The average agency report sent to a contractor is eleven pages long and answers none of the questions the contractor actually has. Impressions are up. Bounce rate is down. Domain authority moved a point. Meanwhile the guy reading it is thinking: did the phone ring more or not?
We are S4 — two working builders in Rigby who run a construction company and rebuild the marketing of trade shops across Eastern Idaho. Here are the six monthly contractor marketing KPIs that actually mean something, where to find each one, and what to ignore.
1. Calls and actions from your Google Business Profile
Where: The performance section of your Google Business Profile.
For most local contractors this is the closest thing to a direct measure of demand. It counts people who found you on Maps or in the local pack and called, asked for directions, or clicked through to your site — many of whom never touched your website at all.
Watch the trend across three months, not month to month. Trades are seasonal, and a January dip in Idaho Falls is weather, not marketing. Google documents the available metrics in the Google Business Profile help center.
2. Category searches versus name searches
Where: Same place — the searches that showed your profile.
This is the most underrated number on the list. Google splits how people found you into searches for your business name and searches for what you do.
Name searches are referrals and repeat customers looking you up. Good, but that is your reputation working, not your marketing.
Category searches — “concrete contractor Rigby,” “emergency plumber near me” — are strangers who did not know you existed. That number growing is the clearest proof that marketing is doing something your referrals were not already doing.
If you check one thing on this list, check this one.
3. Leads by source
Where: Your own intake notes.
No software gives you this cleanly, which is why almost nobody has it. You get it by asking every caller how they found you and writing the answer in the same field every time. Four buckets is enough: referral, Google, repeat, other.
One habit makes the data honest: when someone says “a neighbor told me,” ask “did you look us up after?” A large share will say yes. Those are jobs your online presence helped close that you would otherwise have filed as pure word-of-mouth — and mislabeling them is how contractors talk themselves into cancelling the thing that was working.
4. Cost per booked job
Where: Your bank account and your job list.
Total marketing spend for the month — ad spend, agency fees, software, all of it — divided by jobs booked that you can attribute to marketing.
Compare it to what a job is worth. If a typical job leaves $1,800 in gross margin and you are acquiring one for $250, that is a machine worth feeding. If it costs $900, something is broken upstream, usually conversion rather than traffic.
Two rules keep this number honest. Count the agency fee as marketing cost, not overhead — it is part of what a lead costs you. And use booked jobs, not leads, because a channel that produces cheap leads that never close is more expensive than it looks.
5. Ranking position for your three money keywords
Where: An incognito browser window, once a month, same day, same device.
Pick three: your main service plus your main town (“roof replacement Idaho Falls”), a secondary service, and a nearby town you want more of (“concrete driveway Rexburg”). Search each one, note roughly where you land in the map pack and the regular results, and write it down.
Three caveats. Results are personalized, so use incognito and expect noise. Movement is slow — judge quarterly, not monthly. And a hundred keywords on a report is a distraction; three you actually care about tell you more.
6. New Google reviews this month
Where: Your profile.
Count new reviews, and note whether the flow is steady. Steady beats bursty — twenty reviews in one week reads badly to both Google and to a homeowner scrolling them.
This number is a leading indicator. Reviews earned in July show up as local ranking strength and higher call-through in September and October. When it goes to zero, nothing bad happens immediately, which is exactly why it slips.
A practical target for a shop doing a dozen or more jobs a month: two to four new reviews monthly, forever.
What to ignore on the report
- Impressions. How many times something appeared. Appearing is not the business you are in.
- Click-through rate in isolation. Interesting to a specialist tuning a page. Not a business number.
- Domain authority and similar third-party scores. These are estimates invented by SEO tool vendors, not measurements Google publishes. Useful as rough context, meaningless as a goal.
- Bounce rate. On a contractor site, someone landing on your service page, reading the phone number, and leaving to call you counts as a bounce. That is a win being reported as a loss.
- Social followers. Unless you are actively selling from social, this is a vanity line.
- “Keywords ranking in top 100.” Nobody looks at page ten. This exists to make a chart go up.
None of these are lies. They are just not the thing you are buying.
The twenty-minute routine
First Monday of the month, one page, six lines:
- Profile calls this month vs last vs same month last year.
- Category searches vs name searches.
- Leads by source from your intake column.
- Marketing spend divided by booked jobs.
- Position on your three keywords.
- New reviews.
Then one sentence: what produced work last month, and what did not.
Do that for six months and you will know more about your own marketing than any agency could tell you — because you will have the one dataset nobody else has, which is what actually shows up on your schedule, in your town, at your prices. And when someone tries to sell you an eleven-page report, you will know exactly which six lines to ask them for instead.
FAQ
What marketing metrics should a contractor track?
Six: calls and actions from your Google Business Profile, category versus name searches, leads by source, cost per booked job, ranking position for three priority keywords, and new reviews per month.
How often should I review marketing numbers?
Monthly for tracking, quarterly for decisions. Trades are seasonal and search rankings move slowly, so a single month rarely justifies changing course.
What is a good cost per booked job for a contractor?
It depends on job value. Compare it to gross margin per job — many contractors target roughly 10 to 15 percent of gross margin as customer acquisition cost. Include agency fees and software in the spend.
Why does my agency report look good while my phone is quiet?
Usually because it leads with impressions, click-through rate, and third-party authority scores rather than calls, leads, and booked jobs. Ask for the six numbers above instead.
Should I care about domain authority?
Only as loose context. It is an estimate produced by SEO tool vendors, not a metric Google publishes or uses. Rankings for keywords you actually want are the real measure.
How do I track where my leads came from without software?
Ask every caller how they found you, record it in the same field every time, and use four buckets: referral, Google, repeat, other. Ask referrals whether they looked you up afterward.
If your current report cannot tell you whether jobs went up, we will show you the six-line version on a fifteen-minute call. Start here →
S4 Media 
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