Blind Bucket · Field Notes
Your agency report has charts. None of them show the jobs.
Why the monthly marketing report you get is full of numbers that don't tell you the one thing you need to know — and what the right report would look like.
By Alan ·
You open the email on a Friday afternoon. It is the monthly report from the agency. The subject line says something like April Performance Report or Your Numbers This Month. You click it open. The first thing you see is a line chart with sessions trending upward. Then a pie chart of traffic sources. Then a table of keywords. Then a paragraph that says we increased CTR by 12% month over month and reduced CPC by 8% through aggressive negative keyword expansion.
You scroll to the bottom and ask yourself the only question that matters: did I close more jobs in April because of this work, or fewer?
The report does not say. The report cannot say. The report was not built to say.
This is the Blind Bucket. It is not the agency’s fault, exactly. The metrics they sell are the metrics their tools can produce. Their tools can produce sessions, click-through rates, impressions, cost per click. Their tools cannot produce the homeowner who became a $14,800 job. To produce that, the agency would have to know what closed — and the agency does not know what closed, because the agency does not know what your sales pipeline looks like, because nobody asked them to.
So you sit there with a six-page PDF that uses the word traffic twenty times and the word jobs zero times. You file it in the drawer. You write the check. The check clears.
The right report would have one number on its first page: jobs your marketing produced this month, by source, with the dollar amount alongside. Twelve closed jobs in March, eight from the website, three from Google ads, one from Facebook, total invoiced $112,400. Not impressions. Not sessions. Jobs.
That number does not exist on most contractor reports because nobody set up the loop that would produce it. The loop requires three things: every closed job is logged with the lead source, the contractor (or the agency) sees that log, and the report is generated from that log instead of from Google Analytics. None of those three things are technically hard. All three of them are organizationally rare.
The booklet I am writing right now calls this the Blind Bucket. It explains, in plain English, why most contractor marketing money produces a report instead of producing visibility, and what a contractor can ask his agency for — or do himself — to start seeing the jobs.
If you have ever stared at one of those reports and wondered what am I actually paying for, I would like to hear from you. Thirty minutes. No pitch. I will ask what your last three reports said and what they did not.