You're not a marketer. That's most of the reason you hired one, and it's also what makes the work hard to judge. A report arrives every month, a few numbers are up, and you still can't say whether the money is doing anything for the business.
You don't need to learn SEO or ad platform mechanics to answer this. You need to look at four things: the goal, the reporting, the strategy, and the honesty of the relationship. You also need to be fair about what you're actually paying for, which is the part nobody likes to bring up.
Can Anyone State the Goal in One Sentence?
Start here, because everything after it depends on the answer.
What is your marketing supposed to accomplish over the next twelve months? "More leads" isn't an answer. A real one sounds like:
- Add fifteen commercial accounts
- Grow the termite side of the business, which carries better margins than general pest work
- Fill the schedule in the service area we expanded into last year
- Replace one-off calls with recurring service plans
- Keep the phone ringing through the slow season without discounting
If you can't state the goal, your agency has nothing to aim at and no fair way to be measured. If you can state it and your agency has never referenced it, that's a real problem. Good work isn't an absolute standard. It only means something relative to what you were trying to do.
Look at What Gets Reported
Reporting is where the gap usually shows up. Plenty of reports are technically accurate and still tell you nothing about your business.
Numbers that don't mean much on their own:
- Impressions
- Social followers and post likes
- Total website sessions
- Rankings for keywords nobody in your market actually types
- Tasks completed or hours worked
Numbers that connect to your business:
- Leads by source, with calls and form submissions counted separately
- Cost per lead by channel
- Website conversion rate
- Which services and which locations the leads came from
- Booked jobs and revenue by source, when you can feed that data back
Traffic going up while leads stay flat is information, not a win. If your report celebrates the first number and never mentions the second, ask why. Transparency is also key. All clients at Momentum have access to our Bridge Marketing Portal, that gives live real time reporting for key performance metrics.
For a sense of what this looks like when it's working, one of our pest control clients went from a stalled marketing program to 206% organic lead growth in three months and a 28.3% lower cost per lead on Local Services Ads. Those are business numbers, and they're the ones the client cared about.
Picking the smaller investment and expecting the bigger investment's results is the homeowner who wants a one-time treatment and then calls you in August about the ants.
get startedActivity Reports and Actual Strategy
There's a version of the monthly call where your agency reads you a list. Four blog posts, ads optimized, listings updated. All of it might be perfectly good work, and none of it explains why those four blog posts instead of four different ones.
What you want to hear is the reasoning. Why this service and not that one. What last quarter's data changed about this quarter's plan. What's going sideways right now and what's being done about it.
If you only ask one thing, ask this: if you handed them 25% more budget, where would it go, and if you pulled 25% out, what would they protect? Someone who has been thinking about your business will answer on the spot. If it takes a week and a follow-up email, that tells you something.
The Part Nobody Wants to Bring Up
Now we have to be honest about our own industry, and about ourselves.
Not every client gets the same work, because not every client is funding the same work. A company paying for local SEO and website upkeep is buying something genuinely different from a company funding SEO, paid search, Local Services Ads, content, and email all at once. Both can be done well. They won't produce the same results, and it isn't fair to either side to pretend otherwise.
We don't sell packages. There's no bronze, silver, and gold page on our site and there isn't going to be one. We build the plan around what you're trying to accomplish and what your market looks like, which means the scope is different for every client we have. Usually that conversation ends with two numbers on the table: what we'd recommend to hit your goal on the timeline you want, and what a slower version looks like if the first number is more than you want to spend right now.
Both are fine answers. We've had clients take the smaller number for a year, grow into the bigger one, and do well the whole way. Where it falls apart is when somebody picks the smaller number and expects the bigger number's results. You already know how that goes from your own business. It's the homeowner who wants the one-time treatment and then calls you in August wondering why the ants are back.
For what it's worth, the NPMA and PCO Bookkeepers cost study puts average marketing spend in the trades at around 6.6% of revenue, and companies pushing hard on growth tend to run 10% to 15%. If you're sitting well under that and frustrated about your growth rate, we'd rather have that conversation with you than let you spend another year annoyed. Our budget calculator is a decent place to start, and we've written more on setting a budget and what agencies charge.
So before you decide the work is bad, ask yourself what you actually agreed to fund, what you were told to expect from it, and whether anyone has revisited that conversation since you signed. If the answer to the last one is no, bring it up. It's fair to expect your agency to bring it up too.
The Relationship Is Usually the Tell
The accounts that go best for us don't feel like vendor arrangements. They feel like the same team.
Both sides should feel the freedom to talk about big wins and big concerns. If you dread a conversation with your agency, or you can't have a conversation with your agency, you likely are not going to successfully work together to hit your business goals.
They should also tell you not to spend money sometimes. If an agency has never recommended pausing something, or said a tactic isn't worth it for your business, take the next upsell with a grain of salt.
And you should be able to say something's bothering you without it getting weird. If raising a concern feels risky, the relationship is thinner than either of you thinks it is.
What to Do From Here
If your agency can tell you the goal, show you numbers that mean something, explain the thinking behind the plan, and talk honestly about money, you're probably in decent shape even during a quiet month. Quiet months happen to everybody.
If none of that has been true for a while, start with a conversation rather than a search for somebody new. Tell them what you expected, what you're actually seeing, and what you're willing to spend. Any agency worth keeping will either close the gap or tell you straight that your goal and your budget don't line up. Either answer gives you something to work with. It's the ones who can't give you either that should worry you.
We're glad to look at what you're getting now and give you an honest read on it, even if it doesn't go anywhere with us. Get in touch or call us at (207) 813-4735.
