Method
The Outcome Ledger. The diagnostic, taught rather than teased.
Four systems that have never spoken to each other, joined into one record per enquiry: the ad, the click, the meeting, the sale, and the cost of each step.
01The four systems
Each vendor sees a quarter of the picture. The finding lives in the join.
It needs all four systems at once. The ad agency sees form fills. The CRM admin sees stages. The web vendor sees uptime. The finding that matters is invisible to each of them individually. That seam is the product.
- 01 / The website
- Knows
- Who enquired, and which ad they came from.
- Blind to
- Whether they ever became a customer.
- Who watches it
- The web vendor, who reports uptime.
- 02 / The CRM
- Knows
- Who met with you, who was accepted, who paid.
- Blind to
- What any of them cost to acquire.
- Who watches it
- A CRM admin, who reports stages.
- 03 / The ad platforms
- Knows
- What was spent, by campaign, keyword and audience.
- Blind to
- Everything after the form. They are only ever told about form fills.
- Who watches it
- The ad agency, who reports cost per lead.
- 04 / Spend data
- Knows
- The certified cost of every day, campaign and keyword.
- Blind to
- Nothing, once it lands nightly next to the other three.
- Who watches it
- Nobody, until it is joined.
Joined / The Outcome Ledger: one record per enquiry
- Ad
- Click id
- Enquiry
- Qualified
- Booked
- Held
- Won
- + cost of each step
- Follow one enquiry from the ad to the meeting to the sale, with the cost of each step.
- Price each enquiry by what its segment actually produces, not by what the form fill cost.
- Send the outcomes back to Google and Meta, weighted by value, so the bidding optimises toward revenue instead of toward cheap forms.
- Report cost per outcome by channel every month, from numbers that reconcile to your own books.
02The diagnostic
Seven steps. Each one asks a question your current reporting cannot answer.
This is the logic of the free teardown (steps 1 to 3) and the fixed-fee diagnostic (steps 4 to 7, which need the CRM). The right-hand column is what each step usually turns up. What yours turns up is the teardown.
- 01
List every conversion the platforms are optimising toward
What is Google actually being told a conversion is, and what is it worth?
Pull every conversion action with its first and last fire date and its value. Pin each campaign’s bid strategy to one date. Find the data floor: the point before which absence of data means nothing.
Usually / teardown
Form fills carrying no value, and no down-funnel outcome reaching the platform at all. Either the feed was never fully set up or it broke quietly and nothing alerted anyone. The platform has been optimising toward form count because that is all it was ever told.
- 02
Check what the tag manager and analytics actually fire
Do the events the agency reports exist, once, with a trigger?
Export each container. List tags, triggers and variables. Check which data-layer events have no trigger at all, and which analytics rules reference themselves.
Usually / teardown
Form events counted more than once by a rule that triggers itself. Funnel events that read zero because nothing ever fires them. A monthly report built on both.
- 03
Trace the click id from the ad to the enquiry and back out
Can a customer in your records be traced to the ad that produced them?
Measure click-id capture on the form by month. Follow every webhook or automation that is supposed to send outcomes back to a platform, end to end, and find where it died.
Usually / teardown
Capture that decayed to nothing after a site change nobody connected to marketing. An outcome feed that failed silently when a CRM field was renamed or a layout changed, with the automation still showing green.
- 04
Define the ladder and join spend to it
What are the stages between a lead and revenue, and what does each one cost by channel?
Qualified, booked, held, committed, won. Assemble certified spend, leads, stage history and revenue without mixing denominators. If four independent totals agree within a couple of percent, that agreement is itself a check.
Usually / diagnostic, needs the CRM
The cheapest channel per lead is the most expensive per held meeting, often by a multiple. The budget has been drifting toward it for as long as cost per lead has been the report.
- 05
Locate the leak by stage transition
Where exactly does the loss happen, and is it demand, capacity or follow-up?
Decompose the headline. Use stage history, not current stage. Test capacity against demand. Test the obvious confounds: migration timing, cohort maturity, fee changes, mix shift. Keep a register of claims you refuted.
Usually / diagnostic, needs the CRM
The largest leak sits after the point where any ad platform looks: between acceptance and payment, or between booking and showing up. Booking lead time explains more no-shows than lead quality does.
- 06
Segment by what the form already asks
Which enquiries are worth anything, and can you tell on day one?
Cut booking and held rates by the fields the enquiry already carries: income band, readiness, geography, job type. Keep only the factors that survive; drop the ones whose direction flips by cohort.
Usually / diagnostic, needs the CRM
Whole segments that never buy, identified by a question the form already asks, bought at the same price as the best enquiries. Expected value per enquiry that spans several orders of magnitude, bid on as if identical.
- 07
Price each enquiry and send the value back
What should the platform be bidding toward?
