How to Tell if Your Marketing Agency Is Actually Performing
How to Tell if Your Marketing Agency Is Actually Performing
Ask a home improvement contractor about their close rate, their set rate, or their cancel prior to issue percentage, and most can answer without opening a laptop. Ask the same owner whether their marketing agency is working, and the answer often changes tone completely. On a recent episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin of FatCat Strategies described a confession they hear constantly: an owner who has paid an agency for a year or more and genuinely cannot say whether it is paying off.
These are not inexperienced operators. They track everything that happens inside their own four walls. The problem is that once marketing dollars leave the building, visibility tends to disappear. To close that gap, the hosts laid out a repeatable process built on something contractors already understand well: an inspection.
Why Agency Performance Is So Hard to Judge
Before introducing the framework, Meredith outlined three reasons contractors struggle to evaluate their agencies, none of which have anything to do with intelligence.
The first is that agencies control the reporting. The vendor being evaluated is also the one writing the report card. As Meredith put it, if sales reps graded their own demos, every rep would look like a superstar.
The second is vocabulary. Agency reports are often written in agency language: impressions, click-through rate, average position, domain authority. Contractors run their businesses on a different set of numbers, including leads, issued appointments, demos, sold jobs, and revenue by lead source. When a report is written in a foreign language, it becomes very difficult to challenge.
The third is time lag. Some channels, SEO in particular, genuinely take months to produce results. That means “give it more time” is sometimes honest advice and sometimes a stall tactic, and from the outside the two look the same. Caitlyn noted that the phrase has no expiration date, and the hosts have spoken with owners who have been giving it more time for two or three years.
Meredith added a fourth reason that rarely gets said out loud: relationship inertia. Owners like their account manager, switching sounds exhausting, and a close look might reveal a problem that adds another project to an already full plate. In this industry, many owners have already fired a previous agency or “web guy,” so the current vendor benefits from the memory of the last bad breakup. The hosts argued that this logic runs backwards. The worse an owner’s past experiences, the more important it becomes to evaluate the current agency on evidence rather than feelings.
The Agency Inspection: Four Inspection Points
The fix, according to the hosts, is not for owners to become marketing experts. It is to run an inspection. Nobody buys a house because the seller promises the roof is fine. The same standard should apply to a marketing partner. The framework has four inspection points, each modeled on a part of a home inspection.
Inspection Point One: The Foundation (Attribution)
The foundation is lead source attribution. Every lead should be traceable back to a source and a cost. If the foundation is cracked, nothing built on top of it can be trusted, including every report the agency has ever sent.
Meredith described what good attribution looks like. When a homeowner calls the call center or submits a form, the lead lands in the CRM, whether that is MarketSharp, LeadPerfection, JobNimbus, or another platform, with a source attached. That source is either captured automatically or recorded by a trained call center rep asking the right question, not guessed at weeks later.
The test is straightforward. Pull up last month’s leads in the CRM and check what share of them carry a real source, such as Google CPC, Facebook CPC, Google organic, or Google Business Profile. Labels like “other,” “website,” “internet,” or a blank field do not count. As Caitlyn put it, “internet” is not a lead source; it is a utility. If more than a small slice of leads fall into those buckets, fixing attribution comes before judging anyone’s performance.
The hosts also pointed out what this reveals about the agency itself. A performing agency will push for clean attribution because clean data proves its value. An agency that has never asked about CRM data, how leads are sourced, or what happened to leads after they arrived is sending a signal. A confident agency wants to be measured, and reluctance to be measured is a finding in its own right.
Inspection Point Two: The Load-Bearing Numbers
Caitlyn separated agency metrics into two categories. Decorative metrics include impressions, clicks, click-through rate, keyword rankings, sessions, time on page, and bounce rate. They are not useless, but the business does not stand on them. Nobody has ever installed a walk-in shower for a click.
The load-bearing numbers are four metrics that mirror how contractors already run their sales floors:
- Leads by source: how many raw inquiries each channel produced.
- Cost per lead by source: total spend on a channel, including the agency’s fee, divided by the leads it generated.
