Your marketing agency just sent the monthly report. Five hundred leads. Cost per lead: $20. The charts look great. Everyone on their side is high-fiving.
Here is the question nobody wants to ask: how many of those 500 "leads" became paying customers?
If you are like most pest control companies, you do not know. You know you spent $10,000 on marketing last month. You know the phone rang a lot. The connection between ad dollars and closed revenue is a black box.
This is not an article about firing your agency. Most agencies in pest control do good work. But good work without accountability still leaks budget, and the leak adds up.
Here is how to audit lead quality, figure out what your marketing is producing, and have a useful conversation with your agency about the numbers.
The lead quality problem
When an agency reports "500 leads," what does that mean? Usually 500 phone calls or form submissions that came through a tracked number or landing page. That sounds fine until you listen to the calls.
Here is what we see, over and over, when pest control companies start listening to the calls their agency counted as leads:
- Existing customers calling about a service issue, a bill, or a schedule change. Customer service, not new business.
- Wrong numbers and spam. Robocalls, people looking for a different company, misdials. They all count if they hit the tracking number.
- Price shoppers who ask for a number, say thanks, and never call back. The call happened. The intent was not there.
- The same person counted twice. They clicked a Google ad Monday and a Facebook ad Thursday. One prospect, two leads.
- Form fills with bad info. Fake numbers, unmonitored email addresses, people who never pick up when you call back.
None of this is necessarily the agency's fault. Agencies report on what they can measure: clicks, calls, form fills. They cannot see what happens after the phone rings. They do not know whether your rep closed the deal, fumbled the call, or whether the "lead" was Mrs. Johnson calling about a billing error.
When nobody tracks what happens after the click, both sides are flying blind. The agency optimizes for volume. You pay for volume. The revenue impact stays 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. Sometimes the leads are bad. Sometimes the leads are fine and the problem is on the sales side. Without data connecting lead source to call outcome, you cannot tell which.
The attribution gap
Most pest control companies have a wide 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. Connecting a specific Google Ads campaign to a specific phone call to a specific outcome to a specific dollar amount? Almost nobody in pest control does that.
Jeff Davis at Coalmarch 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, Coalmarch
He is right. The industry has CRMs that track customers and marketing tools that track clicks, and almost nothing that connects the two well enough to say: "This $10,000 in Google Ads produced $47,000 in closed revenue, and this $10,000 in LSA produced $62,000."
Without that connection you are making budget decisions on lead volume, not revenue. 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 one that produces 80 leads at $60 each? Most people pick the first. But if the 200 close at 5% with an average ticket of $300, that is $3,000 in revenue from $5,000 in spend. If the 80 close at 20% with an average ticket of $500, that is $8,000 from $4,800. The "expensive" leads are far more profitable.
You cannot see any of this if cost per lead is the only number you look at.
Call tracking tools like CallRail and CallTrackingMetrics solve the top half of this problem well. They tell you which campaign made the phone ring. What they do not tell you is what the rep said, whether the caller booked, and what that customer was worth. We wrote a separate piece on CallRail alternatives for pest control if you want the detail on where each tool stops.
A framework for auditing lead quality
Whether you spend $5K or $50K a month, here is a straightforward process for figuring out what you are getting. You do not need special software for the first few steps. You need discipline and a spreadsheet.
Step 1: Define what counts as a lead
Obvious, and it is where most agency relationships go sideways. Your agency's definition of a lead and yours are probably different.
Sit down with your agency and agree. A good starting point:
- A lead is a new prospect (not an existing customer) who contacts you about a service you offer in an area you serve.
- Existing customer calls are not leads.
- Wrong numbers, spam, and vendor calls are not leads.
- A person who contacts you through three channels is one lead, not three.
Get it in writing. Put it in the contract, or at least in an email you can point to. Once you both work from the same definition, the monthly reports get useful fast.
This one step typically cuts reported lead counts by 20-40%. That sounds scary. It is not. You are not losing leads. You are seeing reality.
