I get asked about my software stack every few months, usually by a business owner who just got pitched an all-in-one platform or a new business trying to figure out what they actually need. This is the honest answer as of March 2026. These are the tools I open every weekday to run search ads, track leads, audit websites, and report to clients across Idaho. I’m not listing every app I’ve ever tried. This is the short list of what survived contact with real work. If a tool isn’t here, it either duplicated something cheaper, added friction I didn’t need, or solved a problem I don’t actually have.
What analytics tools do you use for client reporting?
Google Analytics 4 is the foundation. It’s free, it connects to Google Ads natively, and every client already has a property even if they’ve never logged in. I spend about an hour per client per month in GA4 pulling traffic sources, conversion paths, and audience behavior.
For clients spending over $4,000/month on ads, I connect GA4 to BigQuery. BigQuery is Google’s data warehouse. The free tier covers most small business query volumes. I use it to build custom reports that answer questions GA4’s interface can’t handle cleanly: lifetime value by traffic source, hour-of-day conversion patterns for service calls, multi-touch attribution across six months. I don’t write SQL from scratch anymore. I describe what I need to Claude or ChatGPT, paste the query into BigQuery, export to Google Sheets.
I tried Looker Studio dashboards in 2024. Clients never logged in. Now I send a PDF every month with eight charts and three paragraphs of plain-English analysis. That gets read.
Cost: GA4 is free. BigQuery is free up to 1TB of queries per month, which I’ve never hit. If you’re running a single-location business in Boise, you won’t either.
What do you use to manage Google Ads campaigns?
Google Ads Editor for bulk changes. It’s a free desktop app. I download campaigns, make edits offline, review everything in a spreadsheet view, then upload. This is faster and less error-prone than clicking through the web UI when you’re updating 40 ad groups at once.
For daily monitoring and anything that needs to happen fast (pausing a runaway keyword, shifting budget between campaigns), I use the native Google Ads web interface. The mobile app is good enough for emergency shutoffs when I’m not at a desk.
I don’t use third-party bid management platforms. The clients I work with spend $2,000 to $15,000 per month on Google Ads. At that scale, manual bid adjustments every three days plus Google’s automated bidding strategies outperform the $300/month SaaS tool that promises to optimize for me. I tested three of those in 2025. They all wanted more data than a Boise HVAC company generates in a year.
Cost: Free.
What SEO software do you actually need?
Google Search Console first. It’s free and it tells you what Google actually indexed, what queries triggered your pages, and what errors are blocking crawlers. I check it weekly for every client. If Search Console says there’s a problem, there’s a problem.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider ($259/year) for technical audits. I run a crawl when I onboard a client, after any site migration, and quarterly for retainer clients. It catches redirect chains, missing alt text, duplicate title tags, orphaned pages. The free version caps at 500 URLs, which is enough for a lot of small business sites, but I hit that limit fast with e-commerce clients or anyone who’s been blogging for five years.
I don’t subscribe to the big keyword research suites anymore. I stopped paying for SEMrush in late 2024. For local service businesses in Idaho, the keyword universe is small and Search Console shows me what’s already working. When I need search volume estimates or competition research for a new vertical, I use Google’s Keyword Planner (free inside Google Ads) and cross-check with actual SERP analysis. I open an incognito window, search the term from a Boise IP, see who ranks, read their pages.
AI-assisted writing: I use Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) to draft outlines, rewrite clunky sentences, generate FAQ schema. I pay for both. Claude Pro is $20/month, ChatGPT Plus is $20/month. I could get by with one, but they’re different enough that I switch depending on the task. Claude is better for long-form structure. ChatGPT is faster for short rewrites. Neither one writes a publish-ready blog post without heavy editing, but they cut research and drafting time in half.
Cost: Search Console free, Screaming Frog $259/year, Claude $20/month, ChatGPT $20/month. Total SEO stack is about $42/month averaged annually.
Why do you track phone calls separately?
Most Idaho small businesses still convert on the phone. A roofer in Nampa, a personal injury attorney in Idaho Falls, a dentist in Meridian, the website exists to generate calls, not form fills. If you’re not tracking calls to the keyword and landing page level, you don’t know what’s working.
