How to find a good marketing agency and test it in one call

Agency emails tend to arrive with a partner badge in the signature. Finding agencies is easy. Telling the ones that know the work from the ones that know how to sell it is harder. Here is how we would do it from your side of the desk, even if one of the agencies on your list is us.

Where good candidates come from

Owners in your trade, outside your market

The best referral comes from someone who does what you do in a city you do not compete in. A roofer two states away loses nothing by sharing a good agency, and has sat through the same storm seasons and the same pitch. Find them through trade associations, buying groups and owner forums, and ask what the agency changed in its first three months.

A referral from a competitor across town needs one more question: if the agency runs ads for both of you in the same zip codes, how does it decide whose budget goes up?

The ad platforms’ own directories

• Google Partners directory. Each listing shows a Partner or Premier Partner’s region and the product areas where it holds Google Ads certifications. It opens on Premier Partners only, so switch the filter to all partners and your region, or you will see just the top 3%.
• Microsoft Advertising Partner Directory. Microsoft’s program has three tiers, and its directory filters by service, location and industry, home services among them. Worth a look if you want Microsoft Advertising and Bing covered too.

Review sites, read with care

Clutch publishes how its score is built, though each directory page weighs it its own way. Rank leans most on an “Ability to Deliver” score out of 40 points. Reviews make up half, weighted by rating, recency, verification and the budget of the client who wrote them. Another quarter is market presence, which includes the firm’s web presence and domain authority.

So a high rank partly reflects big clients and a strong website. Read the reviews from projects close to your size and trade, and skip the ones from companies that spend in a month what you spend in a year.

What a Google Partner badge actually checks

Google publishes the bar for the Google Partner badge: three requirements, checked daily.

• Performance. The agency’s manager account needs an optimization score of at least 70%.
• Spend. Google sets it at $10,000 over 90 days, added up across every account the agency manages, so a handful of small accounts or one larger one clears it.
• Certifications. Google wants at least half of its account strategists certified in Google Ads, with at least one certification in each product area where its clients spent $500 or more in 90 days, a low bar.

Google describes optimization score as “an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform,” and says an account can reach 100% “by applying or dismissing all recommendations.” Dismissing counts. An agency can clear the bar by reading Google’s suggestions and turning them down, which is often the right call on a local account where a suggestion to switch to broad match can mean paying for searches for jobs you do not do. The score shows someone works through the recommendations, not that any client booked a job.

Read the badge as proof that the agency is active, certified and managing live accounts. An agency that presents it as proof of results is showing you how it will report to you.

Five tests for the first call

Ask them to read something of yours, live

Share your screen with last month’s Google Ads search terms report or your Business Profile and ask what they see. Someone in local accounts every day will spot junk searches you paid for, a service area that does not match where you drive, or the wrong primary category within minutes. Someone who mostly sells will offer to come back with an audit.

Ask what they would not do for you

A good agency has opinions about what does not fit you: Meta ads for an emergency trade where people search rather than scroll, a new website when the current one only needs the phone number moved up, Display campaigns for a business with one truck. If everything on the menu suits you, nobody has thought about your business.

Ask them to walk one lead through a real report

Get a real client report with the name hidden, point at one lead, and ask them to trace it: which ad or listing it came from, who answered, and whether it became a booked job. An agency that can follow one lead to the calendar tracks jobs. One that can only point at a total tracks activity.

Ask who will do the work

The person on the call is often not the person in your account. Ask who builds your campaigns and answers your emails, how many accounts that person handles, and whether any work goes to another company.

Ask to speak to a current client in a similar business

Not a quote on their website: a phone number for a current client in a similar trade or market. If nobody like you will take that call, you have learned something.

Signs of real local experience

The agencies worth hiring ask about your business before your budget. Which towns will you drive to, and where do your best-paying jobs come from? How many jobs can you take next month, since more leads than your crew can handle is a cost? Who picks up after hours and on Saturdays, since an ad that makes the phone ring is wasted if nobody answers? An agency that skips straight to packages will fit you into one.

Before the first call

• Look each agency up in the Google Partners directory with the filter on all partners. Companies can opt out of the listing, so a missing one is a question, not proof.
• Pull last month’s search terms report and keep it open for the live read.
• Ask each agency to trace one lead to a booked job.
• Get the name of whoever will run your account, and one current client’s number in a business like yours.

You are welcome to ask us the same questions. Request the free plan, say you want the read and include your Business Profile link, and we will ask for your search terms report and build the plan from both. The consult is free, and the plan is yours to keep whether or not you hire us. One team does all of our work, and none of it goes to another company. Our Google Ads and local SEO pages show how it runs.