← Eddie J. Smith

Results

One of these accounts spent $276,000 while its own reports said $11.

That business was fine. Trucks rolling, phones ringing, roughly $392,000 a month in booked work. It just couldn't see any of it. Here are five accounts I've been inside, and what the numbers actually said once someone opened them.

Before you read them.

Every one of these has a note saying where it stops. Best month rather than average, estimate rather than money in the bank, one channel out of ten. You can open those notes on each card.

I went through 39 accounts to get to five. Not all 39 were clients: the set includes prospects who never signed, ventures I own and sub-accounts I ran through a white-label partner. Most didn't hold up once I was in the data, so they're not here. Which is also why a few of these look modest next to what you'll see on other people's sites.

CRM-measured 55 months of account history

An $8M plumbing and HVAC company

They were spending about $46,000 a month on Google and could not tell you which of it worked. For six straight months the account reported almost no revenue at all, while the business kept booking roughly $392,000 a month. Nothing was broken in the business. The measurement was broken.

The number

Three different agencies ran this account. Only one of them could see the revenue it produced.

What this one does not cover
  • Booked revenue is channel-mixed across roughly ten sources. Most of it is not paid search, and none of it is credited to the ad account here.
  • 64% of revenue arrives unattributed, so every per-channel figure is a floor rather than a measurement.
  • No improvement is claimed. The eras differ in what each could measure as well as how each performed, and the data cannot separate the two.
  • The eras are not like-for-like: one is entirely Search, another roughly a quarter a different Google campaign type.
  • No change log exists for any era, so nothing attributes a result to a specific action.
Modeled 15 months

A regional internet provider

They could tell you their ad spend to the dollar. Ask what a customer actually cost and nobody had ever worked it out. It's in their own sales records, so we did: $246 in their best market. Published estimates for this industry put the figure at $300 to $500, but those are secondary trade estimates rather than anything measured here, so read them as context and not as a scoreboard.

The number

$246 to win a customer in their strongest market, worked out from their own close rate.

What this one does not cover
  • These are estimates. Nobody bought anything at this stage. Every conversion is a lead; no purchase event exists, so no revenue figure and no return can be stated.
  • The figure is one platform in one market. The same close rate gives materially higher costs in the other market and on social. Read the table, not the best number in it.
  • The close rate is the client's own, taken from their sales reporting. That figure came from them, not from me.
  • No lifetime value, payback or return is available: the client's reporting records no churn model.
  • Lead volume itself carries a caveat, because several form actions are counted at once.
  • The $300 to $500 industry figure is a secondary trade estimate. It is not this client's own number, and it is not corroborated by an operator or analyst source, so it is context for the $246 rather than a benchmark this account was measured against.
Cash-verified 3 clean months

An apparel brand being told it made money it never made

A setting inside Google was quietly adding $74 to every new-customer order, and a second one added $74 again for returning customers. Their reports showed roughly $8,000 of revenue in a month that never existed. Dropping both to a nominal $0.01 was the recommendation on file. You can check it yourself in their own export: the padding collapses the following month and never returns.

The number

CA$63,146 in ads produced CA$385,651 in tracked store sales, over three clean months.

What this one does not cover
  • Three months back to back with no gaps, stated in Canadian dollars. The return is the same either way; the dollar totals are not.
  • The earlier month affected by value inflation is excluded rather than restated, so no platform-added value reaches this total.
  • No lift is claimed. The padded period is not a 'before' to improve on, because its numbers were not measuring the right thing.
  • The final month was captured on its closing day and is still settling.
Cash-verified 13 months straight

An apparel brand that held its return while doubling spend

Thirteen months of tracked store sales with no gaps. Across that stretch the monthly budget roughly doubled and the return held. Every dollar of it traces back to an actual order in their store, not to a value the ad platform assigned.

The number

$131,218 in ads produced $1,315,875 in tracked store sales, across 13 straight months.

What this one does not cover
  • Thirteen months back to back with no gaps of tracked store sales, averaged across the whole period. The 15.43x peak month is a peak and is labelled as one.
  • No improvement is claimed. There is no engagement document and no change history, so this is the account held up while we ran it, which is not the same as us lifting it.
  • Nothing here speaks to incrementality. Tracked return is what the platform measured, not what the business would have lost without it.
  • The final month was captured on its closing day and is still settling, so the figure is conservative rather than optimistic.
Cash-verified first 40 days

A membership brand, first 40 days

Forty days. Small money. The point of including it is that the purchase tracking was right from day one, so the cost per sale is a fact rather than a guess.

The number

$3,427 in ads produced $16,627 in sales. About $19 to make a sale.

What this one does not cover
  • Forty days. Short window, small absolute spend, and nothing here extrapolates to a month or a year.
  • Tracked purchase revenue, not an assigned value.

Want to know what your account really says?

Your dashboard will not tell you. The audit tells you what a lead is actually worth to you, and how much of your revenue you currently cannot trace at all. Most owners have never seen either number.

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