Most contractors who’ve hired a Google Ads agency before share a familiar story. The agency promised leads, ran some ads, sent a report packed with impressions and click-through rates, and kept collecting their management fee while the phone stayed quiet. The problem usually isn’t Google Ads itself. It’s that the agency running the campaigns had no idea how contractor businesses actually work.
They didn’t understand seasonal demand swings, job ticket sizes, the difference between a tire-kicker and a booked estimate, or why a roofing company in Phoenix needs completely different targeting than one in Cleveland. Generic agency work produces generic results, and in contractor markets where cost per click is already high, there’s no room to pay for someone’s learning curve.
This guide is for contractors who are done guessing. Whether you’re evaluating agencies for the first time or replacing one that underdelivered, these are the specific things worth checking before you hand anyone access to your ad account. None of this requires a marketing background. It requires knowing what questions to ask and recognizing which answers should make you walk away.
We’ll cover how agencies should structure contractor campaigns, what reporting actually matters, how to spot an agency recycling a generic template, and what a real partnership looks like versus a vendor relationship. By the end, you’ll have a clear framework for making a smarter hire.
1. Check Whether They’ve Actually Run Campaigns in Your Trade
The Challenge It Solves
General home services experience and trade-specific experience are not the same thing. An agency that has run HVAC campaigns understands emergency intent, seasonal demand spikes, and the difference between a repair call and a replacement opportunity. One that hasn’t will spend your budget figuring that out, and you’ll be paying for the education.
The Strategy Explained
Ask directly: have you run campaigns for a roofing company, an HVAC company, a plumber? Not “home services broadly” but your specific trade. Then go deeper. Ask what the typical cost per lead looks like in your trade in your market. Ask how they handle the seasonal slowdown. Ask whether they’ve worked with contractors in your state or region.
An agency with real contractor experience will answer these without hesitation. They’ll reference CPL benchmarks, mention how they adjust bids heading into slow season, and talk about the difference between emergency service campaigns and planned project campaigns. An agency without that experience will pivot to talking about their process, their platform certifications, or their general track record. Those aren’t bad things, but they’re not answers to your question.
Clicks Geek has built trade-specific playbooks across 298 industries, including roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and general contracting. That depth comes from managing over $100 million in ad spend across more than 10,000 campaigns since 2015. When a contractor asks about their trade, we should be able to answer specifically, and so should any agency you’re seriously considering.
Implementation Steps
1. Ask the agency to name three contractors they’ve run campaigns for, ideally in your trade or a closely related one.
2. Ask what CPL benchmarks they typically see for your trade in competitive markets. Home services Google Ads CPL generally runs between $18 and $35, and an experienced agency should be able to speak to where your trade falls in that range.
3. Ask how they adjust strategy for seasonal shifts specific to your trade, not a generic answer about “adjusting bids in slow periods” but something that reflects knowledge of your business cycle.
Pro Tips
Watch for agencies that claim experience across every trade simultaneously. Depth matters more than breadth. An agency that has run 50 HVAC campaigns will outperform one that has run two campaigns in every home services category. Specificity in their answers is a good signal. Vagueness is a red flag.
2. Understand How They Structure a Contractor Campaign from Day One
The Challenge It Solves
Campaign structure is where most agencies quietly fail contractor clients. A poorly structured account throws emergency service searches, planned project searches, and brand searches into the same campaign, competing for the same budget with the same bids. The result is wasted spend, diluted performance data, and no clear picture of what’s actually working.
The Strategy Explained
A properly built contractor campaign separates intent from the start. Emergency searches, think “AC not working” or “burst pipe,” represent a buyer who needs someone today. Planned project searches, like “HVAC system replacement” or “roof replacement cost,” represent a buyer in research mode who will take longer to convert but often carries a higher job ticket. These two audiences need different ads, different landing pages, and different bid strategies.