Step 2: Track call outcomes, not call volume
Knowing the phone rang 500 times tells you almost nothing. What happened on those calls?
At minimum, every inbound call needs one of these outcomes:
- Booked. New customer, appointment set or service sold on the call.
- Quote given, pending. Interested, did not commit, needs follow-up.
- Not qualified. Out of area, service you do not offer, commercial when you only do residential.
- Existing customer. Already in your system, calling about current service.
- No contact. Voicemail, abandoned, nobody answered.
- Junk. Spam, wrong number, solicitor.
If your reps are not dispositioning calls today, start there. It takes five seconds a call and it changes how you evaluate marketing. Without outcomes you are judging your marketing by how many times the phone rang, which is like judging a restaurant by how many people walked past it.
The honest caveat: reps disposition badly when they are busy, and they are always busy in season. That is the main reason we grade calls automatically instead of trusting the dropdown. If you go the manual route, audit the dispositions monthly against a sample of recordings.
Step 3: Calculate cost per sale, not cost per lead
This is the metric that matters. Your agency reports cost per lead. Fine as a secondary number. The number to run the business on is cost per sale, sometimes called cost per acquisition.
Cost per sale = total marketing spend divided by new customers acquired.
If you spent $10,000 on Google Ads, got 500 "leads," and 40 became paying customers, your cost per sale is $250. Your agency will tell you cost per lead is $20. Both are correct. Only one tells you whether you are making money.
Take it one step further and calculate ROI by channel: revenue from the channel minus spend on the channel, divided by spend.
A channel that costs $10,000 and produces $50,000 in first-year revenue has a 4x return. A channel that costs $5,000 and produces $8,000 has a 0.6x return. On cost per lead alone these might look equally good. They are not.
Step 4: Compare lead sources on actual revenue
Once you track outcomes and tie them to revenue, you can finally answer the question every owner wants answered: where should the next dollar go?
Build a simple table. For each lead source (Google Ads, LSA, Yelp, Facebook, direct mail, referral, organic), track:
- Total spend
- Total leads (using your agreed definition)
- Sales closed
- Close rate (sales divided by leads)
- Revenue from those sales
- Cost per sale
- Revenue per dollar spent
The answers jump off the page. One channel delivers cheap leads that rarely close. Another delivers expensive leads that close at three times the rate with bigger tickets. A third delivers decent leads that your reps hate and let go to voicemail.
That third case is more common than you would think. Sometimes the problem is not the lead source. It is how your team treats leads from that source. A channel that produces good leads is worthless once your reps have decided those leads are junk and stopped trying. If you want to know whether your close rate on a channel is actually bad or just feels bad, our close rate benchmarks give you something to compare against.
Red flags your agency may be inflating numbers
To be clear: most agencies are not scamming you. But incentives matter. Agencies get judged on lead volume, so they optimize for lead volume, and certain patterns follow.
Watch for these.
1. Existing customer calls counted as leads
The biggest one. If your agency runs call tracking on your main number, every inbound call gets counted. Mrs. Johnson calling to reschedule her quarterly? A lead. The customer asking why there are still ants after yesterday's treatment? Also a lead.
Depending on the size of your customer base, this inflates lead counts by 30-50%. It also makes cost per lead look phenomenal, because a big chunk of those "leads" were going to call you whether you spent a dollar on marketing or not.
2. Form fills that never answer the phone
A form submission is a lead only if there is a person behind it. If someone fills out "Get a Free Quote," never answers the phone, never replies to an email, and the number goes to a disconnected line, that is not a lead. It is a row in a spreadsheet.
Ask your agency what percentage of form fills turn into conversations. If they do not know, that tells you something.
3. Double-counting across channels
A homeowner sees your Facebook ad Monday, Googles your name Wednesday, clicks a Google ad, and calls. Facebook and Google both get credit. The report says two leads. You got one prospect.
