Most owners hire a marketing agency the way they’d never let a customer hire them: no questions about the work, no look under the hood, price as the only variable. You would walk a customer through the job before quoting it, and you’d expect them to ask what they’re paying for. The agency across the table should survive the same treatment. Knowing how to choose a home services marketing agency takes five questions, one phone call, and the honesty to admit when the right answer is not hiring anyone yet.
The questions below are not trick questions. A good agency answers all five without flinching, because a good agency built its business around the answers. A weak one starts negotiating with the first question, and you’ll hear it happen.
Who owns the accounts?
Ask this first, because the wrong answer costs the most to discover later. You should own your Google Business Profile (the free Google listing that shows your reviews, photos, and map pin when someone searches for you), your ad accounts, and your website. All three, in your name, with your login. If you fire the agency next year, everything should stay with you.
Agencies that hold accounts hostage are the most common horror story in this industry. We’ve audited businesses that left an agency after three years and discovered the reviews, the ad history, and even the website domain belonged to the vendor. Walking away meant starting over from zero: no reviews, no track record with Google, a new phone number on a new site. An agency that builds your presence inside accounts it controls has made leaving expensive on purpose, and that tells you exactly how it plans to keep you. The right answer is boring and short: “You own everything, we get access.” Anything longer than that is a warning.
What number do you report first?
The first number an agency reports tells you what it thinks the job is. A good agency answers with jobs booked and what a booked job costs you. A weak one answers with clicks, impressions, or a dashboard with fourteen charts you can’t read. For the record, a click is a person tapping an ad, and an impression is a person who scrolled past it. Neither one pays for a truck.
This question matters because most owners can’t tell whether their marketing works at all: only 18% of small businesses feel confident their marketing is working 1. Reporting that arrives in a language you don’t speak is a large part of why. If you can’t evaluate the report, the report is doing its job, which is to keep you from evaluating the agency. We wrote up the difference between that model and the one we’d rather run in our comparison with traditional ad agencies; the short version is that a report should answer the question you’d ask anyway: how many jobs, and at what cost.
What happens in the first 30 days?
A good agency spends its first month making your results measurable, not spending your money. On the phone, listen for three specific things: tracking phone numbers (dedicated numbers that forward to your regular line and record which ad or listing made the phone ring), a plan for getting more reviews, and fixes to your Google Business Profile. Those are the signs of a shop that intends to prove its work to you, month after month.
Be suspicious of the opposite: ads launching on day one, before anything is measured. It sounds like hustle. It isn’t. An agency that starts spending before it starts counting can never show you what your money bought, and ninety days in you’ll be deciding whether to renew based on a feeling. The setup month feels slow to owners who want the phone ringing tomorrow, but it’s the difference between a vendor you can hold accountable and one you have to take on faith.
Can I talk to a client in my trade, and what’s the contract?
The last two questions travel together, because both test whether the agency expects to earn your business or lock it in. References should come from your industry: a roofer they’ve grown, a plumber who will take your call, an HVAC owner who’ll tell you what the first six months were like. Logos on a website are not references. Any agency serious about home services can produce a client in your trade or one next door to it, and if every case study is a software company, you’re about to fund their education.
On contracts, month-to-month or a short commitment after a fair setup period beats a 12-month lock every time. Setup work is real, so a few months of commitment while tracking and accounts get built is a fair ask. A year is not; long contracts exist to protect an agency from its own results. Our own answer on minimums is published on the FAQ page, and an agency worth hiring will answer the same question just as plainly, in writing, before you sign.
When you shouldn’t hire an agency at all
If your business does less than about $500,000 a year, do the free work before you pay anyone. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Ask every happy customer for a review, the day the job finishes. Answer the phone every time it rings, including Saturday. Those three things are the foundation any competent agency would start with anyway, and they cost nothing but attention. The best marketing for home services companies under that line is not purchased; it’s operational.
An agency can’t fix an unanswered phone. It can only make the phone ring more often, which means paying to waste calls faster. The businesses that get the most out of our home services work in Atlanta arrive with the basics handled: a profile with reviews on it, a human answering the phone, and a clear idea of which jobs they want more of. Get there first, then hire.
How agencies charge, and what each model rewards
Every pricing model creates an incentive, and you should know which incentive you’re buying. A flat monthly retainer means the agency earns the same whether you spend $3,000 or $30,000 on ads, so its only reason to keep you is results you can see. A percentage of ad spend means the agency earns more when you spend more: at 15%, a $10,000 monthly ad budget pays the agency $1,500 whether or not the phone rings, and $3,000 if they talk you up to $20,000. That is why percentage shops so reliably recommend bigger budgets. Pay-per-lead sounds like the safest deal but rewards volume over quality, because a lead is a phone call or a form fill, not a booked job; you can drown in leads that never turn into work and still get a glowing report.
None of these models is dishonest by itself, and each has a version run well. But the model shapes the advice you’ll get for years, so ask the question, get the answer in writing, and then weigh every future recommendation with the incentive in mind.
Run the call in an afternoon
These five are the questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign anything, and they work because they can’t be answered with a portfolio. Account ownership, the first number reported, the first 30 days, a reference in your trade, and the contract terms: each one forces the agency to describe how it treats a client’s money when the client isn’t watching.
The agency you want treats your money like its own. It would rather turn down a bad-fit client than sign one, and it reports the number you’d check anyway: jobs booked, and what each one cost. Five questions, one afternoon of phone calls. The weak agencies will disqualify themselves before you reach question three.