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

If the invoices keep arriving and you still cannot say whether the marketing company produced a single qualified inquiry, the reporting is not built for the question you are asking. That is a measurement problem, it is fixable, and it has to be fixed before anyone can judge the work fairly.

Activity measures are worth having and they are not results. Ask for the line connecting the activity to leads and booked work, and ask it as a reporting question, because a missing number usually means nobody set the tracking up.

What the monthly report does and does not establish

A typical agency report opens with traffic and keyword positions. Those describe visibility, and visibility is the input. Put qualified inquiries and booked jobs beside them and you have something you can make a decision on.

Rankings and traffic on their own have never made a payroll. Ask the provider to draw the line from the work they did to the inquiries you received and the jobs you booked, and to write down where that line gets uncertain.

"Traffic and rankings describe visibility. Qualified inquiries and booked jobs show whether that visibility contributed to the business goal."

Use five questions to bring the review back to outcomes. We covered what to ask before signing with a marketing company. These apply once work and spend have begun.

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

This question tests whether anyone set up call measurement at all. Call tracking, Business Profile reporting and simply asking customers how they found you each carry their own blind spots, so a good answer gives you a number, the method behind it, and how much confidence to put on it.

If the answer is "we don't track calls, but visibility is up," you have no idea what you bought. A Riverside home service business should get call and inquiry measurement in place first, then ask the question again in thirty days.

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

Forms and quote requests are the second half of your inquiry count. Ask for the number, how each submission was validated, where it came from, and what happened to it afterwards. Spam classification is imperfect everywhere, so expect the figure to arrive with a caveat.

This matters most where customers research before they contact anybody. San Jose renovation and home service businesses should track the research paths, the quote requests, the lead quality and what sales did with them. Ninety days with no requests has several possible causes, and working out which one you have is the next job.

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

This is the question you can answer yourself. You know which jobs you booked this quarter, so pick five recent ones and trace each one backward: how did that customer find you? Some came from referrals and repeat business, which existed before the agency did. What you are looking for is whether any of them came from search, the website, or the Google profile.

Closed-job data is the only place commercial value actually shows up. The SBA's business management guidance makes the same point about connecting spend to revenue alongside lead quality, margin and completed work. If the reporting never touches job source, write that gap down and put it on the agenda for the next review.

Question 4: What did each lead cost me?

Take everything you paid last month, ad spend included, and divide it by the real leads from Questions 1 and 2. That is your cost per lead. At 90 days the number is allowed to be ugly. What it cannot be is missing, and it needs a direction of travel.

A $2,000 monthly retainer producing 20 qualified leads costs you $100 a lead. The same retainer producing two costs $1,000 a lead. Neither number is profit until you set close rate, job value, gross margin and retention against it, and an expensive lead that closes on a large job can beat a cheap one that never books. San Francisco home service businesses can run the same calculation on their own costs, which is the only version of it that means anything.

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

The last question tests whether anyone is steering. Marketing that works is iterative: somebody looks at what produced calls, does more of it, and cuts what produced nothing. Ask directly what changes next month and why. This is the question I would keep asking even in a month when the numbers looked good, because a provider with no answer to it is on autopilot.

You want to hear what changes, what continues, what stops, and which evidence sits behind each of those calls. In Fresno's home service market, the weather hands you obvious seasonal hypotheses worth testing. A calendar-driven April campaign with no evidence behind it is a habit somebody never questioned.

What 90 days should look like

Set the review window from your channel, your baseline, your sales cycle and the work plan. Ninety days is a convention that suits some engagements and badly misfits others, so agree the date at the start. By that date you should have documented measurement, the completed work, the spend, what you observed, what is still uncertain, and what happens next. See how to evaluate an SEO company and the contractor marketing agency checklist.

If the provider cannot answer these five questions at the agreed review, name exactly which data is missing and agree whether it can be put right. Then let the renewal follow the evidence, the contract, and whatever uncertainty is left over.