Every owner we talk to has a story. They hired an agency that promised page-one rankings and a flood of leads, paid $2,000 a month for a year, and got a monthly PDF full of impressions and “traffic up 340%” — while the phone stayed quiet. By the time they tried to leave, they found out the agency owned the Google Ads account, had built the Business Profile under its own login, and the website was on a platform they couldn’t export. They didn’t just waste money. They had to start over.
We’re going to say something most agencies won’t put in writing: we are an agency too, and most of this article is a list of ways agencies take advantage of owners. We’re writing it anyway, because the same standard that protects you from a bad agency is the standard we want you to hold us to. If we ever fail any of these tests, fire us.
Here’s how to vet a marketing agency before you sign — the red flags, the questions, and what good actually looks like.
Red flags: when to walk away
None of these is subtle once you know to look for it. Any one of them should slow you down. Two or three together mean run.
”We guarantee #1 rankings” or “X leads per month, guaranteed”
Nobody controls Google’s ranking algorithm, and nobody can guarantee how many people will need a furnace fixed in your city next month. An honest agency talks in ranges, probabilities, and “here’s what we’ve seen in similar markets.” A guarantee of a #1 ranking or a specific lead count is either a lie or a trick — usually the agency quietly ranks you for keywords nobody searches, or counts spam form-fills as “leads” to hit the number. A real guarantee you can trust sounds like: “If you cancel, you keep everything, and we won’t lock you in.”
Vanity reporting: impressions and traffic instead of calls and jobs
This is the most common way owners get fooled, because the reports look impressive. Impressions, clicks, traffic, “engagement,” keyword rankings — these are activity, not results. A roofing company doesn’t deposit impressions at the bank. The only metrics that matter are calls, booked jobs, revenue, and cost per booked job. If the monthly report leads with traffic graphs and buries (or omits) how many jobs the work produced, the agency is managing your perception, not your pipeline.
No call tracking or lead tracking at all
If an agency is spending your money and can’t tell you which channel produced which call, they’re flying blind — and so are you. Before anyone touches your budget, there should be conversion tracking and call tracking in place that ties every lead back to its source. No tracking means no accountability, which is exactly how a mediocre agency survives for years: you can’t prove they’re not working. An agency that “doesn’t really do tracking” is telling you it never plans to be measured.
The agency owns your accounts
This is the one that traps people. Ask directly: who owns the Google Ads account, the Google Business Profile, the website, and the domain? The answer must be you. When an agency builds your Google Ads under its own “proprietary account,” registers your domain to itself, or creates your Business Profile on its own login, leaving becomes a divorce where they keep the house. You lose your campaign history, your conversion data, your reviews, sometimes your tracking phone number. (Note that even on platforms you set up yourself, the rules can tilt against you: under Google’s 2025 Local Services terms, Google itself now claims sweeping rights to use and reuse your content and call data — which is all the more reason not to also hand control to an agency.)
A percentage cut of your ad spend, or media buried in the fee
How an agency charges tells you who it works for. The cleanest models are a flat retainer or a management fee that’s clearly separate from media spend. The model to watch is a percentage of ad spend: when the agency earns more every time it spends more of your money, there’s a built-in pull to push budgets up whether or not the economics justify it. Equally bad is an agency that won’t show you the split — where you pay one lump number and can’t see how much actually reached Google or Meta versus how much the agency kept. Ask flatly: “Do you mark up my ad spend, and is the media budget a separate line from your fee?” You should always be able to see both numbers.
Long lock-in contracts with no clean exit
Lock-in isn’t automatically evil — real SEO takes 6–12 months to pay back, and a reasonable commitment can be fair. The red flag is lock-in stacked with everything else: a 12-month term, early-termination penalties, the accounts in their name, and no clear way out. That structure guarantees the agency gets paid whether they perform or not. The healthiest arrangement is month-to-month, or a defined term with a clean exit, where the work has to earn each renewal. If an agency only feels safe when you can’t leave, ask why their work can’t keep you.
No cost-per-booked-job math
Most agencies will eventually tell you a cost per lead. Far fewer can tell you your cost per booked job — and that’s the number that pays your bills. Real home-service leads aren’t cheap: HVAC runs around $100 on average and roofing often $120–$230 a lead. So the math matters. A channel that delivers $90 leads that close at 15% costs you about $600 per booked job. A channel with $150 leads that close at 40% costs $375. The “expensive” channel is actually cheaper. If an agency can’t or won’t connect spend to jobs on the schedule, they’re optimizing for a number that doesn’t matter to you.