Beyond intent segmentation, good structure means separate campaigns or ad groups for each major service line, geographic targeting that reflects your actual service area rather than a broad metro radius, and device bid adjustments that account for the fact that 40 to 70 percent of contractor leads arrive by phone. Ask the agency to walk you through how they’d structure your account. If they describe a single campaign with a handful of ad groups, that’s a template setup. If they describe intent-based segmentation and service line separation, that’s someone who understands the work.
Also ask about Local Services Ads. LSAs now appear above traditional Google Ads for many contractor searches. A competent agency should have a clear position on whether LSAs belong in your strategy alongside Search campaigns and why.
Implementation Steps
1. Ask the agency to describe, specifically, how they would structure your account in the first 30 days. Listen for intent segmentation and service line separation, not just “we’ll set up your campaigns and optimize from there.”
2. Ask how they determine your geographic targeting. Do they use your actual service zip codes or a radius around your office? The answer matters more than it sounds.
3. Ask whether they include Local Services Ads in their contractor strategies and how they manage the relationship between LSAs and Search campaigns.
Pro Tips
Request a sample account structure or a mock build for your business. Agencies with real contractor experience can sketch one out quickly. Agencies without it will stall or give you something generic. The willingness to show their work before you sign is itself a signal about how transparent they’ll be once you’re a client.
3. Demand Clarity on What They’re Actually Optimizing For
The Challenge It Solves
Clicks are not leads. Leads are not booked jobs. Many agencies optimize for the metric they can most easily show improvement on, which is usually clicks or click-through rate. Those numbers can go up while your revenue goes nowhere, and the agency still looks good on paper. Contractors need an agency optimizing for cost per lead and call volume, not vanity metrics.
The Strategy Explained
The question to ask is simple: what metric are you primarily optimizing for, and how do you track it? The answer should center on conversions, specifically phone calls and form submissions that represent actual lead activity. If the agency starts talking about Quality Score, impression share, or CTR as their primary focus, that’s a sign they’re managing for their report card rather than your revenue.
Proper conversion tracking for contractor campaigns means call tracking with recording, form submission tracking, and ideally some connection to your CRM or booking system so you can see which leads actually turned into jobs. Call recording is standard practice in this space. Any agency not offering it is operating below what the industry considers baseline.
Ask specifically: do you set up call tracking? Do you record calls? How do you distinguish between a qualified lead call and a wrong number or existing customer call? An agency that has thought through these questions will have clear answers. One that hasn’t will give you a vague answer about “tracking all conversions.”
Implementation Steps
1. Ask what their primary optimization metric is for contractor campaigns and how they define a conversion in your account.
2. Confirm that call tracking and call recording are included in their service, not an add-on or a third-party tool you’re expected to set up yourself.
3. Ask how they handle lead quality. Do they review call recordings? Do they flag irrelevant calls so they don’t inflate your conversion numbers?
Pro Tips
The best agencies will push you to connect ad performance to actual booked revenue, not just lead volume. If an agency is satisfied knowing they generated 40 calls last month without caring how many became jobs, that’s a gap in accountability. The goal is booked work, and the agency should be oriented toward that outcome even if they can’t directly control your close rate.
4. Read the Reporting Before You Sign Anything
The Challenge It Solves
A report full of impressions, Quality Scores, and click-through rates tells you almost nothing about whether your ad spend is generating jobs. Agencies that lead with those metrics are often burying the numbers that actually matter, usually because the numbers that matter aren’t good. Understanding what a real contractor report looks like before you start protects you from months of confusion.
The Strategy Explained
Ask to see a sample report from a current or past client, with identifying information removed. A useful contractor report centers on cost per lead, lead volume by week or month, call volume and call duration, and trends over time. It should be readable by someone who isn’t a digital marketing professional. If you need a glossary to understand the report your agency sends you, that’s a design choice, and not one made in your favor.
The report should also show search term data. You want to know what searches triggered your ads, because that tells you whether your budget is reaching buyers or browsers. If the agency’s report doesn’t include search term analysis, ask why. That data is available in every Google Ads account and there’s no legitimate reason to exclude it.
