Reading The Gauges

You wouldn't run a truck with no gauges. You'd have no idea if it was about to blow up.

Most contractors run their website with no gauges at all. They have a vague feeling it's "probably helping." That's not a business decision, that's a horoscope.

Good news: the gauges are free, and you only need to read five of them.

THE TWO FREE TOOLS

Google Analytics tells you what people do on your site. How many came, what pages they looked at, whether they called.

Google Search Console tells you how people found your site. What they searched, where you ranked, whether Google is having trouble reading your pages.

Both free. Both should already be installed. If your web person didn't set these up, that tells you something. Ask for the logins today, in your name.

THE FIVE GAUGES

Ignore the other 200 numbers. These five run the business.

   ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │  1. VISITORS          "How many showed up"   │
   │  2. WHERE FROM        "How'd they find me"   │
   │  3. TOP PAGES         "What'd they look at"  │
   │  4. CONVERSIONS       "How many called"  ★   │
   │  5. COST PER LEAD     "What'd it cost me" ★  │
   └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
              ★ = the ones that actually matter

[FIGURE 6.1 — "The Dashboard"] Art direction: Five automotive-style round gauges in a dashboard cluster, each labeled. Gauges 4 and 5 rendered larger and in the signal blue; the first three smaller and in grey. Caption: "Two of these pay your bills. Three of them are just interesting."

Gauge 1: Visitors

How many different people came to your site this month.

Don't obsess over this. Traffic is vanity. A hundred visitors from your actual service area who need your actual service is worth more than five thousand from another state.

What to watch: the trend line, month over month. Up and to the right is what you want. If it dropped off a cliff, something broke — go look.

Gauge 2: Where They Came From

Analytics groups your visitors into buckets:

• Organic Search — found you on Google without you paying. This is the good one.
• Direct — typed your address in, or came from your truck wrap / yard sign / business card.
• Referral — clicked a link from another website.
• Social — Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor.
• Paid — from ads you're running.

This tells you what's working. If you're spending $900 a month on ads and paid traffic is 4% of your visitors and none of them call, you now know something you didn't know yesterday.

Gauge 3: Top Pages

Which pages people actually look at.

Almost always: home page, then one or two service pages, then About. This tells you where to put your effort. If "gutter guards" is your third-most-visited page, that page deserves better photos and a stronger call to action.

Also useful in reverse: if you've got a page nobody has visited in six months, stop maintaining it.

Gauge 4: Conversions ★

A conversion is when a visitor becomes a lead. A call, a form submission, a text.

This is the number. Everything else is context.

You have to set this up deliberately — it doesn't happen on its own. Ask whoever manages your site to track:

• Form submissions
• Clicks on your phone number
• Clicks on your text link
• Clicks on "get directions"

What's a good conversion rate? For a local home service site: 3% to 8% of visitors becoming leads is normal. Above 10% is very good. Under 2% means something's broken — usually slow load, no visible phone number, no reviews, or no pricing information.

Do the math on that. If you get 1,000 visitors a month:

• At 2%, that's 20 leads.
• At 6%, that's 60 leads.

Same traffic. Same ad spend. Three times the work. That's what a well-built site is actually worth, and it's why "cheap site, then buy more traffic" is usually the expensive path.

Gauge 5: Cost Per Lead ★

The number that ends arguments.

   ┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │   WHAT YOU SPENT                        │
   │   ─────────────────  =  COST PER LEAD   │
   │   LEADS YOU GOT                         │
   └─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Then:

   COST PER LEAD  ÷  YOUR CLOSE RATE  =  COST PER CUSTOMER

Worked example:

You spend $600/month on everything digital — hosting, site maintenance, some ads. You get 25 leads.

• Cost per lead: $600 ÷ 25 = $24
• You close 1 in 3, so cost per customer: $24 ÷ 0.33 = $72
• Your average job is $2,400 with 40% margin = $960 profit
• You spent $72 to make $960.

That's a 13-to-1 return. Now the question "is my website worth it?" isn't a feeling. It's arithmetic.

Run this every quarter. When somebody tries to sell you a $1,500/month marketing package, this number is how you evaluate it in ninety seconds.

[FIGURE 6.2 — "The Only Math You Need"] Art direction: A fill-in-the-blank worksheet, styled like an invoice or estimate form. Blank lines for the reader's own numbers, worked example printed lightly beside it as a guide. Designed to be printed.

CALL TRACKING (WORTH KNOWING ABOUT)

Here's a problem: somebody finds you on Google, then calls the number on your truck three days later. Analytics has no idea that call came from your website.

Call tracking solves this. You use a separate phone number on your website that forwards to your real phone. Now every call to that number is provably from the website.

Costs $20–$50 a month. Worth it once you're spending real money on marketing. Not worth it on day one.

One important warning: if you use call tracking, your Google Business Profile should still show your main number, or you break the NAP consistency we talked about in Chapter 4. There are correct ways to do this. Make sure whoever sets it up knows that.

WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO EVERY MONTH

Fifteen minutes. Once a month. Set a recurring reminder.

1. Open Analytics. Look at visitors — up or down from last month?
2. Look at conversions. How many leads?
3. Do the cost-per-lead math.
4. Open Search Console. Look at your top searches. Anything surprising? Any search you're almost ranking for that you could build a page around?
5. Check your review count on Google. More than last month?

Write the five numbers in a notebook. In a year you'll have a picture of your business nobody else in your trade has.

DO THIS NOW

Find out if you have Google Analytics and Search Console installed, and whether the accounts are in your name with your email as owner. If your web person owns them, ask to be added as owner today. These are your business records.

→ GOING DEEPER Book Six — "Know Your Numbers" — takes cost per lead all the way through to lifetime customer value, marketing budgets by revenue size, and knowing which jobs to stop taking.