The questions every owner should ask
Bring these to the sales call. Watch how they answer as much as what they say — an honest operator answers fast and plainly; a sales pitch deflects to screenshots.
- “When I leave, who owns the Google Ads account, GBP, website, and domain?” The only acceptable answer is “you, all of it.” Anything else is a trap. Ask them to put it in writing.
- “How will you track booked jobs, and tell me my cost per lead and cost per booked job?” You want a concrete answer involving call tracking, conversion tracking, and ideally your CRM — not “we’ll send you a traffic report.”
- “Do you mark up my ad spend, and is media a separate line from your fee?” You’re listening for a clear split and no percentage-of-spend incentive. “It’s all bundled” is a reason to dig harder.
- “Who is on my account day-to-day, and is any of it subcontracted?” The classic burn is senior sells, junior or offshore delivers. You’re not against juniors — you’re against being sold by an expert and served by someone you never met. Ask for names and what’s done in-house.
- “Can I talk to a current client and a former one?” Curated case studies prove nothing. A reference you call does. The former-client ask is the sharpest one: an agency confident in its offboarding will hand you a name; one that burns people on the way out will suddenly have none.
- “What would you not spend my money on right now?” This is the tell. An agency that wants to sell you everything will pitch you everything. One that’s actually thinking about your economics will sometimes say “don’t do SEO yet, fix your website first” or “your tracking is broken — let’s fix that before we scale spend.” Honest “fix this first” advice costs the agency a bigger invoice today, which is exactly why it’s trustworthy.
What good actually looks like
A good agency is boring in all the right ways. Here’s the bar — the one we hold ourselves to.
- You own everything. Your Google Ads account is under your email with the agency added as a manager you can remove in one click. Your domain, website, GBP, and data are all in your name. Leaving is a formality, not a hostage negotiation.
- You can log in yourself. A good agency gives you direct, real-time access to the ad account and analytics — not just a monthly PDF it curates for you. The ability to open the dashboard yourself any day of the month is the single best antidote to vanity reporting, because nobody can dress up a number you can check.
- Reporting leads with economics, not activity. Every report answers the only questions that matter: How many calls and booked jobs? What did each cost? Is the cost per job going up or down? Traffic and rankings show up as supporting context, never as the headline.
- Tracking is in place before scaling spend. Real conversion and call tracking goes in first, so every dollar is accountable from day one — the same logic that makes SEO measurable, where you need to know which pages actually drive calls, not just which ones rank.
- Honest onboarding and clear ramp expectations. A good agency tells you up front what months one through three realistically look like — setup and tracking first, early signal next, compounding later — so you don’t panic-churn in week six because the flood didn’t arrive on day one.
- A clean exit, in writing. Notice period, and what you get on the way out: account access, a raw data export, your creative and landing-page files, and ownership of any content built for you. If offboarding is defined before you sign, the relationship stays honest.
- No guarantees, just hedged, defensible expectations. They tell you what’s likely, what’s uncertain, and what could go wrong — and they’d rather under-promise and keep you for years than over-promise and lose you in three months.
The hard truth is that a good agency and a bad one can look identical on a sales call. The difference shows up in the boring details: whose name is on the accounts, how they charge, who actually does the work, what the report leads with, and whether anyone can tell you your cost per booked job. Vet on those, not on the pitch.
Ask us the hard questions
We just handed you a checklist designed to expose agencies — including ours. That’s on purpose. If you’re evaluating Husky, or any agency, run us through every question above and watch how we answer. You should own your accounts, see the split between our fee and your media, meet the people on your account, see your cost per booked job, and be free to walk anytime.
Ask us the hard questions → and we’ll give you straight answers — including, sometimes, “you don’t need us for that yet.”
Sources: Searchlight Digital — roofing & HVAC Google Ads CPL benchmarks (2026), upGrowth — red flags in performance marketing contracts (2026), Sarah Stemen — Google Ads agency red flags, Search Engine Land — Google asset ownership in Local Services Ads, Tree Care Marketing Solutions — Local Services Ads 2025 terms update.