- Cost per issued appointment by source: the number most owners skip, because a lead that cancels prior to issue costs the same as one that sits, but only one had a chance to become revenue.
- Revenue by source: what each channel actually put on the board.
To illustrate, the hosts walked through a fictional company they call Ridgeline Windows. Ridgeline is not a real client, and the figures are illustrative. In the example, Ridgeline’s agency reports that clicks are up and cost per click is down. But when Ridgeline runs the load-bearing numbers from its own CRM, the picture shifts. Paid search produced 60 leads at roughly $150 per lead including the management fee, which sounds fine. Only about half of those leads became issued appointments, which puts the cost per issued appointment closer to $300. Meanwhile, organic and referral leads in the same made-up scenario issued at a much higher rate, so the real cost gap between channels was far wider than cost per lead suggested.
The lesson is that the agency’s report and Ridgeline’s reality described two different businesses, and nobody was looking at them side by side. The inspection test is to count how many of the four load-bearing numbers appear in the agency’s most recent report. If the answer is zero, the report is measuring the paint job, not the structure.
These numbers can also expose problems that are not the agency’s fault. Meredith pointed to speed to lead as a classic example. If web form leads wait hours before the call center dials them, the set rate on that channel will sag and the leads will look like junk on paper. Before blaming lead quality, the hosts recommend checking response time. The caveat cuts both ways: an agency can only report cost per issued appointment and revenue by source if the contractor shares that data. A performing agency asks for it.
Inspection Point Three: The Systems Check
This inspection point is quick, binary, and often uncomfortable. It comes down to three yes or no questions:
- Does the owner have admin level access to their own Google Ads account, with the ability to log in and see spend today?
- Does the owner have their own login to their analytics, with no permission required?
- Does the owner control their website and domain, and would both come with them if the agency relationship ended tomorrow?
The hosts noted that some vendor models keep ownership of the domain or website, and owners sometimes discover this only when they try to leave. Caitlyn acknowledged that certain arrangements, such as some pay per lead models, are legitimate when the contractor knowingly accepts the trade-offs. The real problem is not realizing which model is in place.
A performing agency operates transparently in accounts the client owns. Any “no” goes on the report in red ink, followed by a direct question: why not, and how quickly can it be fixed? The agency’s reaction to that question says a lot on its own.
Inspection Point Four: The Punch List
The final point covers the working relationship. Meredith was careful to note that liking an account manager is not a performance metric, though Caitlyn added that it is not meaningless either. On a job site, a good project manager finds punch list items before the homeowner does. An agency should work the same way.
The test is to review the last three monthly calls or reports and count the proactive recommendations, such as testing a new spring offer, addressing slowing review velocity, or rebuilding an underperforming landing page. If the communication has been purely reactive, the owner is paying for a vendor, not a partner. Strong agencies also flag their own misses. In Caitlyn’s words, an agency that only ever brings good news is not having a good year; it is having a good edit.
How to Run the Inspection in Two Weeks
The hosts recommend a simple two-week process. In week one, the owner pulls their own data: the attribution check in the CRM, the load-bearing numbers, and the three systems questions. None of this requires telling the agency.
In week two, the owner brings the findings to the agency meeting, not as an ambush but as a new standard for how the relationship will be measured. Meredith suggested three questions for that meeting:
- “Walk me through what you’d change about our program if the budget stayed exactly the same.”
- “What’s the weakest part of our current results, in your opinion?”
- “If we doubled our lead volume next quarter, where would the leads be coming from?”
Caitlyn singled out the third question. A coasting agency tends to answer by spending more on the same campaigns. A performing agency starts talking about new offers, new channels, and database plays it has been waiting to try.
Three Possible Outcomes
The results typically fall into one of three buckets. A performing agency already has most of this in place and welcomes the conversation. A coasting agency has the capability, but effort has drifted; the hosts suggest a defined window, such as 90 days, to see whether behavior changes. A problem agency cannot or will not provide attribution, resists account access, and keeps reporting decorative metrics. At that point, the decision is based on data rather than emotion.