Multi-touch attribution is a real problem with no perfect answer. At minimum, your agency should de-duplicate by phone number or address. If they report raw counts from each platform without de-duplication, the numbers are inflated.
4. Counting calls under 60 seconds
A 15-second call is not a lead. It is a wrong number, a hangup, or a misdial. Some agencies count every call that connects to a tracking number regardless of length. Ask what their minimum duration is. Sixty seconds is the usual floor, and even that lets plenty of non-leads through.
5. Vanity metrics leading the report
If the monthly report opens with impressions, click-through rate, and "engagement" before it gets to leads and sales, be careful. Those metrics are not useless, but they are inputs, not outputs. You do not pay your technicians in impressions.
A good report leads with new customers acquired, revenue generated, and cost per acquisition. Then it shows the supporting metrics that explain how it got there.
How to have the conversation with your agency
You did the audit. You found discrepancies. The temptation is to call your agency rep and unload. Do not.
A good agency is hard to find, and the problem is rarely bad intentions. It is misaligned incentives and missing data. Fix those two and you get much better results from the same agency.
Lead with data, not accusations
Instead of "your leads are garbage," try: "We tracked 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 real new-prospect conversations, and we closed 35. Can we work together on those numbers?"
That conversation is productive. It gives the agency something specific to work on. It also shows them you are paying attention, which improves performance by itself.
Agree on new reporting standards
Once you share a definition of a lead, ask the agency to report on it going forward. Request a monthly report with qualified leads (your definition), cost per qualified lead, closed sales from marketing leads, cost per sale, revenue generated, and return on ad spend.
Some of those numbers have to come from your side. This is a partnership. If you want the agency to optimize for revenue instead of volume, you have to share revenue data with them. Most pest control companies never do, then wonder why the agency optimizes for the wrong thing.
Set up a feedback loop
Everything changes when the agency can see which campaigns produce customers, not just calls. When they see that Campaign A produces cheap leads that do not close and Campaign B produces pricier leads that close at 25%, they shift budget to B on their own. They want results. They need to know what "results" means on your end.
Schedule a monthly review where you share closed revenue by lead source. Make it a standing meeting. It pays for itself quickly.
The bigger picture: closed-loop attribution
Everything above can be done by hand. Spreadsheets, call listening, and a monthly meeting get you 80% of the way. It is slow, and it depends on your team dispositioning every call correctly, every day, in July.
The end state is what marketers call closed-loop attribution: an unbroken trail from ad click to phone call to what the rep said to whether the deal closed to the dollar amount in your field software. With that, you are not guessing at ROAS. You are reading it.
This is what Plaibook does. It connects the lead source on the call to the graded transcript to the closed job in FieldRoutes, so when you sit down with your agency you can show which campaigns produce paying customers and which produce noise. The marketing dashboard is built for exactly that meeting, and it works alongside the call tracking numbers you already have. Our integrations page lists which phone systems and trackers we pull from today.
Whether you use Plaibook, build something custom, or run it on spreadsheets, the principle holds: stop measuring marketing on lead volume. Measure it on revenue. That is the only number that pays the bills.
What to do this week
You do not need to overhaul everything at once. Start here:
- Pull your last three months of agency reports and total the "leads." Then look at your CRM or field software: how many new customers did you actually add? Divide total marketing spend by new customers. That is your real cost per acquisition.
- Listen to 20 random calls from last month that the agency counted as leads. Tag each one: new prospect, existing customer, wrong number, junk, no answer. That alone tells you how accurate the count is.
- Email the agency with what you found and ask for a call to agree on lead definitions and reporting. Collaborative, not combative.
- Start dispositioning calls. Even a basic booked / not booked / existing customer / junk gets you outcomes. You will thank yourself in 90 days.
Your agency might be doing a great job. They might be inflating numbers. They are probably somewhere in between. The point is that you should know, and right now most pest control companies do not.
Once you can see what is working, the budget decisions get a lot easier.