THE LIBRARY · A PLAIN GUIDE
Do marketing agencies for contractors actually work?
Sometimes.
Not the answer anyone wants, we know. But here's the useful part... you can usually tell which kind you're dealing with before you pay a dime. When a contractor agency fails, the ads themselves are rarely the problem. The ads send people to a website that loses them, or to a phone nobody answers. Or the contract keeps billing for months after the numbers said stop. You can check all three of those before you sign.
If you've paid an agency before and have nothing to show for it, this guide is for you. Same goes if you've got three proposals on the desk right now and a funny feeling about all of them. By the end, you'll have a one-page, 90-day test you can hand to any agency, and how they react to it will tell you most of what you need to know.
Why does this question get asked?
Because agencies love the trades, and it's easy to see why. One roof, one new furnace, one bathroom remodel can be worth thousands of dollars, and the work never really stops coming. That makes contractors great customers. Search your trade plus the word "marketing" and you'll see it: results full of agencies with a page for every trade you can name, a lot of them making the same promises in nearly the same words. Some of those promises are real. The trouble is, nothing on the page tells you which ones.
It's also a lot of money. Here's what a few agencies publish themselves:1
- One contractor-focused agency starts Google Ads and Local Services Ads management at $2,000 a month, and says most of its clients put $5,000 to $8,000 a month into search, paid ads and their website.
- A national agency's search packages run $2,900 to $9,200 a month, on a six-month commitment.
- A large firm that serves the trades typically asks for twelve months on its marketing technology and services like search.
- At the other end, a low-cost provider manages Google Ads for $249 a month and recommends at least $775 a month in ad spend.
Even that last one, the cheapest on the list, comes to about $12,000 over a year once you add its recommended ad budget. So "does this actually work?" is really a question about whether a five-figure check paid for itself, and everything else on that list costs more.
For plenty of owners, the question comes after the fact. Picture someone who paid an agency for eight months. Every month there was a dashboard, and the lines were going the right way. But they still couldn't point to a single job that came from any of it. That owner has every reason to be suspicious. What they bought was a chart.
- Fee: $149, then $249 a month$2,888
- Ad spend: $775 a month$9,300
- A year$12,188
What would "working" have to mean?
For a trade, "working" comes down to one thing: booked jobs. Booked at a cost per job you picked before anything started, and judged with the season in mind. Anything looser than that can't really be checked, and an agency that won't define it that way is asking you to pay on faith.
That rules out a few things agencies like to call working. Here are three you'll see in reports all the time, and none of them counts on its own:
- More traffic. Visitors who never call cost money and bring in nothing.
- More leads. A lead is just a form or a call, and plenty of them are price-shoppers, job seekers, people outside your service area and salespeople. What matters is how many leads became estimates, and how many estimates became jobs.
- A better month than last month. In roofing, HVAC and most exterior trades, the busy season does that on its own. A chart that climbs from April to July mostly proves it's summer.
So before any agency starts, sit down and write out a few numbers:
- What a booked job is worth to you in its first year.
- The most you can afford to pay to get one.
- How many more jobs you could actually take next month.
Our piece on how much a small business should spend on marketing builds a budget from exactly those.
Once they're on paper, "is it working?" turns into a much simpler question: is the cost per booked job under the number we agreed on? You can answer that yourself, and an agency can't argue its way around it.
Count the last box.
Why do contractor agencies fail?
We touched on this at the top, now it's time to dive deeper. When an agency doesn't work out for a contractor, it's usually one of three things, and they tend to show up in this order:
The website. An agency's first lever is almost always traffic: ads, search, the Business Profile. All of that traffic lands on your website.
Now picture the site it lands on. It's a template with a stock photo of somebody else's crew, the phone number is buried under a slideshow, and there's no page for the service people are actually searching for. More traffic to that site just means paying for the click and losing the customer on the next screen. The agency's work can be excellent, and the result can still be nothing.
Our piece on whether your website needs a redesign covers how to tell, and showing your work on your website covers what a trade site needs that a template doesn't give you.
The phone. An ad that rings a phone nobody answers has still been paid for. In the busy season, the owner's on a roof, the office is one person, and the call goes to voicemail.
It can be worse than it sounds, too. On a strong day, Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget (it evens out over the month), so the days your ads work hardest can land right on the days your crew is busiest. Before anyone runs ads for you, figure out who answers the phone between 7am and 6pm, and what happens to the calls that come in while they're already on another line.
The minimum that outlasts the test. Ninety days is usually enough to learn whether ads, a Business Profile and a few new pages are producing jobs at a cost you can live with. On a twelve-month contract, that can mean paying for nine more months after you already know the answer.
To be fair, a long minimum isn't automatically a bad sign. Search work in particular takes a while to show anything. But you should know, before you sign, what happens if the numbers say "stop" at day 90.
There's also a fourth, smaller reason: the agency doesn't know your trade. It's the one that puts HVAC copy on the plumbing page, runs the same ads in January that it ran in July, or has never heard of a shoulder season. There's a simple way to find out: Ask what they'd do differently for you in February than in June. If the answer is the same for both, they haven't thought about it.
- The test: months 1–3
- Paid after you know: months 4–12
What's wrong with the dashboard?
