company that reports submissions but has no idea whether anybody replied is only reporting on their own half of the job.
3. Which specific searches you showed up for
Actual phrases people typed. "Water heater repair Fairfield." "Emergency plumber near me."
This is the one that catches drift. If you're a residential drain guy and you're getting impressions for "commercial grease trap installation," somebody's optimizing for the wrong business. You'd never spot that in a traffic chart, but you'll spot it in about four seconds looking at a keyword list.
4. What actually changed on the site since last month
Specific. "We added a water heater page for Mason and a page for Loveland, rewrote the homepage headline, compressed 40 photos."
If the honest answer is "nothing," that can be fine for a month. It cannot be fine for four. You're on a monthly retainer. Something has to happen monthly.
Now the part that costs me money
All four of those are free. You can get every one of them yourself, tonight, without hiring anybody.
Calls, from your Google Business Profile
Open your Business Profile and find the performance or insights section. It shows calls, direction requests, and website clicks, month by month, going back a year or so. That's number one, half of it, already sitting there.
Calls, from your actual phone
Your call log. Scroll it. This is unglamorous and it's the most honest data you own, because it includes the ones you missed, which no marketing report will ever show you.
The searches, from Google Search Console
This is the big one and almost no contractor has it set up. It's free, it's Google's own tool, and it shows you the exact phrases people searched when your site came up, how many times, and how many clicked.
You need to verify you own the site to turn it on, which is a fifteen minute job and might need whoever built your site. Do it anyway. Own the account yourself, in your own email. It keeps working no matter who you hire or fire, and it's the single best argument-ender in this whole business, because it's Google's numbers rather than anybody's report.
What changed, from your own eyes
Look at your site. Is there a page there that wasn't there last month?
That's the whole method. You don't need a tool.
Why I'm handing you this
Because a guy who can pull his own four numbers is a guy nobody can run a thirty thousand dollar year on. Including me.
That's the trade and I'm fine with it. If I can't show you calls going up, I'd rather you fire me in month four than month fourteen. Month fourteen is how people end up believing this whole industry is a scam, and then they don't hire anybody, and they stay stuck.
The one thing a report genuinely gives you that pulling it yourself doesn't is somebody who has to explain the numbers when they're bad. That's worth something. It's worth a lot less than most people charge for it, and it's worth nothing at all if the report never contains a bad number.
The one question for your next meeting
"How many calls did I get from search last month, and how does that compare to the month before?"
One question. If they know it cold, you're probably fine. If it takes a week and comes back as a chart about impressions, you already know.
And if you want to see what I think a report should contain instead, that's part of what I do. Four numbers, plain language, and a bad month called a bad month.
Set up Search Console this week regardless. Do it even if you never hire anybody, do it even if you fire me someday. It's your data, it's free, and it's the difference between having an opinion about your marketing and having a number. Message me if you get stuck on the verification step, it's the one part that trips people up and it takes me two minutes to talk through.