Reporting frequency matters too. Monthly reporting is standard, but contractor markets move fast. Ask whether you can get weekly check-ins during the ramp period, which typically runs 30 to 90 days, and what the process is if performance drops unexpectedly mid-month.
Implementation Steps
1. Request a sample report before signing. If the agency won’t share one, that tells you something.
2. Confirm that cost per lead and call volume are prominently featured, not buried beneath impressions and CTR data.
3. Ask how they report on search terms and what their process is for reviewing irrelevant traffic each month.
Pro Tips
The best reporting doesn’t just show you what happened. It explains why and what the agency is doing about it. A report that says “CPL increased this month” without an explanation and an action plan is a report designed to check a box, not to run your business better. Hold the agency to that standard from the first month.
5. Verify Their Position on Landing Pages and Website Conversion
The Challenge It Solves
Sending paid traffic to a homepage is one of the most common and costly mistakes in contractor advertising. A homepage is built for general audiences. A buyer searching for emergency plumbing at 11pm or a homeowner getting three quotes for a roof replacement needs to land on a page built specifically for that intent. Without that, you’re paying for clicks that arrive and immediately leave.
The Strategy Explained
Ask the agency directly: where will my traffic land? If the answer is “your existing website,” ask what they’ll do to make sure those pages convert. If the answer is “we’ll build dedicated landing pages,” ask who owns those pages, who builds them, and what happens to them if you leave.
A proper contractor landing page loads fast on mobile, includes trust signals like reviews, license numbers, and years in business, features a prominent phone number that’s clickable on mobile, and matches the specific service the ad was promoting. A page for emergency AC repair should not look identical to a page for HVAC system installation. The intent is different, the buyer’s urgency is different, and the page should reflect that.
Landing page ownership is also worth clarifying upfront. Some agencies build pages on their own platform and retain ownership when you leave. That means you lose the pages, the conversion data, and any performance history when you switch. Contractor-owned landing pages, built on your domain or transferred to you, are the standard you should expect.
Implementation Steps
1. Ask whether the agency builds dedicated landing pages or sends traffic to your existing site. If they build pages, confirm ownership terms before signing.
2. Ask to see examples of landing pages they’ve built for contractors in your trade. Look for mobile speed, clear CTAs, and trust signals.
3. Ask how they test and improve landing page performance over time. A/B testing and conversion rate optimization should be part of the ongoing work, not a one-time setup.
Pro Tips
Page speed on mobile is not optional for contractor campaigns. A significant share of emergency service searches happen on phones, often by people who need help right now. A page that takes more than three seconds to load will lose a meaningful portion of that traffic before anyone sees your phone number. Ask the agency what their standard is for mobile load time and how they enforce it.
6. Ask Exactly How They Handle Negative Keywords and Budget Waste
The Challenge It Solves
Contractor ad accounts attract a disproportionate share of irrelevant traffic. People searching for contractor jobs, DIY repair tutorials, parts suppliers, trade school programs, and salary information all trigger contractor keywords. Without aggressive negative keyword management, a real portion of every month’s budget gets spent on clicks that will never convert into a booked job.
The Strategy Explained
Ask the agency what their negative keyword process looks like, both at launch and on an ongoing basis. At launch, a competent agency should come in with a pre-built negative keyword list specific to contractor industries. Terms like “DIY,” “how to fix,” “parts,” “school,” “training,” “jobs,” “salary,” “license exam,” and “near me for free” are predictable sources of wasted spend in contractor accounts. An agency that builds these lists fresh for every client, rather than maintaining a proven library, is behind the curve.
Ongoing negative keyword management is equally important. Search behavior shifts, new irrelevant queries appear, and without weekly or bi-weekly search term reviews, budget waste compounds over time. Ask how often they review search term reports and what their process is for adding new negatives. If the answer is “monthly,” push for more frequency during the ramp period.