The hosts closed with an honest caveat. Sometimes an agency is doing solid work and results still look rough because the market is soft, the offer is stale, or the call center is struggling to set appointments. Clean attribution shows where the funnel is actually leaking, and sometimes the inspection uncovers a problem inside the contractor’s own house. As Meredith put it, the data doesn’t have a side.
Need Help Reading the Results?
Contractors who run the agency inspection and are unsure what the numbers mean can reach the FatCat Strategies team at fatcatstrategies.com or 919-341-4190. The team can walk through the findings and help frame the conversation with any agency.
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.
Caitlyn: Here is a question that we hear all the time, and usually in a lowered voice, like the person is confessing something. They go, “I’ve been paying my agency for, like, a year and a half, and honestly, I can’t tell you if it’s working.” And these are smart people that are saying this to us. These are owners who can quote you their close rate off the top of their head. Right, and that’s the strange part. These same owners know their set rate, their sit rate, their cancel prior to issue percentage. They track everything inside their four walls. But the moment the money leaves the building and goes to a marketing vendor, the visibility just drops off a cliff.
Meredith: So today, we’re gonna fix that.
Caitlyn: Hallelujah.
Meredith: We are giving you a repeatable way to evaluate whether your agency is actually performing using a process you already understand better than we do, and we’re calling it the agency inspection.
Caitlyn: You inspect houses for a living, kind of.
Meredith: I mean, my husband does.
Caitlyn: Yeah. You know what we mean. But today we’re going to learn how to inspect… Today, you are going to learn how to inspect your agency. I am Caitlin Noble.
Meredith: And I’m Meredith Medlin, and this is Digital Marketing for Contractors.
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Caitlyn: Meredith, before we get into the framework, let’s name the problem. Why is it so hard for a contractor to tell if their agency is performing?
Meredith: Well, I think there are three reasons, and none of them are about intelligence or listening. The first is that agencies control the reporting.
Caitlyn: Mm.
Meredith: Think about that for a second. The vendor you’re evaluating is also the one handing you the report card. If your sales reps graded their own demos, what do you think those grades would look like?
Caitlyn: Every rep would be a superstar.
Meredith: Every single one. The second reason is vocabulary. Agencies report in their language a lot of the times, and it’s not yours. Impressions, click-through rate, average position, domain authority, blah, blah, blah. You run your business on a different set of numbers: leads, issued appointments, demos, sold jobs, revenue by lead source. So when the report is written in a foreign language, you can’t argue with it, and honestly, sometimes that’s the point.
Caitlyn: Oh, that’s a little cynical.
Meredith: It’s a little earned as well. The third reason is time lag. Some of this stuff, especially SEO, genuinely does take months to show results.
Caitlyn: does.
Meredith: So, give it more time is sometimes true, and sometimes it can be a stall tactic. And from the outside, those two things look identical.
Caitlyn: And that’s the trap, because give it more time has no expiration date. We’ve talked to owners who have been giving it more time for two or three years.
Meredith: Yeah, and can I add a fourth reason? Because I think it’s the one that nobody says out loud: relationship inertia.
Caitlyn: So glad you got to say that word.
Meredith: I am so glad. You’ve been with this agency for a while. You like your account manager. They send a card to you at the holidays. And honestly, switching sounds exhausting, and deep down, part of you doesn’t wanna look too closely because if the answer is bad, now you have something else on your plate.
Caitlyn: A huge project.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: A huge project. Oof, so yes, and in this industry, the switching cost feels especially heavy because you’ve probably been burned before. A lot of owners we’ve talked to have already fired an SEO guy or a web guy or a previous agency, and every switch feels like starting over. So the current agency benefits from the memory of the last bad breakup.
Meredith: Which is exactly backwards, right? The worse your past experiences were, the more you need a way to evaluate the current one on evidence instead of vibes.
Caitlyn: Sounds like some people you’ve dated before.
Meredith: It sure does.
Caitlyn: So the fix is not to become a marketing expert, y’all. If you’re listening to this, you do not have to be the marketing expert. The fix is to run an inspection. You would never buy a house because the seller said, “Trust me, the roof is fine.” You get up there and look. Same energy here. All right, so we’re going to lay out the framework. The agency inspection has four inspection points, and we deliberately built it like a home inspection because that’s a process everyone listening to already trust.
