Marketing attribution for home inspectors

Marketing attribution is the record of which channel produced each booked inspection. Google's Analytics help center defines attribution as "the act of assigning credit for important user actions to different ads, clicks, and factors." For an inspection company, the action that matters is a booked inspection, not a click or a page view.

A click or a form fill is not yet a booking, and the path between them can be messy. A buyer might click your Google ad on Monday, call your office on Wednesday and book through their agent's link on Friday. If nobody records the source at each step, the booking lands on your schedule with no channel attached.

Our complete guide to home inspector marketing maps the full channel mix. This post goes one level deeper, into the setup that shows which of those channels earns its spend. For every booked inspection, record five things:

• Source: where the client came from, such as Google, Meta, an agent or a past client.
• Channel type: paid, organic, referral or repeat.
• Detail: the campaign name, the agent's full name or the earlier service.
• Inspection type and fee: a standard buyer's inspection, a pre-listing inspection, a radon test or a sewer scope.
• Booking date: so you can count by month and compare the spring market with the slower months.

A booking can reach you through four doors. Each door needs its own way to capture the source, and a gap at any one of them leaves a hole in your monthly numbers.

If you book through Spectora, learn its limits before you build anything. Spectora's support article on tracking scheduling data says, "We do not have a direct integration with Google Analytics at this time." It also says, "we don’t have the option to redirect the last page of the online scheduler," so a booking there can't load a thank-you page on your site.

Spectora points to its External Scheduling Data export as "a good workaround." That export includes UTM codes, so a tagged scheduler link still shows where each booking came from. Our answer on tracking Spectora bookings in Google Analytics covers the export in more detail.

UTM codes are short tags added to the end of a link that tell your analytics where a visitor came from. Google's guide to campaign URLs says, "When you add parameters to a URL, you should always use utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign." The same page warns that "Parameter values are case sensitive," so "gbp" and "GBP" count as two different sources.

Google also notes that "Missing UTM parameters will result in (not set) values being present in reporting." Write one naming list in lowercase, then reuse it on every link you control. Here is a starting list for an inspection company:

Give each referring agent their own campaign value. That one step lets you count bookings by agent, which helps when you plan your work with real estate agents. Our guide to your Google Business Profile covers the profile itself. Here, the only goal is that its links carry tags.

Leave Google Ads off this list. Google Ads clicks get their own click ID through auto-tagging, covered in the offline conversions section below.

Phone calls and agent referrals leave the fewest clues in your analytics, because neither one has to pass through a tagged link. On Spectora accounts, we treat phone calls as the heavier conversion, compared with a click to the scheduler.

For calls, put a separate tracking number on each paid channel, such as Google Ads and Meta ads. The number a caller dials then tells you which channel sent them. Keep your main number on the places you don't pay for, so buyers who already know it can still reach you.

Then back the numbers up with one question at booking. Ask it the same way on every call, and save the answer in a source field in your scheduling software or CRM. A CRM, or customer relationship management system, is the place your client records live.

1. Ask, "How did you first hear about us?"
2. If the caller hesitates, offer a short list: Google search, Google Maps, an ad, an agent, a past client or something else.
3. If they name an agent, save the agent's full name, not the word "agent."
4. If they are a repeat client, save the earlier service, such as a 4-point inspection or a sewer scope.
5. Save the answer in the same field every time, so you can count it at month end.

Google's help page on offline conversion imports describes an ad that "starts a customer down a path that ultimately leads to a sale in the offline world, such as at your office or over the phone." A buyer who clicks your ad and then calls to book fits that description.

Google says it provides a unique Google Click ID (GCLID) "for every click that comes to your website from an ad." You save that ID with the lead. When the person converts, "you give that GCLID back to Google Ads" along with details about the conversion. If you have not set up offline conversion imports yet, Google's page says, "we recommend starting with enhanced conversions for leads instead." The steps below are for the click ID route.

1. Turn on auto-tagging. Google's setup guide lists it as a requirement: "You've enabled auto-tagging. This lets you import offline conversions."
2. Capture the click ID in a hidden field on your website form, and store it with the lead.
3. Mark the lead as booked in your records once the inspection is on the schedule.
4. Upload the booked leads, with their click IDs and booking dates, to Google Ads.

Spectora's forms won't handle this step for you. In our experience, forms that come through Spectora don't carry hidden tracking fields like ad click IDs or UTM codes, and Spectora has no automated way to send booked inspections back to Google or Meta as offline conversions.

That's why we build our own website forms. They pass a 90-day first-party attribution cookie, which is one set by your own website, into each lead. Each lead carries the ad click IDs gclid, gbraid, wbraid and fbclid, the five UTM fields, the first referrer and the first landing page. Our paid ads management brings conversion tracking online before new ad spend runs.

Once each door captures its source, set aside one sitting a month to add it up. Pull bookings by source from your scheduling software, the External Scheduling Data export if you use Spectora, and spend by channel from your ad accounts and invoices. Count what you pay to manage a channel, not only the ad spend.

In the example, Google Ads spent $1,500 for 20 bookings, or $75 per booked inspection. Compare that figure with your own average inspection fee and with the same channel's number last month. Our post on how to calculate cost per booked inspection covers the formula, agent referrals and SEO.

Watch the unknown row. When it grows, one of your four doors has stopped capturing the source. Then use the review to make a few decisions:

• Add budget to a paid channel whose cost per booked inspection holds steady as spend grows.
• Fix or cut a channel whose cost keeps climbing month after month.
• Thank the agents at the top of the agent list, and check in with the ones who went quiet.
• Fix the door that feeds the unknown row before you add a new channel.

Google Analytics will not always agree with your table. Google describes data-driven attribution as distributing credit "based on data for each key event." Last click ignores direct traffic and "attributes 100% of the key event value to the last channel that the customer clicked through." Your intake question asks where the client first heard of you, so it may credit a different channel than either model. For the lead source side of this work, see our guide to home inspector lead generation.