How to Calculate Your Real Marketing Return as a Trades Business (Not Vanity Metrics)

Every marketing agency in America wants to talk about “impressions,” “engagement,” and “brand lift.” Those are vanity metrics. They don’t pay your guys on Friday.

Here’s the only formula that matters for a trades business — your return on what you spent:

Return = (Revenue from Marketing - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost

If you spent $5,000 on Google Ads in March and closed $25,000 in jobs that came from those ads, your return is (25,000 - 5,000) / 5,000 = 4.0x. For every dollar in, you got four out.

Sounds simple. Most trades businesses can’t actually compute it. Here’s why — and how to fix it.

The four numbers you need

You can’t run this formula if you don’t track these four things:

1. Source of every lead. When someone calls or fills out a form, you log where they came from. Google Ads, Google organic, referral, repeat customer.
2. Conversion rate, lead → quote. Of every 10 leads, how many do you actually quote?
3. Close rate, quote → job. Of every 10 quotes, how many close?
4. Average job value. What does a typical project pay you?

A simple spreadsheet (or any half-decent CRM) handles this. We set up dozens of trades businesses on Jobber, Service Titan, or even just a Google Sheet — and it changes everything.

A worked example

Picture a typical Montana roofing outfit spending $4k/month on Google Ads with no idea what’s coming back. The phone rings sometimes, so it feels like it’s working.

When you actually tag every lead and run the math, here’s what realistic mid-range trade numbers look like at that spend:

• $4,000/mo ad spend
• ~40 leads/mo from ads
• ~24 of those get quoted (60% lead → quote)
• ~7 of those close (29% close rate)
• Avg. job value: $9,200
• Revenue attributable to ads: ~$64,000/mo
• Return: ~15× — fifteen dollars back for every one spent

15× is a great campaign. Most trades businesses spending that money never know.

The kicker shows up when you decompose the spend by campaign. It’s common to find half the leads coming from one campaign and the rest being dead weight. Kill the dead campaigns, double spend on the winner, and inside two months you’re typically pulling 3–4× the attributable revenue off the same or slightly higher ad budget. 25×+ return.

The trap: lead quality

Not all leads are equal. A “lead” who needs a $200 patch job costs you the same to acquire as a lead who needs a $40,000 commercial reroof — but the return is wildly different.

The real number you should track over time isn’t return on leads. It’s return on closed revenue per channel. Some channels send you junk. Some send you gold. The data will tell you in 60 days flat.

Plain-English return tracking — the 1-hour setup

If you want to start tracking this Monday morning, here’s what we do for clients:

1. Set up dynamic call tracking (CallRail or built-in Google Ads call extensions). Each campaign gets its own number.
2. Tag every form on your site with hidden source fields (Google Tag Manager, 30 minutes).
3. Build a one-row-per-lead Google Sheet with columns: Date, Source, Lead Type, Quoted ($), Closed ($).
4. Review every Friday for 10 minutes. Sum the closed column by source. Divide by spend. You have your return per channel.

That’s the system. It costs maybe $50/mo in tools. It will completely change how you spend marketing dollars within a quarter.

What’s a “good” return?

Rough benchmarks for Montana trades:

• Google Ads: 4–8× is healthy. Below 3×, something’s broken (bad targeting, bad landing page, or too-low margins).
• Local SEO: 12×+ once it kicks in (low ongoing cost, high lead quality).
• Facebook Ads: 2–4× for trades. Don’t expect more.
• Direct mail: 5–10× in rural Montana zip codes, surprisingly.

If you’re below those benchmarks consistently, the issue is almost never “the ads.” It’s the website doing the converting (or not). Our website builds and digital marketing service are wired together specifically to fix that — every dollar tagged from ad click to closed job, with Forge CRM closing the loop on attribution.

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If you want to find out what your real return is — and where the dollars are leaking — that’s exactly what our free strategy session shows you. Three pages. Plain English. No sales pitch. Request yours here.