Results & reporting
How we measure results — and what we will not promise
We do not publish client case studies. Most of the numbers you see on agency websites are unverifiable by design, so instead of asking you to take ours on faith, this page shows you exactly what we measure, how we source each number, where measurement genuinely breaks down, and the promises we refuse to make.
If a number matters to your business and we cannot measure it honestly, we will tell you that before you sign — not in month four.
Measurement
The metrics we report on
The KPI set is agreed during scoping, before any work starts, and it is deliberately short. A report with forty charts is a report nobody reads and nobody can be held to. These are the measures that either lead to revenue or predict it.
| Metric | What it tells you | How we source it |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified enquiries | How many people asked you to sell to them, after junk, spam and wrong-fit contacts are stripped out. The primary number on almost every engagement. | Form submissions and tracked calls, deduplicated, then filtered against your own definition of a qualified lead. Where you use a CRM, that is the record of truth. |
| Cost per acquisition (CPA) | What one qualified enquiry costs you in media. The figure that tells you whether to increase or cut budget, and the target we manage bidding against. | Media spend from Google Ads divided by qualified enquiries over the same period, reconciled to your invoice rather than to a dashboard estimate. |
| Return on ad spend (ROAS) | Revenue produced per dollar of media. Meaningful for e-commerce and for any business that can attach a value to a closed deal; misleading without margin context. | Transaction or deal value from your store platform or CRM, matched to spend by campaign. We report by product or service line where margins differ. |
| Organic sessions to money pages | Whether SEO is bringing people to pages that can actually sell, rather than to blog posts that flatter the traffic line and convert nobody. | GA4 landing-page reports segmented to organic search, restricted to service, location, product and contact templates. |
| Keyword visibility, commercial intent | Movement on the terms typed by people close to buying — the comparisons, the "cost", the "near me" queries. Leading indicator, not an outcome. | Google Search Console impressions, clicks and average position for a tracked commercial set, cross-checked against third-party rank data. |
| Core Web Vitals | Whether real visitors on real devices experience the site as fast and stable. Weak pages lose enquiries before any marketing has a chance to work. | Field data from the Chrome UX Report via Search Console, plus lab testing per template on throttled mid-range device profiles. |
| Form and call conversion rate | What proportion of the traffic you already paid for turns into contact. Usually the cheapest thing to improve on the whole account. | Tracked conversion events in GA4 and Google Ads, split by device and landing page, with calls counted only past an agreed duration threshold. |
| Closed-won revenue | The only number that pays wages. Reported where you are willing and able to share it — and it changes what we optimise toward. | Your CRM or accounting export, joined back to the original click or session where a click identifier was captured at enquiry. |
Everything above sits in accounts you own. Google Ads, GA4, Search Console and Google Business Profile are created in or transferred to your name, with you as primary administrator, so every figure in our reports is one you can open and verify yourself. That is a condition of working with us, not a premium option — see what each programme costs.
Straight answers
What we will not promise
Each of these is routinely promised by somebody pitching against us. Here is what the promise actually requires, and why hearing it should make you ask harder questions.
Guaranteed rankings
Google does not sell positions in organic results and does not accept guarantees on anyone's behalf. Nobody outside Google controls the ranking systems, and they change continuously.
When an agency guarantees page one, the guarantee is almost always satisfied by choosing terms that carry no competition and no buyers — your business name, a five-word phrase nobody types, or a city you do not serve. The contract is met, the report looks green, and the phone does not ring. Ask which exact queries the guarantee covers and what their monthly search demand is; the answer usually ends the conversation.
Guaranteed lead volume
Enquiry volume depends on things no agency controls: seasonality, your pricing, your reviews, how fast you answer the phone, and what your competitors do next quarter. A guarantee across all of that is either priced with enormous padding or is not being honoured in practice.
It also creates the wrong incentive. The fastest way to hit a lead count is to loosen what counts as a lead — every form view, every tap on a phone number whether or not the call connected. You end up paying for a number that has quietly stopped meaning anything.
Traffic numbers detached from enquiries
Sessions, impressions and "reach" are inputs, not outcomes. Traffic can double while enquiries fall — that is what happens when content is written for volume rather than for intent, or when broad match starts buying queries adjacent to your business.
We do report traffic, but only segmented to the pages that can sell, and always next to what it produced. If a report leads with a traffic chart and buries conversions, the traffic is the product being sold to you. Our SEO programme is reported the other way round.
SEO results in 30 days
Technical fixes can move things within weeks — indexation, crawl waste, a Core Web Vitals failure, a broken canonical. Those are worth doing first for exactly that reason. But earning position on competitive commercial terms means Google has to see new or improved pages, crawl them, evaluate them against incumbents, and observe how people behave once they land. That is a months-long loop, not a 30-day one.
