Your marketing agency just sent over the monthly report. Five hundred leads generated. Cost per lead: $20. The charts look great. Everyone on their side is high-fiving.
But here's the question nobody wants to ask: how many of those 500 “leads” turned into paying customers?
If you're like most pest control companies, you don't actually know. You know you spent $10,000 on marketing last month. You know the phone rang a lot. But the connection between ad dollars and closed revenue? That's a black box.
This isn't an article about firing your agency. Most marketing agencies in the pest control space are doing good work. But good work without accountability still leaks budget. And that leak adds up fast.
Here's how to audit your lead quality, figure out what your marketing is actually producing, and have a productive conversation with your agency about the numbers.
The lead quality problem
When a marketing agency reports “500 leads,” what does that actually mean? In most cases, it means 500 phone calls or form submissions that came through a tracked number or landing page. That sounds straightforward until you start looking at what's in those calls.
Here's what we consistently see when pest control companies start listening to the calls their agencies count as “leads”:
- Existing customers calling about service issues, billing questions, or schedule changes. These are customer service calls, not new business.
- Wrong numbers and spam. Robocalls, people looking for a different company, misdials. They all count as “leads” if they hit the tracking number.
- Tire-kickers who ask for a price, say “thanks,” and never call back. The call happened. The intent wasn't there.
- Duplicate contacts counted across multiple channels. The same person clicked a Google ad on Monday and a Facebook ad on Thursday. That's one prospect, but it shows up as two leads.
- Form fills with bad info. Fake phone numbers, unmonitored email addresses, people who fill out a form but never answer when you call back.
None of this is necessarily your agency's fault. Most agencies report on what they can measure: clicks, calls, form fills. They don't have visibility into what happens after the phone rings. They don't know if your rep closed the deal, fumbled the call, or if the “lead” was Mrs. Johnson calling about a billing error.
When nobody tracks what happens after the click, both sides are flying blind. Your agency optimizes for volume. You pay for volume. And the actual revenue impact remains a mystery.
“My guys tell me the leads suck. Now I can go back with actual numbers — ‘No, here's why they're not closing.’”— Atlas Pest
The instinct in most pest control companies is to blame the leads. And sometimes the leads are bad. But sometimes the leads are fine and the problem is on the sales side. Without data connecting the lead source to the call outcome, you can't tell the difference.
The attribution gap
Most pest control companies have a massive gap between their marketing data and their revenue data.
Your agency knows how many clicks you got. Your CRM (maybe) knows which customers signed up. But connecting a specific Google Ads campaign to a specific phone call to a specific sales outcome to a specific dollar amount? Almost nobody in pest control is doing that.
Jeff Davis, CEO of CoalmarchGorillaDesk, put it this way:
“Lead attribution and buyer journey — a sales CRM should solve that, and they don't exist in this market. Solving for all three in one is pretty freaking brilliant.”— Jeff Davis, CoalmarchGorillaDesk
He's right. The pest control industry has CRMs that track customers. It has marketing tools that track clicks. But almost nothing connects the two in a way that tells you: “This $10,000 in Google Ads spend produced $47,000 in closed revenue, while this $10,000 in LSA spend produced $62,000.”
Without that connection, you're making budget decisions based on lead volume, not revenue. And lead volume is a vanity metric.
Think about it this way: would you rather have a channel that produces 200 leads at $25 each, or a channel that produces 80 leads at $60 each? Most people instinctively pick the first option. But if the 200 leads close at 5% with an average ticket of $300, that's $3,000 in revenue from $5,000 in spend. If the 80 leads close at 20% with an average ticket of $500, that's $8,000 in revenue from $4,800 in spend. The “expensive” leads are dramatically more profitable.
You can't see this if you only measure cost per lead.
A framework for auditing your marketing lead quality
Whether you're spending $5K or $50K a month on marketing, here is a straightforward process for figuring out what you're actually getting. You don't need special software for the first few steps. You just need discipline and a spreadsheet.
Step 1: Define what counts as a “lead”
This sounds obvious, but it's where most agency relationships go sideways. Your agency's definition of a lead and your definition of a lead are probably different.
Sit down with your agency and agree on what counts. A good starting point:
- A lead is a new prospect (not an existing customer) who contacts you about a service you offer in a geography you serve.
- Existing customer calls are not leads.
- Wrong numbers, spam, and vendor calls are not leads.