Meredith: Exactly, and I can’t wait for my husband to listen to this episode.
Caitlyn: Jimmy, you’d better listen to this.
Meredith: You better listen. He is a home inspector. So inspection point number one is the foundation. That is tracking attribution. Every lead, can it be traced back to a source and a cost?
Caitlyn: Mm.
Meredith: If the foundation is cracked, nothing built on top of it can be trusted, including every report that your agency has ever sent you.
Caitlyn: Completely, completely agree. I know we’re not supposed to be making a pitch about ourselves right now, but, like, that’s how we open our reports.
Meredith: Exactly.
Caitlyn: That is how, as our, as your marketing agency, we open our reports with actual information from your CRM in terms of leads and sales.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: Inspection number two is the load-bearing numbers. These are the handful of metrics that actually hold up your business as opposed to the decorative stuff. We’ll tell you exactly which numbers are load-bearing and which ones are crown molding.
Meredith: Inspection you know, crown
Caitlyn: I
Meredith: come on.
Caitlyn: I know. know.
Meredith: I think it’s cute
Caitlyn: This is cute. This is cute.
Meredith: Okay, inspection
Caitlyn: Love… We love our marketing team. We’re a marketing agency.
Meredith: Yeah. And we love our team.
Caitlyn: Who…
Meredith: Inspection point number three, this is our systems check. Just like you check the electrical panel and the water heater, you’re gonna check whether you have access to your own systems. Who owns your ad accounts, your analytics, and your website? You would be shocked how often the answer is, well, not the person paying for them.
Caitlyn: Mm. Inspection point number four is the punch list. That is the working relationship. Does your agency bring you proactive recommendations, or do they just show up once a month, read you a that has a bunch of weird words on it. And then they disappear.
Meredith: Run all four of these inspection points and you’ll know with real confidence whether you have a performing agency, a coasting agency, or a problem on your hands.
Caitlyn: Yikes. Okay, we’re going to dig into the foundation which is attribution.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlyn: So we’ve just named the four, we’re gonna break them all down. So we’re digging into attribution. This is all about the foundation. Meredith, define what good looks like here.
Meredith: So good is gonna look like this. A homeowner calls your call center or fills out a form, and by the time that lead lands in your CRM, whether it’s MarketSharp, Lead Perfection, whatever you
Caitlyn: JobNimbus
Meredith: JobNimbus it has a source attached, paid search or organic, Facebook, Angie, direct mail, and that source field is filled in automatically or by a trained call center rep asking the right question, not guessed at three weeks later when the record’s being updated.
Caitlyn: And why is this the foundation and not just another metric?
Meredith: I mean, because every performance conversation you will ever have with your agency depends on it. If you can’t tie leads to sources, then when your agency says, “We generated 74 leads this month,” you have no way to check that claim against what actually hit your CRM. You’re comparing their spreadsheet to your gut feeling.
Caitlyn: So here’s the inspection test for the foundation. Pull up your CRM right now or as soon as you’re not driving, and look at last month’s leads. What percentage of them have a real lead source attached? I’m talking Google CPC, Facebook CPC Google organic.
Meredith: Google
Caitlyn: Google GBP, that’s a good one. That’s your Google business profile. Not other, not internet.
Meredith: Exactly.
Caitlyn: Not nothing.
Meredith: Website.
Caitlyn: Oh my God, we’ve seen website a
Meredith: Yeah. Internet as a lead source that’s villain origin story. That will really get me in the worst way.
Caitlyn: Oh my God, it tells you nothing. Internet is not a lead source. It’s a utility. It’s more than a small slice of your leads, of your leads are if more than a small slice of your leads are landing in other internet or just nothing at all, your foundation is cracked, your house is crumbling, and the job one is fixing that before you can fairly judge anybody’s performance.
