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🚫 1. Clicks Aren’t Customers

Vanity metrics are killing your budget.

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The Reality:

• 5,000 impressions? Doesn’t mean the phone rang.
  
  
• 200 clicks? Doesn’t mean you booked the job.
  
  
• Great open rate? Still no estimate sent.

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🔹 Hotjar recommends tracking campaign performance by tying metrics to business outcomes—like lead generation, conversions, and ROI—not just impressions or clicks (Hotjar).

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Fix It:

• Ask your marketer for booked-job attribution, not just CTR.
  
  
• Kill any ad spend you can’t trace to revenue.
  
  
• Judge success by profit, not volume.
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"If it sounds impressive but doesn’t move the bottom line, it’s not working."

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Read: Which Channel Is Just Burning Cash? to audit your spend across platforms.

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🗣️ 2. You’re Tracking Leads, Not Results

Lead count doesn’t mean lead quality.

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The Reality:

• Facebook ads filled your inbox, with junk.
  
  
• Google drove traffic, but from outside your service zone.
  
  
• Your CRM has leads, but your board has empty slots.
  
  

Fix It:

• Track: Where did it come from? Did it book? Did it pay?
  
  
• Review conversion rate from each marketing channel monthly.
  
  
• Know your average lead-to-job conversion.
  
  

"If it doesn’t book work, it doesn’t belong on your budget."

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Related: Am I Targeting the Wrong Job Types? shows how better job mix fixes lead quality at the root.

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📊 3. You're Relying on the Wrong Reports

Most HVAC owners trust reports they don’t understand.

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The Reality:

• Agencies send PDFs full of graphs and jargon.
  
  
• Dashboards look slick but don’t tie to jobs.
  
  
• You’re nodding, but not seeing cash.
  
  

🔹 HubSpot's 2024 State of Marketing report highlights that while marketers are increasing their reliance on data, only 61% say they actually use it to make decisions, leaving the rest stuck in reporting loops that don’t translate to action. Read the 2025 HubSpot State of Marketing Report here.

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Fix It:

• Ask for source-to-close tracking.
  
  
• Map every dollar back to booked work.
  
  
• Build a job-first dashboard: no noise, just net.
  
  

"A confusing report is a red flag, not a flex."

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Also read: Why Aren’t Calls Turning Into Jobs? to see what happens when tracking stops at the phone.

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🧰 Final Takeaway

Marketing should ring the phones and fill the board, not just look good on a spreadsheet. You don’t need noise. You need truth.

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Ready to cut the guesswork?‍

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Download the HVAC Lead ROI Tracker