This is also a good moment to ask about match type strategy. Broad match keywords without strong negative keyword coverage can drain a contractor budget quickly. Understanding how the agency balances reach with precision tells you a lot about how they think about budget stewardship.
Implementation Steps
1. Ask whether the agency has a pre-built negative keyword list for contractor industries and request to see it or a representative sample.
2. Confirm how often they review search term reports and add new negatives. Weekly during the first 90 days is a reasonable expectation.
3. Ask how they approach match type strategy and what guardrails they use to prevent broad match from generating irrelevant traffic.
Pro Tips
Budget waste from poor negative keyword management is invisible in most agency reports because agencies don’t typically highlight it. Pull the search terms report yourself in Google Ads, even if you’re not running the account day to day. Look for searches that triggered your ads and ask yourself whether that person was ever going to hire you. If you see a pattern of irrelevant traffic, that’s a conversation worth having with your agency immediately.
7. Evaluate the Contract Terms Before You Commit
The Challenge It Solves
The contract structure tells you a great deal about how an agency views the relationship before you’ve spent a dollar with them. Long lock-in agreements, agency-owned ad accounts, and opaque fee structures all shift risk onto the contractor. These terms protect the agency, not you, and they’re worth scrutinizing before you sign anything.
The Strategy Explained
There are three specific things to check. First, who owns the Google Ads account? Account ownership disputes are a known issue in the industry. If the agency creates the account under their Google MCC and retains ownership, you lose all of your campaign history, conversion data, and audience data if you ever switch. Your account should be created in your name or transferred to your ownership from day one. This is non-negotiable.
Second, what are the contract terms? Month-to-month agreements signal an agency that expects to earn your business every month rather than lock you in and coast. Long-term contracts aren’t inherently wrong, but a six-month or year-long commitment with significant cancellation penalties shifts all the risk to you. Clicks Geek operates without lock-in contracts for exactly this reason.
Third, how is the management fee structured? Flat monthly fees are easier to budget and align the agency’s incentives with performance rather than spend. Percentage-of-spend models create an incentive to increase your budget regardless of whether it’s producing returns. Ask how the fee changes as your spend scales and whether there are any additional charges for setup, landing pages, call tracking, or reporting.
Implementation Steps
1. Confirm in writing that you will own the Google Ads account, not the agency. Ask for admin access before any campaigns go live.
2. Review the cancellation terms carefully. Understand what you’re entitled to take with you if you leave, including campaign data, landing pages, and creative assets.
3. Ask for a full breakdown of all fees, including setup, management, and any tools or platforms billed separately. Get this in writing before you sign.
Pro Tips
An agency that pushes back on account ownership or insists on a long lock-in before they’ll take you on is telling you something about how they expect the relationship to go. The best agencies are confident enough in their results that they don’t need contractual leverage to keep clients. If an agency needs a 12-month contract to feel secure, ask yourself why.
Putting It All Together
Hiring the right Google Ads agency as a contractor comes down to one real question: do they understand your business well enough to make your phone ring with qualified buyers? The seven checkpoints above give you a structured way to evaluate any agency before you commit a dollar of budget.
Start with trade experience and campaign structure. Those two things predict almost everything else. If an agency can’t speak specifically to your trade’s cost per lead benchmarks, can’t explain how they’d separate emergency service traffic from planned project traffic, and can’t show you a reporting sample that focuses on booked jobs rather than clicks, keep looking.
The agencies worth hiring will welcome these questions. They’ll have direct answers, not vague promises about “driving results” and “growing your business.” Specificity is the tell. Vagueness is the warning sign.
Clicks Geek has been running contractor campaigns since 2015. As a Google Premier Partner with trade-specific playbooks built from managing over $100 million in ad spend across more than 10,000 campaigns, we can speak to your market, your trade, and your cost per lead expectations without guessing. We work month-to-month, your account stays yours, and we’re happy to show you exactly how we’d approach your campaigns before you commit to anything.
If you want to see what this would look like for your business, we’ll walk you through how it works and break down what’s realistic in your market.
