7:12 Monday morning. The dashboard shows three campaigns running, green across the board. Then the phone rings twice back to back, both about the same panel upgrade, and nobody picking up either line can say which ad actually brought either caller in.
Most electrical contractors can’t say which ads are actually bringing in jobs, because nothing in the shop ties a finished job back to whatever brought it in the door. The fix isn’t a better habit. It’s one field built into every call: how the caller heard about the shop, asked and logged the same way, every time.
We see this in almost every shop we look at. Nobody ever sat down and built a process for tracking where a job comes from. It’s one more thing that never got built on purpose, the same way most things in a growing shop don’t.
The CSR asks sometimes. On a slow day it makes it onto the ticket. On a morning with three panel changes stacked before lunch, the question never gets past the address. The caller knew exactly how she found the number. It just never made it anywhere that could add it up later.
What two quarters of guessing cost one shop
We watched one shop pay $1,200 a month for Facebook ads, $800 for Google ads, and $200 for a directory listing, for two straight quarters, with nothing to go on but each platform’s own dashboard insisting it was working. Every renewal was a guess, dressed up as a decision.
The field that closes the gap
One required field: how did you hear about us, asked on every call, logged the same way every time, for one full quarter. Not a note when someone remembers. Every ticket.
Six weeks in, the picture was already there. The directory listing had brought in two service calls and nothing else. The owner cut it, kept running the two ad platforms, and stopped renewing anything on faith.
Your business works. It just works harder than it should.
