Agency Horror Stories Pt.2: Spooky Agency Stories
Five Agency Horror Stories Every Home Improvement Contractor Should Know
A contractor can have a strong sales team, a busy call center, and a healthy marketing budget and still lose leads because nobody is watching the systems behind the scenes. A website goes unmaintained. Paid search keeps spending on the wrong clicks. An SEO report celebrates rankings that never turn into appointments. By the time the problem becomes obvious, months of momentum may already be gone.
On a recent Halloween-season episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin of FatCat Strategies returned to their agency horror stories series with five more ways marketing relationships can go wrong. The company names in their examples are fictional, but the situations reflect real issues contractors encounter. Each story came with a practical antidote: secure, watch, measure, coordinate, and build.
The Break-In: When Nobody Owns Website Security
The first story follows Heritage Exteriors, a fictional roofing and siding contractor whose website was built years earlier and then largely left alone. One day, strange pages, spammy links, and redirects appeared. The owner discovered the problem by searching for the company online, not through an alert from a vendor.
For a contractor, a compromised website is more than a technical embarrassment. Paid ads, local listings, emails, and social posts all send prospects to that destination. Security warnings can drive homeowners away, while compromised landing pages can interrupt advertising and damage search visibility.
When Heritage asked who was responsible, the website builder said maintenance was outside its scope, the marketing vendor said it only managed ads, and no one could locate a recent backup. What could have been a manageable cleanup became an urgent operational problem.
The antidote is clear ownership. Contractors should ask, in writing, who handles website updates, security monitoring, backups, and recovery. They should also know who will pause campaigns if a compromised site is no longer a safe destination for paid traffic. As the hosts emphasized, the important question is not who built the website, but who keeps it safe.
The Autopilot Ghost: Paid Search Without Active Management
Summit Bath Solutions, a fictional one-day bath remodeling company, launched a Google Ads campaign with carefully selected keywords, ad copy, and a budget. The initial setup looked good. The trouble began when the agency stopped paying close attention.
Over time, searches for free bathtubs, repair parts, DIY projects, and jobs started triggering Summit’s ads. Every irrelevant click still consumed budget. The hosts also described accounts where spending drifts heavily toward searches for the contractor’s own name, while reports present the resulting clicks as a major success. In more severe cases, an overlooked billing or policy issue can suspend an account and cut off leads altogether.
Meredith and Caitlyn stressed that PPC is not a set-it-and-forget-it program. Search terms, negative keywords, budget pacing, lead quality, and account health need regular reviews. An agency should be able to explain which irrelevant searches it excluded recently and why.
The contractor has a role, too. A hundred form submissions that never become viable appointments are not equivalent to a smaller number of leads that sit and buy. Feedback from the call center, sales team, and CRM helps an agency distinguish volume from value.
The Rankings Mirage: SEO Wins That Do Not Produce Leads
At fictional Ridgeline Windows, the SEO report was full of page-one rankings and number-one positions. The owner searched the company name, saw the business at the top, and felt encouraged. Yet organic leads in the CRM had barely changed.
A closer look showed why. Some reported keywords were branded searches, some were unusually specific phrases with little demand, and some rankings reflected a particular device or location. The positions were not necessarily false; they simply were not strong evidence that new homeowners were finding Ridgeline.
Search results vary by location, device, and query. A homeowner shopping for replacement windows is more likely to search for the service in their town than for a company they do not yet know. They may also encounter a Google Business Profile before visiting a website.
The hosts acknowledged that SEO takes time, sometimes many months or longer depending on the market. Slow early results are not automatically evidence of poor work. The problem arises when an agency can show keyword positions but cannot connect progress to organic inquiries, Google Business Profile calls, appointments, or sold jobs.
The antidote is to measure nonbranded visibility and business outcomes together. Contractors should ask for rankings on terms homeowners actually use, then compare organic leads and calls against their own CRM. Searching the company name on a personal phone is not a reliable performance dashboard.
The Haunted Patchwork: Too Many Vendors, No Coordination
Tidewater Exteriors, another fictional contractor, had assembled its marketing piece by piece. One vendor built the website, a freelancer handled paid search, someone else sent emails, a family member posted on social media, and lead aggregators filled additional gaps. The owner was the only person who understood the full arrangement.
