Contractors get pitched by marketing agencies constantly, and the pitches sound identical. Here are the questions that actually separate them, and what a good answer sounds like.
1. What will you not promise?
Ask it directly. An agency that cannot name a single thing it will not promise is either inexperienced or telling you what you want to hear.
Rankings, lead volume and top-three positions all depend on your market, your budget and your competition. None of them can be honestly guaranteed. An agency that guarantees them has either found a loophole in the definition or is planning to argue about it later.
2. Do you work with my competitors?
If an agency runs three general contractors in Salt Lake City, your budget is bidding against their other clients in the same ad auction, and every strategic insight they learn from you is available to the firm down the road.
Some agencies will tell you this is fine because the accounts are separate. The auction does not care that the accounts are separate.
3. Who owns the accounts?
Your Google Ads account, your Business Profile, your domain, your website and your call data should be in your name, and you should have admin access to all of them from day one.
Agencies that build in their own accounts are creating an exit cost. When you leave, you leave without your ad history, your conversion data, and sometimes your site. Ask specifically what happens to each asset if you part ways.
4. How are you paid, and does it change with my spend?
Percentage-of-spend pricing means the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not the extra spend produced anything. That is a misaligned incentive and it is worth understanding before you sign.
Flat retainer by scope means you can see exactly what you pay the agency and exactly what goes to Google or Meta. Ask for that split in writing.
5. What will you report, and in what unit?
Impressions and clicks are activity. Calls, booked site visits and signed projects are outcomes. Ask which you will be shown monthly.
Specifically, ask whether calls are tracked and attributed to the channel that produced them. If they are not, nobody in the relationship can tell which half of the budget is working, and you will be making renewal decisions on feel.
6. What happens in the first thirty days?
A good answer is specific and mostly unglamorous: audit, tracking installed, Business Profile fixed, the obvious keyword waste cut, landing pages built for the services you actually want. A vague answer about strategy and brand positioning usually means the first month is a discovery invoice.
The contract terms that matter
Beyond the questions, look at three things in the agreement:
- Term length. Ninety days is a reasonable ask to get past setup and see data. Twelve months with no exit is not.
- Notice period. Thirty days is normal. Ninety is a trap.
- What you keep. Site, content, accounts, data. Get it in writing.
7. What happens if it is not working at month six?
Ask it before signing, because the answer tells you how they think about accountability. A good agency has a real answer: what they would change, what they would stop, and at what point they would tell you to spend the money elsewhere.
An agency that cannot imagine the scenario is either inexperienced or planning to blame the market.
8. Who is actually doing the work?
You are frequently pitched by the owner and handed to somebody else. That is normal and not a problem in itself — but you should know who, how many other accounts they hold, and whether any of it is subcontracted offshore.
The answer worth worrying about is a vague one.
Warning signs in the pitch itself
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody can guarantee a position, and with local results varying by the searcher's location there is no single position to guarantee.
- A report full of vanity numbers. Impressions, reach and traffic without a line connecting them to booked work.
- Pressure to sign this week. Marketing decisions do not expire on Friday.
- No mention of tracking. An agency that has not asked how you currently attribute calls is not planning to measure anything.
- An audit that is clearly automated. A generic scan with your name at the top took ninety seconds, and it tells you what the account management will look like.
- They will not name a specific first action. A competent agency can tell you, in the first conversation, what they would change first and why.
What a fair arrangement looks like
A short initial commitment, usually around ninety days, so there is time to get past setup and see real data — followed by month to month. Anything longer than that at the start is asking you to underwrite their risk.
Ad spend paid directly to the platform, on your own card, in your own account. Fees quoted separately and visibly. Accounts in your name. Everything exportable if you leave.
None of that is unusual to ask for, and the reaction to being asked is itself informative.
Our own answers
Since it would be strange to publish this without answering it: we will not promise rankings or lead volume, everything is built in your accounts under your domain, we charge a flat retainer by scope and never a percentage of ad spend, we report in calls attributed to source, and we ask for ninety days and then go month to month.
If another agency answers these better than we do, hire them. The questions matter more than who you ask them of.