Meredith: And here’s the part that matters for today’s topic a performing agency will be pushing you to fix this. They want clean
Caitlyn: Me too
Meredith: because a clean attribution proves their value. An agency that has never once asked about your CRM data, never asked how leads get sourced, never asked to see what happened to the leads after they came in, that tells you something.
Caitlyn: I know. On all these sales calls that I have, I, like, I feel, like, embarrassed when I ask if we’ll be able to get access to the CRM. And I’m like, well, just ’cause you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I wanna look inside your, you know, closet,” and,
Meredith: that’s true This is why we ask.
Caitlyn: Yeah, this is why we ask. This is exactly why we ask. It’s so important. And, and I’d, I could riff forever, but there are different levels of access that you
Meredith: for sure
Caitlyn: agency so they don’t have to see, you know, your underwear.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlyn: So that’s worth repeating. A confident agency wants to be measured. Reluctance to be measured is is itself a finding on your inspection report.
Meredith: Okay. Inspection point number two, the load-bearing numbers. All right, Caitlin, let’s start with the decorative stuff, because that is what we’ve seen a lot of agencies fill their reports with.
Caitlyn: It’s so much fun. Impressions, clicks, click-through rate, keyword rankings, website sessions, time on page, bounce rate. None of those are
Meredith: Mm-mm
Caitlyn: but none of them are load-bearing either. Your business does not stand on impressions. Nobody has ever installed a walk-in shower for a click.
Meredith: All right. So if those are decorative, then what is load-bearing? What is holding up the building?
Caitlyn: Okay, four numbers, and they should feel very familiar, familiar because they match how you already run your sales floor. Number one, leads by source. How many raw inquiries did each channel produce? Number two, cost per lead source. Total spend on that channel, including the agency’s fee, divided by the leads it produced. Number three, and this is the one most owners skip, cost per issued appointment by source. Because a lead that cancels prior to issue costs you the same money as a lead that sits, but only one of them ever had a chance to become revenue.
Meredith: That third one, that’s where the truth lives. Different lead sources set an issue at wildly different rates. Everybody listening has seen aggregator leads that come in
Caitlyn: Free
Meredith: and then evaporate before a rep ever even gets in the driveway.
Caitlyn: Yep. And number four, revenue by source. What did each channel actually put on the board? Now, let’s make this concrete with an example, and obviously, as always, a quick heads-up that this is a fictional company. Ridgeline Windows is like I said, not a real client, so we can use real-looking numbers without putting anybody’s actual business on blast. We would never do that. The situation is one we see all the time though, but the company and the figures are illustrative.
Meredith: All right. So fake Ridgeline is paying an agency a monthly retainer plus ad spend, and the agency’s report says that things are great Clicks are up, cost per click is down, the campaign’s won some internal award for quality score, whatever. Champagne emoji celebration here.
Caitlyn: You have the best lines in this one. But when Ridgeline runs the load-bearing numbers from their own CRM, here’s what the fictional math shows. They paid search, they… Gosh, words are hard.
Meredith: Hard.
Caitlyn: Say paid search generated 60 leads last month at a cost per lead of around $150. You fold in the management fee. Sounds fine on its own, but only about half of those leads turned into issued appointments. So the cost per issued appointment is closer to $300. Meanwhile, their organic and repeat referral leads in this made-up example are issuing at a much higher rate. So the true cost gap between channels is way bigger than the cost per lead gap suggested.
Meredith: And notice what happened there. The agency’s report and Ridgeline’s reality are not describing the same business. The agency is reporting on the decorative and the load-bearing numbers are living in Ridgeline’s CRM, and nobody was looking at them next to each other.
Caitlyn: Or asking.
Meredith: Or asking for it.
Caitlyn: So the inspection test for point two is simple. Look at the last report your agency sent you and count how many of the four load-bearing numbers appear in it. Leads by source, cost per lead by source, cost per issued appointment, revenue by source. If the answer is zero, your report is measuring the paint job, not the structure.
Meredith: And here’s a wrinkle that the load-bearing numbers will surface that the decorative ones are never gonna show you. Sometimes the channel looks like it’s underperforming when the real issue is what happens after the lead arrives.
Caitlyn: Yeah.