This is why our SEO retainer carries a three-month minimum and then runs month to month. It is not a lock-in — it is the shortest window in which you could fairly judge the work. If you need enquiries this quarter, paid search is the honest answer, and we will say so on the first call.
What we do commit to. A defined scope of work each month, a named strategist who presents it, reporting against KPIs agreed before we start, dashboards you can open at any time, and the right to leave month to month once any minimum term has passed. Those are promises about our conduct, which we control — not predictions about an auction and a ranking system, which we do not. The full list is on our FAQ page.
The technical part
How attribution actually works
Attribution is the weakest link in nearly every SMB marketing programme, and most reports paper over it. Here is what is really happening underneath the numbers, so you can read any agency's report — including ours — with the right amount of scepticism.
Buying is multi-touch; reporting is single-column
A homeowner sees your ad on a phone at lunchtime, reads two of your pages that evening on a laptop, checks your Google Business Profile reviews the next morning, then calls you from the car. That is four touches across three devices and two channels. Every reporting platform then has to compress it into one row.
GA4 resolves this with data-driven attribution by default in its advertising reports, spreading fractional credit across the touches it can see. Google Ads counts the conversion against the date of the click, while GA4 counts it against the date the conversion happened — so the same event lands in different weeks in two reports that both look authoritative. Neither is wrong. They are answering different questions.
Cookie lifetimes shorten the window you can see
Safari's tracking prevention caps client-side cookies set by script at seven days, and at twenty-four hours when the visit arrives with link decoration it distrusts. Firefox blocks known trackers outright. If your buying cycle is three weeks — normal for professional services and for anything expensive — the first touch has expired before the enquiry arrives, and the conversion gets filed as direct or organic.
Server-side tagging and first-party cookie configuration extend the window and stabilise the measurement, and we implement them where the volume justifies the setup cost. They reduce the gap. Nothing closes it entirely.
Consent mode changes what exists to count
With Consent Mode v2, tags fire in a restricted state until a visitor accepts. Decline analytics or ad storage and no identifier is written, so that person's journey is not recorded at all. Google fills part of the hole with modelled conversions, but modelling requires a minimum volume of traffic and conversions before it engages — a threshold plenty of SMB accounts never reach. Below it, the declined traffic simply is not in your numbers.
The practical consequence: your true conversion count is usually higher than your reported one, and the size of the gap moves whenever your consent banner, its wording, or its default state changes. We note banner changes in the report for exactly that reason. How we handle this data is set out in our privacy policy and cookie policy.
Call tracking: useful, and not magic
Dynamic number insertion swaps the phone number on the page per visitor, drawn from a pool, so a call can be tied back to the session and the keyword that produced it. It works well — provided the pool is large enough for your concurrent traffic. Too small a pool and numbers recycle while a session is still open, silently misattributing calls.
It also cannot see calls that never touch your website: someone tapping the number in your Google Business Profile listing, calling from a van they saw, or ringing the number saved in their phone from last year. We count a call as a conversion only past an agreed duration threshold, because a twelve-second call is a wrong number, not a lead. And we keep the tracked number consistent in your listings and citations so local SEO does not suffer for the sake of measurement.
Offline closes need one field and one habit
For any business where the deal closes days or weeks after the enquiry, the whole picture depends on capturing the Google click identifier in a hidden field on your form, storing it against the record in your CRM, and importing the outcome and its value back into the ad account when the deal is won.
The engineering is a one-off. The habit is the hard part: someone has to keep CRM stages current. Where that happens, bidding starts optimising toward revenue instead of form fills, and it is usually the single biggest improvement available to a mature account. Where it does not, we say so in the report rather than quietly reporting form volume as if it were sales.
Why the platforms never reconcile
Expect Google Ads, GA4 and your CRM to disagree, permanently, by a margin that is often double-digit. The causes are structural: different attribution models, conversions dated by click versus by completion, "every" versus "one" conversion counting, GA4's event-based sessions restarting after thirty minutes of inactivity or at a campaign change, bot and internal-traffic filtering applied in one system and not another, tags that fire before consent resolves, and cardinality limits that collapse rare values into "(other)".
So we pick one system of record per engagement — usually your CRM, because that is where money is recorded — and treat the platforms as directional instruments for steering budget. Then we report the variance instead of hiding it. An agency that shows you three numbers that match perfectly has either found a very simple business or is only showing you one system.
Scope & sequence
Illustrative engagement scenarios
Since we do not publish case studies, the next most useful thing we can give you is the shape of the work: what we would do, in what order, and what would appear in your report. Three composite situations, drawn from the categories we work in most.