- A person who contacts you through multiple channels is one lead, not three.
Get this in writing. Put it in the contract or at least in an email you can reference. When you're both working from the same definition, the monthly reports become immediately more useful.
This single step will typically cut reported lead counts by 20-40%. That sounds scary, but it's not. You're not losing leads. You're seeing reality.
Step 2: Track call outcomes, not just call volume
Knowing that the phone rang 500 times tells you almost nothing. What happened on those calls?
At minimum, you need to track every inbound call with one of these outcomes:
- Booked: New customer, appointment set or service sold on the call.
- Quote given, pending: Prospect is interested but didn't commit. Needs follow-up.
- Not qualified: Out of service area, service we don't offer, commercial account when you only do residential, etc.
- Existing customer: Already in your system, calling about an existing service.
- No contact: Call went to voicemail, was abandoned, or nobody answered.
- Junk: Spam, wrong number, solicitor.
If your reps aren't dispositing calls today, start there. It takes five seconds per call and it completely changes how you evaluate marketing. Without call outcomes, you're judging your marketing by the number of times the phone rang. That's like judging a restaurant by how many people walked past it.
Step 3: Calculate cost per sale, not cost per lead
This is the metric that actually matters. Your agency will report cost per lead (CPL). That's fine as a secondary metric. But the number you should be running your business on is cost per sale (CPS), sometimes called cost per acquisition (CPA).
The math is simple:
Cost Per Sale = Total Marketing Spend / Number of New Customers Acquired
If you spent $10,000 on Google Ads and got 500 “leads” but only 40 of those became paying customers, your cost per sale is $250. Your agency will tell you your cost per lead is $20. Both numbers are technically correct. Only one of them tells you whether you're making money.
Take it one step further and calculate your marketing ROI by channel:
Marketing ROI = (Revenue from Channel - Spend on Channel) / Spend on Channel
A channel that costs $10,000 and produces $50,000 in first-year revenue has a 4x ROI. A channel that costs $5,000 and produces $8,000 has a 0.6x ROI. If you're only looking at cost per lead, these might look equally good. They're not.
Step 4: Compare lead sources head-to-head on actual revenue
Once you're tracking call outcomes and tying them to revenue, you can finally answer the question every pest control owner wants answered: where should I spend my next dollar?
Build a simple comparison table. For each lead source (Google Ads, LSA, Yelp, Facebook, direct mail, referral, organic), track:
- Total spend
- Total leads (using your agreed definition)
- Total sales closed
- Close rate (sales / leads)
- Total revenue from those sales
- Cost per sale
- Revenue per dollar spent
When you look at this table, the answers jump off the page. You'll see that one channel delivers cheap leads that rarely close. Another delivers expensive leads that close at 3x the rate with bigger tickets. A third delivers moderate leads but your reps hate them and let them go to voicemail.
That third scenario is more common than you'd think. Sometimes the problem isn't the lead source. It's the way your team handles leads from that source. A channel that produces great leads is worthless if your reps have decided those leads are junk and stopped trying.
Red flags your agency may be inflating numbers
Let me be clear: most marketing agencies aren't deliberately scamming you. But incentive structures matter. Agencies are typically evaluated on lead volume, so they optimize for lead volume. When that happens, certain patterns emerge.
Watch for these:
1. Existing customer calls counted as leads
This is the biggest one. If your agency uses call tracking on your main business number, every inbound call gets counted. Mrs. Johnson calling to reschedule her quarterly treatment? That's a “lead.” The customer asking why there are still ants after yesterday's treatment? Also a “lead.”
Depending on the size of your existing customer base, this can inflate lead counts by 30-50%. It also makes your cost per lead look phenomenally good, because a huge chunk of those “leads” were going to call you whether you spent money on marketing or not.
2. Form fills that never answer the phone
A form submission is only a lead if there's a real person behind it. If someone fills out a “Get a Free Quote” form and then never answers the phone, never responds to an email, and the phone number goes to a disconnected line, that's not a lead. It's a data point.
Ask your agency what percentage of form fills result in actual conversations. If they don't know, that tells you something.
3. Double-counting across channels
A homeowner sees your Facebook ad on Monday, Googles your company name on Wednesday, clicks a Google Ad, and calls you. Both Facebook and Google get credit for a “lead.” Your total report says two leads. You got one prospect.