Expected value of an enquiry = probability of booking by segment × probability of being held × probability of winning × net fee. Rates from a frozen snapshot of matured cohorts, smoothed. Net fee is one config value that scales everything and reorders nothing. Run dark for a week, compare against the price list, then go live one platform at a time.
Usually / diagnostic, needs the CRM
The platform’s own “best” ad set by cost per conversion turns out worst by cost per booked meeting. Once value flows back, the ranking inverts and the bidding follows it.
03The outcome ladder
One ladder, B2B or B2C. Your sale maps onto it.
Every report, every bonus and every value sent back to a platform uses the same six stages. The names change by industry; the arithmetic does not.
| Stage | Legal | Home services | Real estate | B2B services |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1Lead | Intake form or call | Request | Lead | Enquiry or demo request |
| 2Qualified | Conflict and practice-area check | Serviceable area and job type | Motivated | Fit and budget confirmed |
| 3Booked | Consult booked | Estimate booked | Appointment set | Discovery or demo call booked |
| 4Held | Consult held | Estimate given | Showing held | Call held |
| 5Committed | Engagement letter sent | Proposal signed | Agreement signed | Proposal or quote accepted |
| 6Won | Retained | Job sold | Closed | Contract signed or order placed |
Pricing an enquiry
EV(enquiry) = P(booked | segment) × P(held | booked) × P(won | held) × net fee
Rates come from a frozen snapshot of matured cohorts, smoothed so small segments do not swing. Net fee is a single configuration value: it scales every price and reorders none. The value sent to the platform is this number, per stage, per enquiry.
Vertical caveats
- Legal. No percentage of fees. Flat fee plus a bonus on cost per retained client or held consult, structured as a marketing fee.
- Home services. Calls are usually the primary conversion. Bonus on cost per estimate given or job sold, never per call.
- Real estate. Bonus on cost per signed agreement or closed transaction, checked against state brokerage rules.
04The rules
The numbers are held to rules. These are the ones that catch the most.
R1
Numerator and denominator on the same scope
Never total spend divided by channel-attributed outcomes. The first wrong number in most audits is a mixed denominator.
R2
Unknown is never zero
An enquiry the system cannot attribute stays unlabelled. Forcing it into a bucket flatters whichever channel has the most gaps.
R3
The report must reconcile or it does not publish
If the sections do not sum to the total, the endpoint refuses to return. A report that silently disagrees with the books is worse than none.
R4
The agreed definition governs
What counts as a held meeting, an estimate given or a retained client is written down and agreed before work starts. We reconcile our count against whatever you already count and explain every difference. Nobody changes a definition mid-term; a change is agreed and the baseline re-struck.
R5
State the data floor
A sparse table does not mean nothing happened. Say “none since the feed broke”, never “only a handful ever”.
R6
Judge on outcomes, never on lead volume
When the bidding starts optimising toward value, enquiries fall and someone will call it a regression. The success criteria are set before the switch.
05The engagement
Teardown, diagnostic, build, retain. In that order.
Nothing is built before it is measured. Nothing is retained before it is built. The order is the risk reversal. The free teardown stops at the CRM; the diagnostic is where the CRM, the funnel economics and the value of a customer by segment come in.
A / The teardown
FreeIs what you are being told about your marketing even true, and what is that costing you?
- Looks atYour ad accounts, Your analytics, Your tag manager, Your website
- Does not touchYour CRM. Any data warehouse or BigQuery work. Any pipeline build.
- BoxA hard time box. If your data cannot answer the question inside it, that is itself the finding.
B / The diagnostic
Fixed feeWhere exactly does the funnel leak, what is a customer worth by segment, and what should you be bidding?
- Looks atEverything in the teardown, Plus your CRM
- BoxScoped on the call.
- 1
Teardown
Time-boxedFree. Read-only. Ad accounts, analytics, website. Is what you are being told true?
Teardown, then diagnostic → - 2
Diagnostic
WeeksFixed fee. Adds the CRM. Where the funnel leaks and what a customer is worth by segment.
Teardown, then diagnostic → - 3
Build
A projectTracking, the ledger, outcomes to the platforms, reporting. Migrations and portals where needed.
Full implementation → - 4
What you keep
- Your CRMKept
We read it, and later write outcomes to it. We do not replace it unless you ask.
- Your websiteKept
A tracking package or a tag-manager container and a relay. A migration is a separate decision, and one we make easy.
- Your ad agencyKept
They keep executing. They receive outcome data for the first time. Most do better with it.
Everything on this page is the actual procedure. Giving it away costs nothing: the hard part is the access, the data and the year of traps already paid for.
Start
Two ways to start. Both are free.
The teardown is a written read of your measurement stack and your funnel, from your own numbers, in about two weeks. The call is thirty minutes to decide whether a teardown is worth doing.