Then the website vendor updated a contact form. Homeowners could still submit leads, but the conversion tracking stopped recording them. The paid search freelancer saw conversions plummet, assumed the campaigns had stopped working, and cut spending. A tracking problem eventually became a real lead-volume problem.
Each vendor could defend its own work, but no one was accountable for what happened between systems. Caitlyn and Meredith said this kind of vendor fatigue is familiar: contractors often want a single point of contact who understands how the website, campaigns, tracking, and sales process fit together.
Their recommendation was not necessarily to eliminate every specialist. It was to eliminate silos. Contractors should maintain a simple list of vendors, responsibilities, and system access, document meaningful changes, and assign one person or partner to coordinate the entire marketing program.
The Rented House: Paying for Leads Without Building Assets
Fictional Cornerstone Bath signed up for a pay-per-lead program that initially appeared convenient. The vendor built a website using the contractor’s branding, controlled a similar-looking domain, funded advertising, answered calls, and transferred qualified prospects. The phones rang and the sales team stayed busy.
But when lead costs rose and Cornerstone considered ending the arrangement, the weakness became clear. The domain, site, campaign history, and underlying data belonged to the vendor. Once payments stopped, so did the lead flow. Cornerstone had bought volume without building a durable marketing asset of its own.
The hosts were careful not to dismiss pay-per-lead programs altogether. Purchased leads can be a useful supplement, especially when a contractor needs additional volume. The risk is making rented leads the entire foundation of the pipeline, particularly when leads are shared or the contractor does not control the underlying assets.
The antidote is to build what the business owns: its website, Google Business Profile, reviews, useful content, email database, and advertising accounts. Contractors should also compare marketing cost as a percentage of revenue by source and ask how much of their pipeline would disappear if they stopped paying a single vendor.
The Smaller Scares That Can Still Cost Real Money
The episode also highlighted familiar problems that rarely make headlines: form notifications sent to a former employee, holiday promotions launched after the holiday, slow-season budgets cut without a plan, inconsistent phone numbers across listings, review requests that never go out, and agencies that never ask about close rates or sales revenue.
These failures share a common pattern. The issue is usually not one dramatic villain; it is unclear responsibility, poor communication, or a missing check between marketing activity and actual business results.
How Contractors Can Get Their Marketing Back Under Control
For owners who recognize their own situation in one of these stories, Meredith and Caitlyn outlined a practical reset. Start with an inventory of every vendor, what each one does, and what the company pays. Next, establish a baseline from the CRM: leads by source, issued appointments, sales, and revenue. Then confirm administrative access to the website, domain, analytics, and ad accounts.
A second opinion can help distinguish a serious problem from a misleading report. A useful agency audit should identify website health, tracking accuracy, ad spend allocation, and meaningful organic visibility, then provide a short, understandable list of priorities. If switching agencies is necessary, a planned handoff helps protect access, history, and campaign momentum.
The hosts also stressed that accountability runs both ways. Contractors need to share lead-quality feedback, close rates, promotions, and seasonal plans so the agency can adjust its work. A 90-day checkpoint with specific goals gives both sides a reasonable way to evaluate whether changes are making a difference.
Five Questions to Ask the Agency This Week
Who is responsible for website updates, security monitoring, backups, and restoration?
Which search terms and negative keywords did the PPC team review or change last month?
Which nonbranded keywords are improving, and how many organic leads and Google Business Profile calls resulted?
Who coordinates changes across the website, campaigns, tracking, and other vendors?
Which marketing assets does the contractor own, and how dependent is the pipeline on rented leads?
The bigger takeaway from the episode is that most agency horror stories are preventable. A contractor does not need to become a digital marketing specialist to demand clear ownership, meaningful measurement, and a partner who pays attention.
Need a Second Set of Eyes?
Contractors who want help evaluating their website, lead tracking, advertising, or agency relationship can contact the FatCat Strategies team at fatcatstrategies.com. An objective review can help clarify what is working, what is not, and what to address first.
Audio only version of the podcast here.
Podcast Transcript
Intro: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let’s get started.
Meredith: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. I’m Meredith Medlin.