Multi-touch attribution is a real problem and there's no perfect solution. But at minimum, your agency should be able to de-duplicate by phone number or address. If they're reporting raw counts from each platform without de-duplication, the numbers are inflated.
4. Counting calls under 60 seconds
A 15-second phone call is not a lead. It's a wrong number, a hang up, or someone who hit the wrong button on their phone. Some agencies count every call that connects to a tracking number, regardless of duration. Ask what their minimum call duration is for counting a lead. Industry best practice is at least 60 seconds, though even that can include a lot of non-leads.
5. Vanity metrics dominating the report
If your monthly report leads with impressions, click-through rates, and “engagement” before it gets to actual leads and sales, be cautious. These metrics aren't useless, but they're input metrics, not output metrics. You don't pay your technicians with impressions.
A good agency report should lead with: new customers acquired, revenue generated, cost per acquisition. Then it should show the supporting metrics that explain how they got there.
How to have the conversation with your agency
You've done the audit. You've found discrepancies. The temptation is to call your agency rep and lay into them. Don't.
Here's why: a good marketing agency is hard to find, and the problem usually isn't bad intentions. It's misaligned incentives and missing data. Fix those two things and you'll get dramatically better results from the same agency.
Lead with data, not accusations
Instead of “Your leads are garbage,” try: “We tracked call outcomes on last month's leads. Of the 500 reported, 180 were existing customers, 45 were wrong numbers, and 90 never answered when we called back. That leaves about 185 actual new prospect conversations, of which we closed 35. Can we work together to improve those numbers?”
That conversation is productive. It gives the agency something specific to work with. It also shows them you're paying attention, which tends to improve performance all by itself.
Agree on new reporting standards
Once you've established a shared definition of what counts as a lead, ask your agency to report on those numbers going forward. Request a monthly report that includes:
- Qualified leads (using your agreed definition)
- Cost per qualified lead
- Closed sales from marketing leads (you'll need to provide this number)
- Cost per sale
- Revenue generated (again, your data)
- Return on ad spend
Notice that some of these require data from your side. This is a partnership. If you want your agency to optimize for revenue instead of volume, you need to share revenue data with them. Most pest control companies never do this, and then wonder why their agency optimizes for the wrong thing.
Set up a feedback loop
Things change when your agency knows which campaigns produce customers, not just calls. When they can see that Campaign A generates cheap leads that don't close and Campaign B generates pricier leads that close at 25%, they'll shift budget to Campaign B on their own. They want to produce results. They just need the data to know what “results” looks like on your end.
Schedule a monthly review where you share closed revenue by lead source. Make it a standing meeting. You'll be surprised how quickly it starts paying for itself.
The bigger picture: closed-loop attribution
Everything above can be done manually. Spreadsheets, call listening, and monthly meetings will get you 80% of the way there. But it's slow work, and it depends on your team consistently dispositioning every call correctly.
The ideal state is what marketers call “closed-loop attribution”: an unbroken data trail from ad click to phone call to what the rep said to whether the deal closed to the actual revenue amount. When you have that, you're not guessing about marketing ROI. You're measuring it in real time.
This is what Plaibook does. It connects the buyer journey from ad click to call to closed deal to revenue. So when you sit down with your agency, you can show them which campaigns produce paying customers and which ones just produce noise.
But whether you use Plaibook, build something custom, or run it on spreadsheets, the principle is the same: stop measuring marketing on lead volume. Start measuring it on revenue. That's the only number that pays the bills.
What to do this week
You don't need to overhaul everything at once. Here's where to start:
- Pull your last three months of agency reports. Count the total “leads” reported. Then look at your CRM or customer records. How many new customers did you actually add in those months? Divide your total marketing spend by new customers. That's your real cost per acquisition.
- Listen to 20 random calls from last month that your agency counted as leads. Categorize each one: new prospect, existing customer, wrong number, junk, no answer. This alone will tell you how accurate the lead count is.
- Email your agency with your findings and ask to set up a call to align on lead definitions and reporting going forward. Remember: collaborative, not combative.
- Start dispositioning calls. Even if it's basic (booked / not booked / existing customer / junk), start tracking outcomes today. You'll thank yourself in 90 days.
Your marketing agency might be doing a great job. They might be inflating numbers. They might be somewhere in between. The point is: you should know. And right now, if you're like most pest control companies, you don't.
Once you can see what's actually working, the budget decisions get a lot easier.