Meredith: Speed to lead, classic example, if the web form leads are sitting for hours before your call center dials them, your set rate on that channel is gonna start sagging, and on paper, it’s gonna look like the agency’s leads are total junk.
Caitlyn: Right. So when you see a source with a healthy lead count but a lousy issue rate, don’t jump straight to blaming lead quality. Check the response time first. That’s a that’s a finding about your own operation, and it’s one more reason the inspection has to run on your CRM data, not the agency’s dashboard, because the agency’s dashboard can’t see inside your call center.
Meredith: And one caveat, because it’s fair, your agency can only report cost per issued appointment and revenue by source if you give them
Caitlyn: That’s
Meredith: to that data.
Caitlyn: Yep.
Meredith: Or at least share it monthly. This is a two-way street, but a performing agency asks you to share that. So that’s the difference.
Caitlyn: Yep. Completely agree. Okay, inspection point three, the systems check. This one is quick, it’s binary, and it’s uncomfortable. Meredith, walk us through the panel.
Meredith: All right. Three questions, yes or no answers. Question one, do you have owner level or admin level access to your own Google Ads account? Not a PDF of it, not a screenshot. Can you yourself log in today and see the spend?
Caitlyn: Yes or no. Question two, do you have access to your own analytics? Same standard. Your own login, your own eyes on the data whenever you want without asking permission.
Meredith: And number three, do you own your website and your domain? And I mean, if you parted ways with this agency tomorrow, does the website come with you, and can you get in there right now? Because there are vendor models in this
Caitlyn: We’ve seen ’em
Meredith: longtime listeners have heard us talk about this, where the vendor owns the domain, they own your website, sometimes even run lookalike domains. And when you leave, everything that you thought you had is staying with that agency. You’re not getting it to take with you.
Caitlyn: And to be fair, some of those are legitimate business models with trade-offs the contractor knowingly accepted, like certain pay per lead arrangements. The problem is not always the model. The problem is when the owner doesn’t realize which model they’re in until they try to leave.
Meredith: Right. So the inspection standard here, simple. A performing agency operates transparently in accounts that you own. If any of those three questions you answered no to, that’s automatically a fire alarm.
Caitlyn: Mm.
Meredith: But it goes on the report in red ink, and the follow-up question to your agency is, “Why not, and how fast can we fix that issue?”
Caitlyn: Exactly. And watch the reaction to that question. An agency that says, “Great, let’s get you admin access this week” is telling you one thing. An agency that gets cagey or starts explaining why it’s complicated is telling you something else.
Meredith: All right. Now, last inspection point, and this is the punch list. This is the relationship layer, and I wanna be careful here because, “I like my account manager,” is… That’s great, but it’s not a performance metric.
Caitlyn: No, but it’s not nothing either. So here’s how we’d frame it. On a job site, the punch list is the running list of things that need attention, and a good project manager walks the site and finds those items before the homeowner does. Your agency should work the same way. The question is, who is finding the items?
Meredith: So let’s test this. Look back at your last three monthly calls or reports. How many proactive recommendations does your agency bring? Not status updates, not just, “Campaigns are performing well, yay.” Actual recommendations. “We think you should test a new offer this spring,” or, “Your reviews velocity has slowed down, and here’s the plan of how we can fix that,” or, “This landing page is underperforming, and here’s what we’re gonna do to rebuild it.”
Caitlyn: If the last three months of communication have been purely reactive, where you ask questions and they answer them, you’re paying for a vendor, not a partner. A performing agency has opinions about your business and volunteers them.
Meredith: And, I mean, they flag their own misses.
Caitlyn: Yes,
Meredith: And this is a big one for us. Every agency, ours included, has campaigns that underperform sometimes. That is the nature of it. The question is whether you hear about it from them with a plan of attack, or whether you find out yourself three months later when you’re doing this inspection.
Caitlyn: Exactly. An agency that only ever brings you good news is not having a good year. They’re having a good edit.