Caitlyn: And I am Caitlin Noble. We’re with Fat Cat Strategies, a digital marketing agency based out of Raleigh, North Carolina, that works exclusively with home improvement contractors all over the United States.
Meredith: And today is part two of agency horror
Caitlyn: Ooh
Meredith: just in time for spooky season, Halloween. In part one we covered four big scares. They were agencies that hold your accounts hostage, lead counts that were wildly inflated, account managers who vanish, and agencies that work for your direct competitor. And we also gave you a list of red flags to use when you are shopping for a new agency.
Caitlyn: So if you missed it, go back and listen after this one. Everything we’re about to cover today is brand new, no repeats.
Meredith: And yes, we are an agency spending 20 minutes on how agencies go wrong. I get it. But we think that is exactly why you should hear it from us. A lot of the contractors we meet have been burned before.
Caitlyn: Mm.
Meredith: They were sold something that they didn’t understand, they paid for it for months, and they never saw more leads.
Caitlyn: So here is how today works. Five haunts.
Meredith: Ooh.
Caitlyn: For each one, we’ll tell you the scare, what was really going on, and the antidote.
Meredith: I… This is very on theme for Halloween.
Caitlyn: theme.
Meredith: I’m glad we’re recording this on October
Caitlyn: In October, and I think it’s gonna launch the week of Halloween.
Meredith: I hope so.
Caitlyn: Yeah, Yeah, what’s, what’s an important note? Oh, that everything is fake.
Meredith: Yeah, we are
Caitlyn: Kinda fake
Meredith: fake names, so you know,
Caitlyn: Fake
Meredith: disclosure.
Caitlyn: Yep. We would
Meredith: All the names are fictional. We would never discuss any of our actual client
Caitlyn: Ever
Meredith: on any of these episodes. But all of the things that we’re gonna talk about are real situations, just with fictional companies.
Caitlyn: Absolutely. Let’s get into it.
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Meredith: Okay, so haunt number one is the break-in. This is the website that nobody was guarding.
Caitlyn: Meet Heritage Exteriors, fictional. Heritage is a siding and roofing company with a strong sales team and a busy call center, a solid replacement contractor. Their website was built a few years back, and then nobody really touched it again.
Meredith: Which is the problem. A website is not a brochure that you just print once. It is software, and software needs updates, plug-ins, themes, security patches. When nobody owns that job, the site slowly gets easier and easier to break into.
Caitlyn: So one day it happens. Somebody gets in and plants strange code, redirects, spammy links, pages that were never there, and Heritage does not find out from the agency. They find out when the owner Googles his own company.
Meredith: And here is why a hacked website is so much worse for a contractor than just an embarrassing moment. Everything you pay for points to that site. Your Google Ads clicks through right to it. Your local listings link to it. Your email campaigns and your social posts are sending people there.
Caitlyn: If search engines flag the site, your visibility can and will take a hit. If your ads land on a compromised page, they are going to get disapproved or paused, depending on when the platform finds out, and homeowners who see a warning do exactly what you do. They’re gonna leave.
Meredith: Exactly, so we covered this in an earlier episode about how a hacked website can damage your online marketing efforts, and if you haven’t listened to that one, it’s worth it. Go back. This one, it, you know, it hits close to home.
Caitlyn: 100%, so now here is the part that makes this a horror story. I feel like already it’s a horror story,
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlyn: it’s not just bad luck. When Heritage asked who was responsible, everybody pointed to someone else. The web company said they built it. They did not maintain it. The marketing vendor said they only handle ads, and nobody had a recent backup.
Meredith: A cleanup that should have been routine turns into a scramble, days of lost momentum, ads been sending traffic into a mess, and an owner with no idea who to call.
Caitlyn: The antidote for the break-in is secure.
Meredith: Ask one question, “Who is responsible for the security and maintenance of my website?” in writing. Not who built it, who keeps it safe.
Caitlyn: Then ask about the basics. Are software updates happening on a schedule? Is there a recent backup, and where does it live? Is anybody monitoring the site so you hear about it, so you hear about a problem from your team and not from a homeowner?
Meredith: And have a plan for a bad day when it comes. Who do you call? How fast can the site be restored?
Caitlyn: Ghostbusters.
Meredith: And who pauses the ads while it gets fixed?
