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By Darren DeYoung
Before you sign with a marketing agency, ask to see booked jobs: the ones their marketing actually produced for a client like you, plus what each one cost.
Clicks, traffic and "more leads" are easy to promise and hard to bank. If they can't show booked jobs or tell you what a bad lead looks like, hold off on signing.**
Ask four things:
The answers will show whether they track the work that pays you or just the activity that fills a report.
You want real jobs on the calendar, tied to the ad, search or page that brought them in. One screenshot of a great week doesn't count.
Google Ads can do this. Its offline conversion import exists so you can "measure what happens in the offline world after your ad results in a click or call to your business." If an agency runs ads and never connects them to jobs, ask why.
Every report has a definition hiding in it. One agency might count every call, wrong numbers included. Another might count every form, spam and all, or a tap on the phone number even when nobody calls.
Google lets the account owner pick what counts. A conversion action is "a specific customer activity that is valuable to your business." Before signing anything, define what a good lead is.
Cost per booked job is what you spent on marketing divided by the jobs it booked. The hard part is the bottom half: who decides a job came from marketing?
Ask if their count will match what's in your scheduling software, like ServiceTitan, Jobber or Housecall Pro. That also means you'll need to share job data with them. No agency can count booked jobs it can't see.
A tree company and a garage door company buy differently. Ask for a client whose customers look like yours, then ask that owner one thing: did the calls turn into jobs?
Then check the agency yourself. Search its name on Google, read its Google reviews, and look at its Google Business Profile for photos, hours and how it answers reviews.
We walk through the same check for your own business in What Customers See When They Look You Up.
A click report shows how many people saw an ad or visited the site. It hides who they were, where they live, whether they called, and whether anyone booked.
You can have a great month of clicks and a slow month of jobs, and the report will still look good.
| Report shows | What it leaves out |
|---|---|
| Clicks | Did they call? |
| Traffic | Are they in your area? |
| Leads | Were they real customers? |
| Calls | How many were booked? |
Clicks are cheap to grow. A bigger budget and broader keywords will raise the number without keeping a single crew busy. Here's more on which paid ad metrics actually matter.
Our own Capabilities page puts it this way: "What really matters to your business, bounce rate and a big logo? Or is it profit?" That's the question to bring to every agency meeting.
It looks like a full calendar.
A Garage Door And Gate Store, a garage door and gate company in San Diego County, was booked out for six months after Hoist started running its Google Ads. That's the kind of proof to ask any agency for: what happened to the schedule, not just the traffic.
Before Hoist, A Garage Door And Gate Store relied on mailers. In their words, they were seeing "diminishing returns."
We built a set of Google Ads campaigns with targeted keywords and eye-catching graphics. The work came in so fast they needed more staff, then asked us to pause the ads so they could catch up.
Pausing on purpose is part of the proof. An agency selling volume wants the ads running no matter what. One focused on booked jobs turns them down when the crew can't take more.
Read it for who, where and what. A strong proposal names your customer, your towns and the job types you want more of, then explains what happens after the form comes in.
If it only promises a bigger number, it's selling volume. Ask what they'd call a bad lead. No answer means no plan.
Our Google Ads page says it in four words: "Qualified Leads Over Volume." Use these questions to check whether a proposal means the same thing.
More leads from the wrong place is more work for nothing.
By default, Google Ads location targeting reaches people who are in your area and also people who've "shown interest in your targeted locations". That's how a Twin Cities landscaper ends up paying for clicks from people two states away.
Ask which setting they'll use and why. If you're getting calls from people you can't serve, call tracking shows which ad sent them.
A quick repair call and a full install don't need the same ads. The proposal should name the jobs you want more of and the ones you'd rather skip. If it treats every lead the same, it'll fill your phone with the small stuff.
A form that sits until tomorrow can turn into a job for someone else.
Ask who gets the form, how fast, and whether the agency checks if anyone called back. That part is often on you (the business owner). Here are ways to tighten your response time if it's lagging.
Google Ads lets you set the days and hours ads run, and budgets can drop in a busy month. Ask what they'll do in peak season and in the slow weeks. Here's more on when to start advertising for the season.
Our Results page shows the numbers those clients tracked at the time. Here's how we'd measure booked jobs for you from day one:
You'd see cost per booked job, not just clicks.
On our Results page, some clients tracked leads and some tracked conversions. HomeSmart, for example, tracked an 86% improvement in conversions in the first months.
Precision Landscape & Tree is the business-growth story. While marketing with Hoist, its staff grew from about 10 to over 50 people, enough to buy new equipment and expand its headquarters.
From day one, we'd set up:
Hoist builds websites and runs marketing, so the site and the ads answer to the same team. More on that in Web Designer vs. Marketing Agency.
Keep asking before you sign. Some agencies can track booked jobs and just haven't been asked. If they can't explain how they'd count them, or what a bad lead looks like, it's a volume pitch, and it's fine to keep looking. Bring the same questions to us, too.
Want to see how we'd measure booked jobs for your business?