You hired an agency because marketing isn't your job. That also means you're not in a great position to grade the work, which is an awkward spot to be in when you're writing the check every month. The report shows up, a few arrows point up, and you're left guessing at whether any of it matters.
The short version, if you're in a hurry; a good agency can tell you what goal it's working toward, show you leads and revenue instead of impressions and followers, explain the reasoning behind what it chose to do, and tell you when something isn't working before you find out yourself.
The longer version takes a few minutes and doesn't require you to understand SEO or ad platforms. There's also a budget question sitting underneath all of this, plus a couple of things that might not be your agency's fault at all. We'll get to those.
Start With the Goal
Before you judge anything else, ask what your marketing is supposed to be doing this year.
Not "more leads." Every business wants more leads. We mean something specific enough that it would change how your office manager builds next month's schedule. Adding fifteen commercial accounts. Growing the termite side because the margins beat general pest work. Filling the second service area you expanded into last spring. Getting more customers onto recurring plans instead of one-off calls.
If nobody on your side can answer that, your agency is guessing, and so are you. If you can answer it and your agency has never once brought it up, that's worth raising on your next call. The only honest way to judge the work is against what it was supposed to accomplish.
Your Report Should Sound Like Your Business
Most reports we see aren't dishonest. They're just full of numbers that would never come up in a management meeting. Impressions. Followers. Sessions. Rankings for search terms nobody in your market types. A list of tasks completed last month.
None of it is fake. And it is all good information for a marketer to assess and base strategy around. It's just not what you care about or the conversation you need to be having.
The numbers worth arguing about are the ones tied to the phone ringing:
- Leads by source, with calls and form fills counted separately
- Cost per lead by channel
- Search trends in your area (especially for seasonal services like pest control)
- Which services and which towns those leads came from
- Booked jobs and revenue by source, if you can get that data back to your agency
Here's a quick test. If traffic is up 30% and your lead count hasn't moved, does the report say so? It should, and you shouldn't have to go looking for it.
You should also be able to pull these numbers yourself whenever you feel like it. Waiting on a monthly PDF hasn't been necessary for years. Every client we work with has a dashboard they can open at any time.
When this is all working, it looks like a pest control company we took over from another agency: 206% organic lead growth in three months and a 28.3% drop in cost per lead on Local Services Ads. Those are numbers you can do something with.
Activity 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 have a directional answer for you right there, even if they want to check the numbers before committing to specifics. If it takes a week and a follow-up email, that tells you something.
How Long Before You Should Expect Something
A fair amount of the frustration we hear has less to do with the work than with the clock. Different channels come back on different schedules, and holding all of them to the same standard is how good campaigns get killed early.
Google Ads and Local Services Ads should show positive strides somewhere in the 30 to 90 day range. A new account starts with no conversion history, so early cost per lead is usually rough, and in a competitive market it can take a while to gain traction at all. LSAs carry an extra wrinkle, because your ranking depends heavily on review volume and how quickly you answer the phone, and no campaign setting fixes either one.
SEO and content run on six months and up. Rankings and impressions on your target pages should climb well before lead volume moves, and a brand new service area takes longer than a market where you already have some footing.
Website and conversion work depends on how much traffic you get. A site with real volume can tell you whether a redesign helped within a few months. A smaller site takes longer, because a handful of extra form fills isn't enough to call it either way.
Treat all of those as ranges rather than promises. The more useful question is whether your agency gave you a realistic window before the work started and can show you where you stand against it now. Ask what you should reasonably be seeing at this point in the campaign, then ask again next quarter.
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 pest control specifically, the 2025 NPMA and PCO Bookkeepers Cost Study put marketing and advertising at 6.6% of revenue on average. Companies chasing aggressive growth generally spend more than that, though how much more depends on your margins, your market, and how much capacity you actually have to fill. If you're sitting well under the average and frustrated about your growth rate, we'd rather have that conversation with you than let you spend another year annoyed. Our marketing journey planner 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.
When the Leads Are Fine and the Jobs Still Don't Close
Sometimes the leads are coming in at a reasonable cost and they're dying somewhere between the phone ringing and the job getting booked. Calls rolling to voicemail during the workday. Estimates nobody follows up on. Three days between a form submission and a callback. Pricing that's drifted out of step with your market. Or a schedule so full that your CSR is quietly talking people out of booking.
When that's what's happening, a new agency fixes nothing. You'll spend six months onboarding somebody else and end up in the same spot with less data than you had before.
It's a fair thing to put on us, too. We can tell you how many calls came in and how many got answered, which is usually the quickest way to find out whether the problem lives before the phone rings or after. That's part of why we wrote about Google charging for missed Local Services Ads calls, since an unanswered call now costs you the job and the lead charge on top of it.
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, which sounds like a pleasant thing to say until you look at what it actually asks of both sides.
Your agency should know your business and not just your website. Your margins by service line. How many trucks you can put out in a week. Your close rate. Which jobs you'd happily stop taking. We can't prioritize a commercial campaign properly if we don't know a commercial account is worth four residential ones to you.
You should hear bad news from them first. Every program has months that don't go well. What matters is whether it's talked about and a strategy change made, or you discover it on your own and have to advise on next steps.
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 weaker than either of you thinks it is.
Questions for Your Next Call
Paste these into the calendar invite if it helps:
- What's our main goal right now,?
- How many leads came in last month, from where, and at what cost each?
- What's not working, and what are we doing about it?
- Where would an extra 25% of budget go, and what would you protect if we cut 25%?
- How far into this campaign are we, and what should I reasonably expect at this point?
- Are we funding this at a level that matches what we said we wanted?
Most of these should get a real answer on the spot.
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 and timelines, 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.