Caitlyn: Fat Cat Strategies does.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: All right, so that is the first haunt. Let’s get into the second haunt. Haunt number two is the autopilot ghost.
Meredith: Spooky. Hate him.
Caitlyn: I hope somebody listens in, to this, like, in July next year.
Meredith: And they’re like, “Wow, okay”
Caitlyn: Fun times, spooky. But this is the campaign that is running, spending money, and being managed by absolutely nobody, classic.
Meredith: Meet Summit Bath Solutions, fictional again, and so is every figger, figure in this story. Not figger, but here we go. Summit sells one-day bath remodels. They run paid search on Google. At set up, everything looked great. Keywords were chosen, ads were written, and their budget was set.
Caitlyn: And those figgers were ready to go.
Meredith: They were.
Caitlyn: And then the agency basically walked away from it. The campaign just ran month after month. Nobody looked at which search terms were actually triggering ads.
Meredith: So Summit’s ads started showing up for searches that had nothing to do with their business, people looking for free bathtubs, people looking for jobs, people looking for bathtub repair parts. Every one of those clicks cost money.
Caitlyn: Paid search is a bidding system. You pay for the click, whether the person is a homeowner ready to book an estimate, or a college student researching a DIY project
Meredith: And there’s another version of this ghost.
Caitlyn: Ugh.
Meredith: The campaign that spends the budget on a single thing, like the contractor’s own business name, and then reports it as a win.
Caitlyn: Of course.
Meredith: We did a whole episode on whether you should pay to advertise your own business name, because it is a real question, and the answer depends on your specific situation.
Caitlyn: 100%. Then there is the really scary one, the account itself gets suspended.
Meredith: Oh, God,
Caitlyn: This is real. I remember
Meredith: I
Caitlyn: this little Bath Summit Solutions, whatever they are.
Meredith: Yeah. Nightmare.
Caitlyn: I remember this. A policy issue, a billing problem, something nobody caught, and the leads just stopped. We covered that in a cautionary tale episode on Google Ad accounts getting shut down. The whole point is somebody has to be watching.
Meredith: Yeah. The common thread here is attention. PPC is not a slow cooker that you set and forget. It needs regular human eyeballs in the account reviewing it.
Caitlyn: And I, we’re about to talk through this, but I would absolutely say the antidote for the autopilot ghost is watch, so.
Meredith: Yeah. Ask your agency how often they review your search terms and what have they added in terms of negative keywords recently. Negative keywords are the list of searches that you don’t want to show up for.
Caitlyn: Free.
Meredith: And if the
Caitlyn: DIY
Meredith: is
Caitlyn: Repair. Sometimes repair
Meredith: yeah, whatever the terms are that you don’t want to be showing up for,
Caitlyn: Cheap
Meredith: Yes.
Caitlyn: Job.
Meredith: If the answer is never, or “I’m not sure, I need to ask my Google specialist,” or whatever the case is, if your agency can’t answer it and they don’t know when they checked or added negative keywords, that is the ghost in your account.
Caitlyn: Yes. So not to distract, but ask your agency how often they review your search terms. Next, ask about budget pacing. Is your spend on track for the month? And what happened the last time it was not?
Meredith: And ask about lead quality, not just volume. 100 form fills that all turn into cancel prior to issue is a different story than a handful of leads that actually sit down and buy.
Caitlyn: Which means your call center and your sales team are part of this conversation, too. The agency cannot improve what it never hears feedback about.
Meredith: Amen.
Caitlyn: And we’ve got tools for that, too.
Meredith: We sure do.
Caitlyn: These are good little haunts.
Meredith: They are. Okay, spooky haunt number three the rankings mirage. It looks like water in the desert and you walk towards it, but you get there and there is nothing there.
Caitlyn: Mm. Meet our friends at the fake company called Ridgeline Windows. Ridgeline pays an agency for search engine optimization, AKA SEO, and the monthly report opens with great news. Page one rankings, number one for a long list of keywords.
Meredith: And then the owner checks, he types his company name into Google, and there he is. He’s the first result, so he’s super excited.
Caitlyn: Beautiful. And he looks at his CRM, which he tracks religiously, and the leads from organic search have barely moved.
Meredith: All right, so what is happening?
Caitlyn: Ugh.
