Is My Marketing Company Actually Working? 5 Questions to Ask in 2026

You are three months in, the invoices keep arriving, and you honestly cannot tell whether the marketing company has produced a single job. You are not paranoid. That uncertainty is the most common complaint contractors have about marketing firms.

The second most common is harsher: "they took my money and disappeared." Both problems have the same root. The company gets measured on activity instead of outcomes, and activity is easy to fake.

Why the monthly report tells you nothing

The standard agency report shows traffic going up and keyword rankings with little green arrows. None of those numbers pay for a truck. Traffic can rise for months from blog visitors three states away who will never hire you. A keyword can hit page one and produce zero calls because nobody searches it with intent to buy.

There is a structural reason reports look like this. Rankings and traffic move with effort almost automatically, so they always give the agency something positive to show. Calls and booked jobs can stay flat even when activity is high, so an underperforming company has every incentive to keep the conversation on the metrics it controls. Any company that cannot connect its work to your phone has chosen not to make that connection.

"Traffic is what marketing companies show you when they cannot show you customers."

The fix is not learning to read SEO reports. It is asking five questions that force the conversation back to outcomes. We covered what to ask before signing with a marketing company. These are the questions for after, once real money has gone out the door.

Question 1: How many phone calls came from your work this month?

This is the first question because it exposes whether measurement was ever set up. A competent company installs call tracking in week one: a forwarding number on the website and Google Business Profile that records how many calls came from search, from ads, and from the profile. The answer should be a number, not an estimate.

If the response is "we don't track calls, but your visibility is up," you have learned something important. The company either never built the plumbing to measure its own results or built it and does not like what it shows. In a high-volume market like Riverside's home service market, where homeowners search at night and call the first credible result in the morning, calls are the entire game. A vendor not counting them is not playing it.

Question 2: How many quote requests did the website generate?

Calls are half the picture. The other half is form fills and quote requests, and these are even easier to track because every submission leaves a record. Ask for the number, and ask what happened to each one. A serious company knows which requests were real prospects and which were spam.

This matters most where customers research before reaching out. San Jose's renovation and home service market runs on high-income homeowners who compare contractors online for weeks before submitting a single request. If your site is not producing quote requests there after 90 days, either the site has a credibility problem or the traffic arriving at it was never going to hire anyone.

Question 3: Which jobs on the books came from marketing?

Here is where you participate. You know which jobs you booked this quarter. Pick five recent ones and trace them backward: how did that customer find you? Some came from referrals and repeat business, which existed before the agency did. The question is whether any came from search, the website, or the Google profile.

A good company will ask you for this information, because closed jobs are how it proves its own value. The SBA's business management guidance calls this connecting marketing spend to revenue, and it is the only measurement that matters at renewal time. A company that has never once asked where your jobs came from is reporting in a vacuum on purpose.

Question 4: What did each lead cost me?

Take everything you paid last month, including ad spend, and divide it by the number of real leads from Questions 1 and 2. That is your cost per lead. It does not need to be impressive at 90 days. It needs to exist, and it needs a trend.

Knowing this number changes the conversation permanently. A $2,000 monthly retainer producing 20 real leads is $100 a lead, which most trades convert profitably. The same retainer producing two leads is $1,000 a lead, and no amount of ranking improvement excuses it. Competitive markets sharpen the point: San Francisco's home service trades sustain hundreds of contractors competing year-round, and the businesses that survive there know their acquisition cost the way they know their material costs.

Question 5: What changes next month based on these numbers?

The last question tests whether anyone is steering. Marketing that works is iterative: the company looks at what produced calls, does more of it, and cuts what produced nothing. So ask directly what they are changing next month and why.

A company doing real work has an immediate answer, because it was already planning the adjustment. A company coasting on a retainer will describe continuing the current activity. Timing makes this urgent in seasonal markets. In Fresno's heat-driven service market, where spring visibility determines summer revenue and 111 days above 90 degrees concentrate demand into a few months, a vendor that spends April "continuing to build momentum" has cost you the season.

What 90 days should look like

Fairness cuts both ways, so set honest expectations. SEO work rarely produces a flood of calls in the first 90 days, and a good company will have told you that upfront. What you should see by then: measurement installed and reported without being asked, early movement in calls or quote requests, a clear account of where the money went, and a specific plan that responds to the data. We wrote a deeper version of this for SEO contracts specifically in how to know if your SEO company is actually working. If you are still comparing options before signing, the contractor marketing agency evaluation checklist covers the criteria that separate accountable vendors from ones that hide behind traffic reports.

What you should never see at 90 days is a company that cannot answer the five questions above. The questions take one email to ask. The answers, or the silence, tell you whether to renew.