How to track your marketing ROI as a tradesperson (2026)

Most trade businesses spend money on marketing without knowing what it returns. Google Ads, Checkatrade listings, Facebook ads, leaflet drops, directory memberships — the spending adds up to £500, £1,000, sometimes £2,000 or more per month. But when you ask a typical tradesperson which channel generates the most booked jobs, the honest answer is usually “I'm not sure.” This guide shows you how to fix that.

Why most tradespeople waste marketing spend

The problem is not that tradespeople choose bad marketing channels. The problem is that without tracking, they have no way to compare channels objectively and reallocate budget towards what works.

The typical pattern goes like this: a plumber pays £100/month for a Checkatrade listing, £300/month on Google Ads and £200/month on a Facebook page boost. Some enquiries come in, some jobs get booked. At the end of the month, the plumber cannot say with confidence which of those three channels produced which jobs — so the budget stays the same next month. Meanwhile, one channel might be generating 80% of the work and another might be generating nothing.

The cost of not measuring is not just the wasted spend — it is the opportunity cost of underinvesting in the channels that do work.

The attribution problem: how jobs actually come in

Attribution is the process of connecting a booked job back to the marketing activity that generated it. It sounds simple. In practice, it is complicated because the customer journey for a trade job rarely follows a straight line.

A homeowner might see your Google Ad, not call immediately, search for your business name a week later, find your Google Business Profile, read your reviews, then phone you directly. The phone call attribution might record this as “phone call,” missing the Google Ad that started the journey. Or they might see a leaflet, Google your business name, and then call from the website — which looks like organic search when the leaflet was actually the trigger.

Perfect attribution is impossible. But imperfect attribution that is 80% accurate is enormously more useful than no attribution at all. The goal is directional accuracy: to know that Google Ads is roughly twice as cost-effective as Checkatrade, not to know the exact contribution of every touchpoint.

Ask-at-booking tracking

The simplest and most underused attribution method is asking every customer at the point of booking: “How did you hear about us?” This single question, asked consistently and recorded in a spreadsheet or your job management software, gives you a picture of attribution within a few weeks that would otherwise take months of technical tracking to approximate.

The key word is “consistently.” If you only ask when you remember, you will end up with a sample biased towards the channels you mentally associate with enquiries, which may not reflect reality. Train yourself — or your office staff — to ask every single time.

Be specific with the options. “Google” is too vague — it conflates organic search, Google Maps (your Business Profile) and Google Ads, which are three very different sources with different costs. Ask customers to be specific: “Was it a Google ad, a Google Maps result, or did you just search and find my website?”

UTM parameters and call tracking numbers

For digital channels, UTM parameters are tracking tags added to the end of URLs in your ads. They tell Google Analytics where the visitor came from. If you are running Google Ads, the platform should automatically add UTM parameters if you enable auto-tagging. For Facebook Ads, add UTM parameters manually in the ad creation interface.

For offline channels and phone enquiries, call tracking numbers are the equivalent. A call tracking service provides you with different local phone numbers for different marketing channels — one for your Checkatrade listing, one for your leaflets, one for your van livery. When a customer calls, the platform records which number they dialled and therefore which channel generated the call. Costs typically start around £20–£50/month for a basic setup. CallRail, ResponseTap and Infinity are common UK providers.

You do not need both UTM parameters and call tracking from day one. For most small trade businesses, the ask-at-booking method combined with recording the source in your job management software gets you 80% of the value at zero additional cost.

Campaign attribution software

Job management and FSM software platforms vary widely in their attribution capabilities. Most platforms can record a “source” field against a job but do not aggregate this data into meaningful reports. You end up exporting to a spreadsheet and doing the analysis manually.

Trade2Base is built with campaign attribution as a core feature, not an afterthought. Every job has a campaign source attached. The platform aggregates this data automatically into a cost-per-booked-job report, showing you the true cost of each channel when you input your monthly spend. You can see, at a glance, that your Google Ads campaign generated 8 booked jobs last month at a cost of £100 per job, while your Checkatrade listing generated 4 jobs at £150 per job.

Calculating cost-per-booked-job by channel

Cost-per-booked-job (CPJ) is the metric that matters most. Cost-per-lead sounds attractive when a channel generates a lot of enquiries, but if those leads do not convert to booked jobs, the cost is misleading. A channel that generates 20 leads and books 5 jobs is worse than a channel that generates 10 leads and books 8 jobs.

The formula is simple: divide your total monthly spend on a channel by the number of jobs booked from that channel in the same period.

Here is what this looks like across typical channels for a small plumbing business:

What good ROI looks like for trade marketing

There is no universal benchmark for trade marketing ROI because average job values vary enormously. A bathroom fitter with an average job value of £4,000 can sustain a cost-per-booked-job of £300–£400. A plumber doing emergency call-outs at £150 per job needs a cost-per-job below £40 to maintain healthy margins.

The target is typically to keep your cost-per-booked-job below 5–10% of your average job value. If your average job is worth £500, a CPJ below £50 is excellent, £50–£100 is acceptable, and above £100 is a warning sign.

The other dimension is customer lifetime value. A customer who books an annual boiler service, calls you for every plumbing issue and refers you to neighbours is worth far more than their first job value. If you track where your best long-term customers came from, you may find that the channel with the highest CPJ produces the most loyal customers — which changes the ROI calculation significantly.

Using Trade2Base for attribution

Trade2Base makes campaign attribution part of the job creation workflow rather than a separate reporting task. When you create a job, you select the campaign source from a dropdown (Google Ads, Google Maps, referral, Checkatrade, leaflet, repeat customer, and any others you define). This takes five seconds per job.

At the end of the month, you add your spend for each channel in the campaigns section. Trade2Base combines the job source data with the spend data and generates a cost-per-booked-job report automatically. No spreadsheets, no manual calculation, no guesswork.

Over three to six months, this data becomes your single most valuable business tool. It tells you, with actual numbers, where to put next month's marketing budget. Most Trade2Base customers who use attribution consistently find at least one channel they can reduce or cut entirely — and redirect that spend into channels that generate jobs at materially lower cost.

The business intelligence you are flying blind without is available within a quarter of consistent recording. Start now, and by the end of the year you will have a clear, evidence-based view of where your marketing budget should go — not where it has always gone by default.