Meredith: Look closely at the keywords in the report that you’re ranking for. Some of his are his own company name, which of course he ranks for. Some are so specific and so rarely searched that nobody’s actually typing them in. There are a few rankings checked on from one location on one device, as if every homeowner searches them that way.
Caitlyn: Here’s the truth about search that trips up a lot of owners. Being number one depends on what you searched, what device you used, and where you were standing when you searched. Two people can search the same phrase and see different results.
Meredith: And the person who wants new windows is not typing your company name.
Caitlyn: No.
Meredith: They’re typing replacement windows and the name of their own town, usually on a phone, and they are often looking at a map listing before they even ever see a website.
Caitlyn: So the report was not exactly lying. Those rankings were real. They just did not matter.
Meredith: And to be fair, SEO takes time.
Caitlyn: All the time
Meredith: months, sometimes usually longer than months, and it all depends on your market and your competition. So a flat early stretch is not automatically scandalous and you should be alarmed. The real scandal is when the proof of progress is just a set of numbers that can’t be connected to a single phone call or appointment.
Caitlyn: Mm-hmm. So the antidote for the rankings mirage is measure.
Meredith: Yeah, so ask your agency to see rankings for terms that homeowners actually
Caitlyn: Yes
Meredith: without your company name in them. Ask how many leads came from organic search and how many calls came from your Google Business Profile.
Caitlyn: Do not rely on your own Google search as the scoreboard. I get it. Totally fair. I’ve been in that situation before. But your results are always going to be personalized to you, and you are the one person in the market who already knows your name.
Meredith: Then connect that to your CRM, organic leads, appointments, and sold jobs. If the agency can’t help you draw that line, the mirage is not going away.
Caitlyn: WhatConverts helps with that.
Meredith: They sure do.
Caitlyn: All right, the fourth haunt.
Meredith: Spooky.
Caitlyn: Y’all can’t see it, but we have, like, sound effects, that it’s supposed be a sewing machine.
Meredith: Mm.
Caitlyn: Then stitches tearing.
Meredith: Cute.
Caitlyn: Good luck editing that, Chad. So haunt number four is the haunted patchwork. Too many hands and none of them holding the whole thing
Meredith: So meet our fictional company, Tidewater Exteriors. Tidewater is a roofing and gutter company, and over their years of marketing they’ve assembled one piece at a time, slowly building. A web agency built the site, a freelancer runs the paid search, and the owner’s nephew posts on social media when he has time. And then there’s another random company in the mix, and they’re sending emails. Oh, and they still buy leads from a couple of aggregators.
Caitlyn: Mm. Five or six vendors, and the owner is the only one who knows all of them exist.
Meredith: One afternoon, the web agency refreshes the contact form. It looks fantastic, but in the update, the tracking that records the form submission quietly stops working.
Caitlyn: This hurts. This, too close to home.
Meredith: Ouch.
Caitlyn: Nobody tells the freelancer, so the freelancer sees paid search conversions drop to almost nothing, assumes the campaigns have stopped working, and then cuts the budget.
Meredith: Meanwhile, leads are still coming in. The form works fine for the homeowners. The tracking just broke, but because the campaigns are now underfunded, the real leads slow down for real.
Caitlyn: The owner is told the ads are not performing. The web agency says the site is fine. The freelancer says the numbers do not lie. Everyone is right about their own piece, and the whole thing is broken.
Meredith: We hear a version of this constantly.
Caitlyn: Constantly.
Meredith: Owners tell us that they’re fatigued from managing so many separate vendors, and the phrase we hear the most is, “Can y’all just manage it all for me? Like, just be my one point of contact, my one person to do it all.”
Caitlyn: And of course, the nephew posts on social media whenever he can.
Meredith: That’s fine.
Caitlyn: Which is so lovely until the page goes quiet for months, and he’s on his honeymoon, and then the password is locked, and nobody can get into the account.
Meredith: Yeah, so the antidote for the haunted patchwork is coordination.
Caitlyn: Somebody has to be the quarterback, y’all. One partner or one person on your team who sees how the pieces connect and who is accountable when something breaks.
Meredith: Keep a simple map. Every vendor, what they do, what they touch, and keep a change log so when the website changes, the person running the ads hears about it before the numbers drop.