I use CallRail. It costs $45/month for the base plan (one tracking number, call recording, basic reporting) and scales up with the number of lines and minutes. A contractor running local service ads in three cities might pay $150/month. That sounds expensive until you realize a single missed lead inquiry costs more than a month of tracking.
CallRail integrates with Google Ads and GA4. When someone clicks an ad, lands on the site, and calls, I see the keyword, the ad, the page, the time of day, and I can listen to the call. I know which campaigns generate tire-kickers and which ones generate people ready to book. That changes how I allocate budget.
I tested a cheaper call tracker in 2025 that charged $25/month. The UI was slow, it dropped two calls during the trial, and the GA4 integration required Zapier. I went back to CallRail.
Cost: $45 to $200/month depending on call volume. I bill this as a pass-through expense to clients who need it.
What CRM do you recommend for follow-up?
This is where most small businesses lose money. You spend $2,000 on ads, generate 30 leads, follow up with eight of them, close two. The problem isn’t the ads. The problem is the 22 leads that disappeared because nobody called them back within four hours.
HubSpot for clients who need a real sales process, multiple team members, email sequences, and detailed pipeline reporting. The free tier is enough for a solo service business. The Starter tier ($20/month per seat) adds automation and better reporting. HubSpot’s friction is the learning curve. It does everything, which means it’s complicated. I spend two hours onboarding a client into HubSpot and another hour per month tuning workflows.
GoHighLevel for agencies or clients who want an all-in-one system (CRM, email, SMS, appointment booking, landing pages). It costs $97/month for the basic plan. The UI is clunkier than HubSpot but it’s faster to deploy and the SMS follow-up features are better out of the box. I’ve moved three clients from HubSpot to GoHighLevel in the past year because they wanted text message automation without duct-taping Zapier and Twilio together.
I don’t use Salesforce. It’s too expensive and too heavy for a business doing $800K/year in revenue.
Cost: HubSpot free to $50/month for most clients, GoHighLevel $97 to $297/month depending on features. I bill CRM setup as a project fee ($800 to $1,500) and let clients pay the software directly.
What software did you stop using in 2025?
An all-in-one social media scheduler. I was paying $30/month to queue posts for clients. The problem: small businesses don’t need 40 scheduled posts per month. They need four good ones and real engagement with comments. I deleted the tool and now we schedule directly in Meta Business Suite (free) and Google Business Profile (free). Takes three extra minutes per client per month. Saved $360/year.
A dedicated rank tracking tool. I was paying $50/month to track keyword positions daily. Clients liked seeing the graphs. But daily rank fluctuations don’t matter. What matters is traffic and conversions, which I see in Search Console and GA4. Dropped it in March 2025. Nobody noticed.
An email marketing platform for my own business. I sent a monthly newsletter to 400 people. Open rate was 18 percent. I was paying $40/month for MailChimp. I moved my list to HubSpot’s free tier (I already had an account for client work) and cut the expense. My open rate went up to 23 percent because HubSpot’s deliverability is slightly better.
A separate landing page builder. I tried a $50/month tool that promised high-converting templates. It was slower than just building pages in WordPress with Elementor (which most of my clients already have) or in GoHighLevel (which has a page builder included). I used it for two months, migrated everything off, canceled.
The pattern: if a tool only does one thing and I can do that thing inside a tool I already pay for, the standalone tool gets cut.
How much does this whole stack cost per month?
For my consulting business, managing six to eight active client accounts:
| Tool | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| GA4 + BigQuery | $0 |
| Google Ads Editor | $0 |
| Search Console | $0 |
| Screaming Frog | $22 (annual avg) |
| Claude Pro | $20 |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 |
| CallRail (avg 3 numbers) | $130 |
| HubSpot Starter (2 seats) | $40 |
| GoHighLevel | $97 |
| Total | $329/month |
CallRail and CRM costs scale with client count and get billed as pass-throughs. My actual out-of-pocket software cost for running the business is about $180/month (the AI tools, Screaming Frog, and one HubSpot seat for my own pipeline).
A solo business owner running their own marketing in Boise could operate on $40/month: CallRail base plan and one AI subscription. You don’t need GoHighLevel if you have ten leads a month. You don’t need ChatGPT Plus if you’re writing one blog post per quarter.