What Happens Between Signing Up and Seeing Your First Lead Sources

You need to give us four things. That is the entire ask on your side before we go to work.

1. Your active marketing channels and approximate monthly spend per channel. Tell us where your dollars are going — Google Local Services Ads, Google Search, Facebook, Yelp, Angi, Nextdoor, door hangers, truck wraps, whatever you are running. Ballpark spend is fine ($500/month on Google, $200/month on Yelp). We use this to build your source taxonomy so every lead maps to an actual budget line.

2. Your business phone number. The number you currently use for inbound calls. We route calls through channel-specific tracking numbers that forward to this line. Your callers dial what looks like your normal number. You answer the same way you always have.

3. Your existing calendar or booking system. Google Calendar, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, a paper book — whatever you use today. We configure the appointment feed so booked jobs land where you already look.

4. View-only access to any active paid ad accounts. This is the one that raises questions, so here is exactly what it means: view-only means we can see your campaign names, ad group names, and spend data. We cannot create ads, change bids, pause campaigns, or spend a dollar. We need it so we can map your exact campaign naming to the tracking layer — if we guess at campaign names, attribution breaks. Read-only access is granted in Google Ads under Tools → Access and Security, or in Meta Business Manager under People. You can revoke it any time.

Most owners send us everything in one 15-minute email.

Once we have your four inputs, the agency builds the full tracking layer. Here is what goes live on our side before you see a single result.

Channel-specific tracking numbers. Every active marketing channel gets a unique forwarding number. Google Ads gets one. Yelp gets one. Your truck wrap gets one. When a call comes in on any of those numbers, the source is stamped automatically — no manual logging.

Form parameter setup. If you run any web forms — contact page, quote request, booking widget — we append UTM parameters to every submission path so web leads carry the same source data as phone calls. No more "where did you hear about us" guessing.

Pipeline stage configuration. We set up lead stages that match how a home service job actually moves: new inquiry, qualified, estimate scheduled, job booked, won, lost. Each stage maps to your workflow, not a generic template.

Lead tagging rules. Every inbound contact gets tagged at the moment it enters: source channel, campaign (if paid), day and time, service type requested (plumbing emergency, HVAC tune-up, electrical panel quote). These tags are what make your weekly summary readable in plain English instead of a spreadsheet dump.

Source taxonomy aligned to your channel mix. We do not use a generic 12-channel list. We build your taxonomy from the actual channels you listed in step one. If you run Google LSA and Nextdoor and nothing else, your taxonomy has two sources — clear and uncluttered. If you run six channels, you get six. No phantom data categories inflating the report.

All of this is configured, tested with a dry-run call, and confirmed before the 24-hour mark.

Attribution goes live the moment the configuration is confirmed — not at some scheduled future date, not after a warm-up period.

The first real call that arrives after go-live is tagged in real time: which tracking number it hit, what source that number is assigned to, what time it came in, whether it was answered or missed. That data is written to the lead record before the call is even over.

The same is true for web form submissions. The moment a prospect fills out your contact form, the UTM parameters we built into the form path are captured and written to the lead record. The source, the campaign, and the landing page are all stamped without anyone touching anything.

You do not need to do anything for attribution to start working. There is no "activation step" on your end, no code you need to add to your site, no pixel you need to approve. We handle the implementation before we hand off.

What this means practically: on day one, every lead that comes in — phone or form — has a source attached. You are never looking at an unlabeled lead wondering if it came from Google or Yelp or the referral you forgot about. The clock on your attribution history starts at go-live, not at some future manual setup date you have to remember to complete.

When the system is live, you get three things from us — not a login, not a dashboard link, not a tutorial video.

A confirmation with your channel list. A plain-English summary that lists every source we built into your taxonomy, the tracking number assigned to each, and confirmation that the dry-run test call was received and tagged correctly. Print it or file it — this is your record of what is being tracked.

A walkthrough of a test lead. Before you ever get a real inbound, we run a test contact through your system and send you the output: what the lead record looks like, what tags it carries, what stage it sits in. You see exactly what a real lead will look like — so the first time an actual prospect hits your line, it is not a surprise.

Your first plain-language summary format. We show you the template we will use for your weekly and monthly summaries — what columns it includes, what it does not include, and how to read the one number that matters most: cost per booked job by channel. No raw log files. No pivot tables. No "here is your data, good luck."

Live does not mean "we handed you a tool and walked away." It means the system is running, you have seen proof it works, and you know exactly what you will receive going forward.

Here is something most agencies will not tell you: month one attribution data is thin. You should know that going in.

In week one you will see inbound volume start flowing through tagged sources. The data is real, but the sample size is small. If you get 12 calls in week one, you cannot draw conclusions from that. You can confirm the tracking is working, but you cannot rank your channels by performance yet.

By day 30 you have something to look at. Patterns start showing up — which channel is generating the most calls, which channel is generating calls that actually book versus calls that ghost you after the estimate. You can see which days of the week and which time windows are highest volume. That is genuinely useful.

By day 60 you can make budget decisions with confidence. If Google LSA is booking two jobs per week at $80 cost per lead and Yelp is generating calls that never convert, that is a $1,600-per-month finding — enough to either cut Yelp or overhaul the Yelp campaign. That kind of decision requires two months of data, not two weeks.

We tell you this upfront because owners who expect a full picture in week one get frustrated and make premature changes to channels that just needed more data. Patience in month one prevents bad budget cuts in month two.

After go-live, the attribution system runs without you.

We monitor tracking integrity — if a tracking number stops routing correctly or a form parameter breaks after a website update, we catch it before it creates a gap in your data. You will not notice a problem because we fix it before it becomes one.

When you add a new marketing channel — a new Google campaign, a mailer campaign, a partnership with a local realtor — we add the source to your taxonomy and assign a tracking number. You tell us you are running something new; we handle the setup.

Every month you receive a plain-language summary: calls by source, form leads by source, booked jobs by source, and cost per booked job by channel (if you shared spend data). No raw exports. No spreadsheets. The number that matters — which channel is booking jobs at what cost — is the number we lead with.

You never log into a dashboard. You never update a tracking number. You never file a support ticket to add a campaign. That is the model — you run your business, we run your attribution.