Caitlyn: Fewer vendors is not always the answer, but fewer silos almost always is.
Meredith: Ugh, lovely.
Caitlyn: Sound effect, stitches mend, soft chime.
Meredith: Okay, time for haunt number five, the rented house, and this one could sneak up even on the smartest owners.
Caitlyn: Meet our fake friends over at Cornerstone Bath. Cornerstone is a growing is growing so fast, and it wants more volume, so it signs up for a pay-per-lead program. The vendor says, “We will handle everything,” and they do.
Meredith: The vendor sets up a separate website with a domain name that is very close to Cornerstone’s own, but not quite. The vendor that you hired owns that domain. The vendor builds the pages using Cornerstone’s logo and photos so it looks just like the real thing.
Caitlyn: The vendor funds the paid search campaigns. The vendor runs a call center that answers the incoming calls. If the caller is in the service area and sounds qualified, the call is live transferred to our friends at Cornerstone. And at the end of the month, Cornerstone gets a bill for the leads.
Meredith: And honestly, that works for a while. The phones ring, and the sales team is busy.
Caitlyn: Then Cornerstone looks at its marketing cost as a percentage of revenue, which every serious replacement contractor watches. The cost per lead creeps up, and the owner thinks, “What if I stopped paying?”
Meredith: So they try, and the leads vanish. The website belongs to the vendor, not the client.
Caitlyn: Eh.
Meredith: The domain belongs to the vendor, not the client, and the rankings, ad history, data, all of it belongs to somebody else. Cornerstone built nothing. It was renting the whole time.
Caitlyn: And we will say this carefully because pay per lead is not evil. It’s really not. Some of our clients use us as their complete digital marketing partner and still buy leads from a pay-per-lead vendor when they need some extra volume. That is a smart supplement.
Meredith: Yeah, the problem is when rented leads become the entire foundation, and the same thing goes for big shared lead aggregators. Those leads are not often exclusive, and the moment you stop paying, the flow stops.
Caitlyn: Correct, and we like to describe it as a treadmill. You keep running, you pay to keep running, and the minute you step off, you are exactly where you started.
Meredith: The antidote for the rented house is building.
Caitlyn: Oh, build assets you own, a website that ranks, a Google Business Profile with real reviews, content that keeps working, an email list, campaigns in an ad account that belongs to you.
Meredith: Use those rented sources to fill in the gaps, not to hold up the roof.
Caitlyn: And track your marketing cost as a percentage of revenue by lead source so you always know which ones are earning their keep.
Meredith: Perfect. Okay, I think it’s time for the lightning round. Are you ready?
Caitlyn: Sh.
Meredith: Perfect sound effects. So this is a quick lightning round of smaller scares before we wrap up the episode.
Caitlyn: I wish you could have seen the look Meredith just gave me. Scare number one, the form notifications that go to a former employee’s inbox. Leads come in, the email arrives, and nobody is reading it. That’s a horror story.
Meredith: Ugh. Scare number two, the holiday promotion that launches after the holiday. Great offer, great design, finished two weeks too late. We have an episode on crafting holiday promotional offers, y’all, so the idea is to plan early.
Caitlyn: Scare number The slow season surprise. Nobody planned for it, the budget gets slashed in a panic, and then the spring rush arrives and the pipeline is empty. We have an episode on making the most of your slow season too.
Meredith: Scare number four, the phone number mismatch. The number on the website is one thing, the number on the GBP is another, and the one in the old directory listings is a third. Homeowners get confused, and your tracking can’t tell you which one is actually working.
Caitlyn: And then scare number five, the review request that nobody sends. Happy customers finish the job, and then silence. Reviews are social proof, and a steady trickle of fresh ones does more than a burst once a year. If you didn’t know, we have done a lot of episodes on reviews.
Meredith: Sure have. Scare number six is the agency that has never once asked to see your sales numbers. If nobody on the marketing side knows your close rate and your average ticket, nobody can tell you whether a lead is expensive or it’s a bargain.
Caitlyn: What are they doing? And the thread through all of these is that most horror stories are not about the villains.
Meredith: Mm-mm.
Caitlyn: They are about communication failures, unclear responsibility, and nobody asking the next question.
