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What should be included in a contractor marketing audit?
Seven zones. Anything less is a sales pitch.
A real audit covers seven zones: acquisition channels, speed-to-lead, CSR / booking, conversion path, attribution, retention, and vendor accountability.
If it skips even one — especially the CSR or attribution — it's not a diagnostic, it's a quote.
The 7-zone checklist
1. Acquisition Channels
- Document every active channel: Google LSA, Google Ads, GBP organic, website organic, referral, repeat, direct mail, yard signs, other
- Pull spend-per-channel for the last 90 days — all-in, including management fees and retainers
- Verify each channel has a lead count, a booking count, and a cost-per-booked-job calculation
- Flag any channel that's active but has no outcome tracking attached to it
2. Speed-to-Lead
- Pull the last 30 days of inbound leads and measure response time from first contact to first human response — by channel and by time of day
- Test the web form-to-CRM pipeline: submit a test lead and clock response time
- Check after-hours handling — is there a live answering service or does it go to voicemail?
- Flag any channel where average response time exceeds 5 minutes
3. CSR / Booking Performance
- Pull 20 random recorded calls from the last 30 days — not cherry-picked, random
- Score each call: greeting, qualification (service + address + timeframe), objection handling, booking close, call disposition accuracy in CRM
- Calculate booking rate from inbound calls — total calls vs. total booked jobs, not "appointments set"
- Identify top three booking failure patterns (price objection, scheduling friction, unanswered question)
4. Conversion Path
- Walk every lead-capture path from ad click to form submission: check mobile load speed (target under 3 seconds), form functionality, and confirmation sequence
- Verify Google Ads conversion is firing on booked-job CRM stage — not form submit, not phone call connection
- Review post-lead follow-up automation: is there an email or text sequence for unbooked leads?
- Check for broken CTAs or dead-end landing pages
5. Attribution
- Open the CRM and pull source field data for the last 90 days — check fill rate (what % of jobs have a source assigned)
- Reconcile ad platform lead counts against CRM lead counts for the same period — if they disagree by more than 5%, attribution is broken
- Confirm source field values are standardized (not "Google" and "google" and "G-ads" all meaning the same thing)
- Verify there is a defined attribution rule for referrals and repeat customers
6. Retention
- Pull customer return rate: what % of customers from 12–18 months ago have a second job on record?
- Review post-job follow-up sequence: is there one? What's the timing and channel?
- Check whether a maintenance membership or service plan exists and what the conversion rate is
- Pull referral volume: how many jobs in the last 90 days were sourced from customer referrals?
7. Vendor Accountability
- For each active vendor, document: contracted deliverable, current reporting format, and whether the KPI in the report is connected to booked revenue
- Flag any vendor whose monthly report doesn't include a cost-per-booked-job or booking-rate metric
- Review vendor contracts for auto-renewal clauses, spend minimums, and cancellation terms
- Note any vendor whose KPI is improving while booking rate or revenue is flat or declining — this is the most common accountability gap
Read this first
Find the leaks before you spend another dollar.
A self-scored worksheet covering the five leaks we find on most contractor teardowns — and the revenue each one quietly costs every month.