Nothing, really, as a dashboard. When we went through the websites of 71 marketing providers in November 2026, almost all of them promised transparency, and almost all of them meant a dashboard. Some of those dashboards are very good, too, with call recordings, cost per lead, even booked jobs if the agency can see your scheduling software.
The trouble is what a dashboard can't show you. It reports the numbers. It can't tell you whether anyone looked at your search terms this month, rewrote the ad that's been losing to a competitor's since spring, or noticed that your Business Profile still lists the hours from before you added Saturdays.
And in the trades, the season moves the numbers more than almost anything an agency does. Calls climb when the first heat wave hits or a hailstorm rolls through, whether anyone touched the account or not. They can sag in a month of really good work, because the weather turned mild or a competitor doubled their budget. That's how the owner we pictured at the start, the one with eight months of dashboards, ended up with charts going the right way and no jobs to point to.
So ask for the work alongside the numbers: a dated list of what got done this month, what's planned for next month, and anything the agency needs from you. Of the 13 trades agencies we read, not one publishes a weekly written account of the work. Some will do it if you ask, and how they answer that request tells you a lot about how they operate. Our piece on what a marketing agency does in a month goes through what that list should look like for each kind of work.
Illustrative. Most of this curve is weather.
How do you run a 90-day test?
This is the one-page test we promised at the top. Write it up before the first invoice, and get both sides to agree to it. It covers five things:
- The numbers. What a booked job is worth, the most you'll pay per booked job, and how many more you could take. (The same ones you wrote down in the "working" section.)
- The fix list, first. What has to change on the website and the phone before anyone buys traffic, and who's doing it. If the agency says nothing needs to change, pull the site up on your phone together and see how long it takes to find the number.
- The spend and the fee, through all 90 days. Both, listed separately, with the ad account in your name and your card paying the platform. If your trade qualifies, look at Google's Local Services Ads first. You "only pay when a customer gets in touch from your ad," instead of paying for every click. Our piece on what Google Ads management costs covers how the fees work.
- The tracking. A call-tracking number on the ads and a form that reports where each lead came from. Without it, nobody can answer the question on day 90, and you'll have paid for 90 days of guessing.
- The stop. The cost per booked job that, on day 90, means it isn't working, and what happens then: the agreement ends, and the ad account, the ad copy and the pages stay with you.
Then you let it run. When day 90 comes around, you'll be looking at one of these:
- The cost is under your number. Keep going, and think about spending more if you can take the work.
- The cost is over your number, but the agency can tell you why and what it would change. Give it one more month, with the same stop.
- The cost is over your number, and the explanation is "marketing takes time." It does. But you agreed on the time together on day one, and it's up. Stop.
- The numbersA booked job is worthMost we’ll pay per booked jobExtra jobs we could take
- The fix list, firstWebsitePhoneWho’s doing it
- The spend and the feeAd spend, paid by us to the platformAgency fee
- The trackingCall-tracking numberForm source
- The stopCost per booked job that means stopWhat stays with us
Remember how we said an agency's reaction to the page tells you most of what you need to know? An agency that's willing to sign it expects to be measured, and that's the kind you want. The ones that won't sign will usually tell you 90 days isn't long enough. For search, that's sometimes true. For ads, the phone and the website, you'll know a lot by then. Our piece on choosing a marketing agency covers the six things to get in writing before you sign.
So, do agencies work?
Yes, the good ones do, for the contractor whose site turns visitors into calls, whose phone gets answered, and who agreed on a stopping point before day one. Skip any of those, and even a good agency usually won't work out, while the dashboard looks fine the whole time.
So whether an agency works is mostly decided before it starts, by things you control. Fix the site. Get the phone answered. Write the number down. Then hire one, and hold it to that one page.
Where we fit
Marketing Monthly is built around that same test. It's $2,500 a month plus your ad spend, which you pay to Google or Meta directly. The minimum is three months (the same 90 days, because that's how long a fair test takes), and every number in your scope has its stopping point written next to it before the work starts. If we recommend stopping, the minimum ends right there. Along the way, you get a note from us every Friday, a log of the work you can open any time, and every tracked call listened to and tagged. The full terms and a sample Friday note are on the page.
- AMarketing Monthly
- Price
- $2,500 a month.
- Minimum
- Three months, then 30 days’ notice. A stop recommendation ends it.
- Ad spend
- Paid to Google or Meta directly.
- What you see
- A note every Friday and a log you can open any time.
- BMarketing Plan
- Cost
- $1,500, once.
- Takes
- Two weeks.
- What you get
- A written plan built from how work reaches you today: three ranked moves, each with its cost, its number and the point at which you’d stop.
- Credit
- If you go on with us within 60 days, the $1,500 comes off what you start next.
On the fit call, we'll tell you whether Marketing Monthly fits, whether a Marketing Plan should come first, or whether you don't need us yet. If the site or the phone needs work before any ads run, we'll say so. And if it's the site, we build those too.
Not sure you’re ready? That’s what the call is for.
Fifteen minutes about your business and how jobs come in today. We’ll tell you whether Marketing Monthly fits, whether a Plan should come first, or whether you don’t need us yet.