Meredith: Okay, Caitlin. Somebody is listening to this right now and thinking, “Oh, no, I think I’m living in one of these haunts. What do I do?”
Caitlyn: I’ll say, I’ve never, like, used the word like I’m living in a haunt, but now I’m going to make a point of.
Meredith: I think you should.
Caitlyn: Okay, so first of all, you’re gonna… You’re living in one of these haunts, you’re gonna breathe. We call this the exorcism.
Meredith: Do we? That
Caitlyn: And
Meredith: what we gotta do
Caitlyn: lot less dramatic than it sounds. It is mostly paperwork and a few honest conversations.
Meredith: Okay, so step one of this exorcism. Make an inventory. Write down every vendor that you pay, what they do, and how much you pay them.
Caitlyn: Yep.
Meredith: You would be surprised at how many owners have never seen all of that on one page together.
Caitlyn: It’s, it’s one of my favorite things to do at the end of the year with clients, is let’s go through that list
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlyn: and get a vet on that. Step number two, you’re gonna get your baseline from your own CRM, not from anybody’s report. How many leads, from which sources, how many appointments, how many sales. That is your ground truth, and you will need to… it to judge anything that comes next.
Meredith: Step three is lock down your access. In part one, we talked about owning your accounts. If you don’t have admin access to something, make that your first request, politely and in writing.
Caitlyn: Yeah, no, no-brainer. Step four, get a second opinion. An audit from someone, like Fat Cat Strategies, with no stake in the current setup can show you what is real and what is a mirage. We are happy to do that, as I said, and so are other, many other good agencies.
Meredith: Yeah, a good audit should answer plain questions. Is the website healthy and secure? Is tracking actually recording leads? Where is the ad budget going? Which rankings matter, and which are just vanity numbers? And you should walk away with a short list of what to fix first, and in language that you can follow and understand.
Caitlyn: Totally. If an audit leaves you with a pile of jargon and no opportunities, it is, was not fully done for you.
Meredith: Yeah. Okay. Step five. If you decide to switch, do it in an organized way. We have an episode on changing PPC agencies, and another one on navigating transitions in Google Ads management.
Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.
Meredith: And the headline is that a clean handoff protects your campaign history and momentum.
Caitlyn: Step six, and this is one for the contractor side of the table, feed your agency. Share your CRM data. Tell them which leads were junk and which ones sold. Share your promotions and your seasonal plans before they start, not after.
Meredith: The best agency relationships has to run both ways. You bring your business knowledge, and the agency brings its expertise and a point of view. And a good one will respectfully tell you when they disagree.
Caitlyn: Absolutely. And so step seven, set a 90-day checkpoint with specific goals. If those goals are not being met, you will know why, and you will know what to do about it.
Meredith: Okay. So let’s give the people something to do Monday morning or the weekend, or when they get home. So Caitlin, five five action items. Go.
Caitlyn: One, secure. Ask in writing who is responsible for your website’s updates, backups, and security monitoring.
Meredith: Number two is watch. Ask your PPC manager to walk you through the last month’s search terms and the negative keywords that they’ve added.
Caitlyn: Three, measure. Ask for rankings on terms that do not include your own company name, and ask how many organic leads and Google business profile calls you got.
Meredith: Four, coordinate. Make a one-page map of every vendor and what they touch, and name one person at your company responsible for the whole picture.
Caitlyn: Five, build. Look at your lead sources by cost and by percent of revenue, and figure out how much of your pipeline would disappear if you stopped paying one vendor tomorrow.
Meredith: And we are working on an agency inspection
Caitlyn: Sure are
Meredith: That pulls these together with the red flags from part one, so you can run the whole check in just one sitting. So stay tuned for that.
Caitlyn: Can’t wait to see it. So if this episode made your stomach drop a little, take a breath. Every one of these is fixable, and the first step is just knowing where you stand.
Meredith: And if you want a second set of eyes on your own situation, we are happy to take a look. Visit fatcatstrategies.com or give us a call. Our phone number is on the website.
Caitlyn: Thanks for listening to Digital Marketing for Contractors. If you have your own agency horror story, we would love to hear it. No names, of course, are required.
Meredith: Until next time, lock your windows.
Caitlyn: And keep your lights on. What?
Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.
