Stop Wasting Your Marketing Budget
Turn existing data into more profitable customers.
Five years ago, when I ran my traffic control company during the NBN rollout, I thought our digital marketing was dialed in.
Leads were coming in, and the business was growing. But long after we’d sold the business, I realised that we had left money on the table. Why? Because we hadn't been using the goldmine of data we were sitting on.
Fast forward to today, and I see the same missed opportunities in tons of trades businesses.
While you might be tracking traffic or leads from your agency reports, here’s the inconvenient truth: without much more granular and deeper insights, you’re making spending decisions half or completely blind and leaving profits behind.
In fact, data suggests that 60% - 70% of advertising spend is wasted in Australia. Of course, you need to test ads, but wow, that’s a high number.
Let’s go through what you can do to change that.
The Problem: Not being able to attribute revenue to marketing spend properly, or at all.
As our Lawrence, a Digital Advisor at says:
“Revenue tracking by channel is critical to understanding your true cost of acquisition.”
But what does that really mean?
You see, most agencies focus on surface-level metrics like clicks, impressions, or, at best, phone number taps. But these are passive indicators—and they don’t tell you whether someone actually called, converted, or became a profitable customer.
When you can track real revenue from every channel and campaign, you can make smarter decisions that lead to better growth. Decisions like:
• Allocating budget to the channels and campaigns driving the highest-value customers.
• Reducing wasted spend on efforts that bring in low-value, one-time buyers.
• Uncovering the marketing strategies that generate repeat business and long-term revenue.
But it's not straight forward. For instance how do you accurately track which channels lead to a customer calling you when customers use multiple channels before picking up the phone?
Think about it: A customer might see a LinkedIn post, then click a Google ad, then browse your website, and finally decide to call your landline. Without proper tracking, how can you know which channel was used and how to decide what difference each made?
So you can see, if you’re not tracking phone calls properly, you’re flying blind.
Imagine assuming a customer found your number on a van - when in fact they found it from a Google ad, SEO, or a both - then you decide to spend less on one of the wrong digital channels or digital altogether.
You can see where you start losing opportunities.
The Solution: Smarter Revenue Tracking
At EngineRoom, we solve this not just tracking where leads come from — we go a step further by tracking and matching the actual revenue too, helping us to uncover patterns, like:
• Which campaigns bring in high-revenue, repeat customers versus low-value one-offs.
• Which channels have high lead volumes but low profitability.
• Which smaller campaigns are driving the most valuable results.
For example, one client discovered that their emergency callout ads brought in high volumes of leads but low profitability. Meanwhile, their maintenance contracts were far more valuable over time. With this insight, they shifted focus to attracting steady, repeat business, leading to increased profitability without extra spend.
Practical Tip: Ask yourself:
• Do I know how each marketing channel contributed to bringing in each lead?
• Can I track phone calls back to specific channels?
• Do I understand which channels and content bring in more high-revenue, repeat customers?
If the answer is no, you’re likely missing critical insights to make your marketing dollars work harder.
Okay, so lets say you've got that problem sorted and know which channels and content lead customers to finally pick up the phone.
We're not done yet because here’s even more data waiting to be tapped—data most trades businesses aren’t using.
Find the Gold in Call Data
Every phone call holds all kinds of valuable insights you can take action on, both immediately and strategically. This is some of the valuable detail that our platform tracks and extracts from calls like:
- Customer Type: Is this a new lead or a repeat customer?
- Customer Sentiment: Are they interested and likely to convert?
- Products Mentioned: What services or products caught their attention?
- Key Issues: What problems can shape your content strategy?
Having these insights both on individual calls, and being able to identify trends and patterns let you refine your marketing, identify gaps, and focus on actions that drive real growth.
Tip:
Ask yourself these questions:
1. Am I keeping track of every call that comes in
2. Do we know what marketing channel brought the call in?
3. Do we have a way of capturing and learning from the content of each call?
If not, you’re missing out on massive optimisation opportunities.
So how can you start doing this?
While you can find various call tracking and analytic tools that give you the data, making sense of it—and knowing what to take action on and what to ignore—is critical to getting closer to your strategic business goals.
But even with tools available, the real challenge is turning data into decisions that align with your business goals.
This is hard without some really smart Humans in the Loop that know your business. And that can’t be you when you’re busy in the weeds running everything else in the business.
That’s where our platform and advisors step in and do the heavy lifting:
• Analyse calls for actionable insights.
• Attribute revenue across channels.
• Optimize campaigns for maximum ROI.
• Ensure the strategy is aligned with your business plan.
For example, for one of our plumbing customers, we discovered users who read their guides spent 3x more users looking for emergency services. By shifting their strategy, they unlocked more profitable long-term customers.
Stop Guessing. Start Scaling.
The data and numbers don’t lie. Proper tracking transforms your marketing from a guessing game to a growth engine.
Stop wasting money and start making your data work for you. With EngineRoom, you’ll turn guesswork into growth and start scaling faster.
EngineRoom’s services team and platform specialise in leveraging internal business data sources with search traffic data to execute highly effective customer acquisition strategies, maximising profitability and long-term growth. By combining advanced analytics in their platform, skilled digital advisors and their AI CoPilot and PromptEngine technologies, EngineRoom ensures every marketing dollar is strategically spent to drive measurable business outcomes.
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