A home-services company
Multi-van HVAC or plumbing business, one metro area, strongly seasonal, most enquiries by phone.
What we would do, in order
- Audit first: analytics, Search Console, the ad account and how calls are answered today.
- Fix measurement before spending anything — conversion tracking, call tracking with a duration threshold, GA4 events that mean something.
- Turn on demand capture with Google Ads, because emergency searches convert the day they happen.
- Rebuild the service and location templates so the ads have somewhere credible to land.
- Add organic and Google Business Profile work for the terms that repeat every season.
What the report would show
Qualified enquiries split between form and call, cost per acquisition against the agreed target, search-term waste removed this month, and local pack visibility by suburb.
Illustrative only. This describes typical scope and sequence, not a client result. No performance figures are stated or implied.
A professional-services firm
Law, accounting or financial advice. High deal value, long consideration, referrals matter, and the enquiry arrives weeks after the first visit.
What we would do, in order
- Audit, then map practice areas to the commercial-investigation queries buyers actually type.
- Restructure the site around one page per service the firm wants to be hired for, with credibility evidence on each.
- Capture the click identifier at enquiry and wire the CRM so offline closes can be imported later.
- Publish editorial content answering the questions the partners answer on every first call, reviewed under our editorial policy.
- Layer paid search on the highest-value practice area once the pages convert.
What the report would show
Organic sessions to practice-area pages, enquiry quality by source as scored by the firm, closed-won revenue where the CRM is kept current, and visibility on the tracked commercial term set.
Illustrative only. This describes typical scope and sequence, not a client result. No performance figures are stated or implied.
A boutique e-commerce brand
Small catalogue, real margin differences between product lines, competing against marketplaces on some terms and against nobody on others.
What we would do, in order
- Audit the catalogue, the product feed and Core Web Vitals on the templates that carry the most revenue.
- Fix the feed before the ads: titles, attributes, availability and disapprovals, since the feed is the campaign.
- Rebuild campaigns with brand search separated from Performance Max so reported conversions are not recycled brand demand.
- Improve product and collection templates for both speed and search, then the checkout path itself.
- Move bidding from blended ROAS to margin-aware targets by product line.
What the report would show
Return on ad spend by product line rather than blended, new-versus-returning revenue split, organic sessions to collection pages, and Core Web Vitals on the top revenue templates.
Illustrative only. This describes typical scope and sequence, not a client result. No performance figures are stated or implied.
The order above is not arbitrary — it follows the same five stages we run on every engagement. See the full process, stage by stage →
Cadence
Your reporting rhythm
Reporting is not a PDF that arrives to prove we were busy. It is the mechanism by which you decide whether to keep spending — so it runs on a fixed schedule, in plain language, against numbers you can open yourself.
Monthly written report
What we did, what it produced against the agreed KPIs, what did not work, and the recommendation for next month. Written, not just a dashboard link — because a chart does not tell you what to do on Monday.
Quarterly strategy review
Every three months we step back from the monthly detail: competitor gap analysis, whether the KPI set is still the right one, budget reallocation between channels, and what we would stop doing.
Live dashboard access
You have login access to Google Ads, GA4, Search Console and the reporting dashboard at all times, in your own accounts. You never have to wait for us to find out how the month is going.
A named strategist
The same Account and Strategy Lead who ran your discovery presents every report and answers your questions. Nothing is handed to an unnamed junior once the contract is signed.
What a monthly report contains
- Performance against each agreed KPI, with the previous period alongside
- The work completed this month, and the work queued for next
- Anything that moved against us — an algorithm update, a competitor, a tracking break
- Variance between platforms and the system of record, stated rather than smoothed
- One clear recommendation, with the trade-off spelled out
Reports are prepared by the people who did the work. Read more about who does what on the team.
Before any of this starts
Measurement is set up during scoping, not retrofitted in month three: conversion actions defined around real business value, GA4 and Google Ads cross-checked, call tracking where phone matters, and consent-aware configuration — signed off before the first dollar of media is spent.
If tracking is already working, we say so and leave it alone. If it is counting the wrong thing, fixing it comes before anything else, because optimising toward a bad signal only makes the waste more efficient.
Questions about reporting on a specific programme? Email [email protected] — all the details are on the contact page. We reply within one business day, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Central Time.
See your own numbers before you commit
The free audit is a written document about your business, not a portfolio of somebody else’s. It covers what your tracking is currently missing, where enquiries are being lost, and which channel your next dollar should go to — including the answer that it should not go to us.
- A written audit of your site, SEO and ad account
- A prioritised list of fixes, ranked by impact
- Transparent pricing before any commitment
- No obligation and no sales pressure
Replies within one business day, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Central Time.