Meredith: Oh, Lord. Okay. Well, let’s pull this all together, because the framework is only useful if you actually run it, and here’s how we suggest doing it over the next two weeks. Week one, pull your own data, foundation check your CRM, load-bearing numbers from your own reports, and the three systems question. You can do all of that without ever telling your agency you’re doing it, if you’re worried about that.
Caitlyn: Absolutely. So week two, bring it to your agency meeting, and here’s the posture we’d recommend. This is not an ambush. You’re not trying to catch anybody. You’re telling them, “This is how we’re going to measure this relationship going forward. These are the four numbers we want to see every month, and here’s the access we need squared away.”
Meredith: And if you want three specific questions to ask in that meeting, write these down, or when you’re done
Caitlyn: Uh-huh
Meredith: write them down after. Question one, say, “Walk me through what you’d change about our program if the budget stayed exactly the same.” A performing agency answers that instantly, because they’ve been thinking about it already. Question two, “What’s the weakest part of our current results, in your opinion?” You’re honestly just testing for honesty there. Every program, every strategy, every tactic has a weak spot, and if they claim that there just isn’t one, that’s your answer. And question three, “If we doubled our lead volume next quarter, where would the leads be coming from?” That is going to test whether they have a plan or a routine in place.
Caitlyn: I love that third one, because a coasting agency’s honest answer is, “We’d spend more on the same campaigns,” and you can hear the autopilot in it. A performing agency starts talking about new offers, new channels, dormant database plays, things they’ve clearly been waiting for permission to try.
Meredith: Then the results sort themselves into three buckets. Bucket one, the performing agency. They already have most of this in place. They welcome the conversation, and they… Honestly, this meeting makes the relationship better.
Caitlyn: It does.
Meredith: And if that’s your outcome, congratulations. Tell them that they’re doing a great job.
Caitlyn: So bucket two, the coasting agency. The capability is there, but the effort has drifted. Reports went on autopilot. Proactive ideas dried up. For this bucket, the inspection is a reset. Give them a defined window. We’d say 90 days is reasonable for most of this, and see if the behavior changes. Sometimes it genuinely does, and you’ve saved yourself the enormous cost of switching for no reason.
Meredith: And bucket three, the problem. They can’t or won’t give you attribution. They resist giving you access to your own accounts, and the reporting stays in decorative metrics no matter how many times you ask for the good stuff. And that point in the inspection, that’s done its job. You’re not making an emotional decision. You are making it based on data, numbers, and you’re just reading a report at that point.
Caitlyn: Mm-hmm. And one honest caveat before we wrap this segment, because we always want to be straight with you. There’s a version of this where the agency is doing solid work and the numbers still look rough because the market is soft, or your offer is stale, or the call center is struggling to set. The inspection helps here, too, because clean attribution shows you where the funnel is actually leaking. Sometimes you run the inspection on your agency and find a problem in your own house. We’ve seen that happen more than once.
Meredith: And that is the beauty of doing it with real numbers. The data doesn’t have a side.
Caitlyn: No, it does not. So we’re gonna recap the agency inspection. Four inspection points. One, the foundation, which is attribution. Every lead traced to a source and a cost in your CRM. Two, the load-bearing numbers. Leads by source, cost per lead, cost per issued appointment, and revenue by source. Three, the systems check. You own and can access your ad accounts, your analytics, and your website. And four, the punch list. Proactive recommendations and honest reporting of misses, not just sunshine.
Meredith: Run it in two weeks. Pull your own data first, and then bring it to your agency as your new standard, and let the results land you in one of three buckets. They’re performing, they’re coasting, or they’re the problem.
Caitlyn: And if you run this inspection and you don’t love what you find or you’re not sure how to read the results, that’s literally what we do all day. You can visit fatcatstrategies.com, or call us at 919-341-4190, or just visit our website. Find us on social, too and we’ll walk you through all of the numbers with you and help frame that conversation.
Meredith: All right, everybody. Thank you as always for listening to Digital Marketing for Contractors. If this episode was useful, share it with another contractor who’s been saying, “I don’t know, but I think my marketing is working,” for a little bit too long.
Caitlyn: They know who they are. We’ll see y’all next time.
Meredith: See ya.
Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.