Here's a situation I see constantly in Austin: a plumber or HVAC owner has been paying a marketing company $1,500–$3,000 a month for 8 months. They think it's working because the agency sends a monthly PDF with charts and phrases like "brand impressions" and "audience growth." Meanwhile, they can't point to a single job they can trace back to that spend.
That's not marketing. That's a subscription to a slide deck.
If you run a service trade in Central Texas — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, gates, AV installs, whatever — you don't have the margin to carry dead weight. Here's how to audit your marketing situation in about 10 minutes. No agency fluff. Just the real questions.
Step 1: Ask Where Your Last 10 Paying Customers Came From
Pull up your last 10 invoices. For each one, answer: how did this person find me?
Call the source what it actually is — not what the agency claims. If a customer says they "Googled plumber near me" and your agency is taking credit for SEO, fine. But if they found you through a neighbor referral or your truck wrap, that's not the agency. That's you.
According to a 2025 BrightLocal Local Consumer Survey, 87% of consumers used Google to evaluate a local business in the past year. If you're not showing up in the local 3-pack for your core service keywords in your target city — say, "AC repair Cedar Park" or "electrician Round Rock" — and you're paying for SEO, that's a problem you can verify right now by typing the search yourself.
If fewer than 3 of your last 10 customers came through the marketing channel you're paying for, you have your answer.
Step 2: Check the Three Numbers That Actually Matter
Every marketing effort for a service trade should produce movement in one of three numbers: inbound calls, form submissions, or booked jobs. That's it. Everything else is a supporting metric, not a primary one.
Ask your agency — or check your own data — for these specific figures, broken down by month:
- How many inbound calls came from paid ads vs. organic? If they're running Google LSA or PPC for you, they should have call tracking in place. If they don't, they're flying blind with your money.
- How many form fills converted to actual conversations? A lot of agencies inflate lead counts with form submissions from bots or low-intent clicks. If 40 people filled out a form last month and you only spoke to 3, the lead quality is garbage.
- What is your cost per booked job? Not cost per click. Not cost per lead. Cost per booked job. If you're paying $2,400/month in agency fees plus $800/month in ad spend and booking 4 jobs from it, your cost is $800 per job. Whether that's acceptable depends on your ticket size — but at least now you know the real number.
If your agency can't or won't give you these three numbers on demand, that's the audit result right there.
Step 3: Look at What Changed After You Hired Them
Go to Google Search Console — it's free, and your agency should have already set it up for your site. Look at the organic clicks and impressions graph for the past 12 months. Find the month you hired the agency. Did anything go up meaningfully after that? Did it go up at a pace that justifies the fee?
Do the same with your Google Business Profile. Under the "Performance" tab, check calls and direction requests by month. These are direct indicators of local intent — people who are actively looking to hire someone in San Marcos, Pflugerville, Kyle, wherever you work.
If both graphs are flat or declining since you signed the contract, no amount of agency reporting language changes what the data shows.
Step 4: Have the Five-Minute Accountability Conversation
Email or call your agency and ask this single question: "What specific result did our spend produce last month, and what's the plan to improve it next month?"
A good agency answers that with real numbers and a real plan. A bad one responds with reasons why results take time, new metrics you've never heard of, or a pivot to talking about your brand. You've been paying them for months. Time has already passed.
This isn't about being adversarial. It's about running your business like a business. If your parts supplier sent you defective inventory for eight months, you'd stop ordering from them. Marketing spend is no different.
If the Audit Comes Back Bad, Here's What To Do
Don't panic and don't ghost them yet. Give them 30 days with a written benchmark: X calls, Y booked jobs, Z improvement in local rankings. If they hit it, great. If they can't even agree to a benchmark, you have the clarity you need to make a decision.
At Bizinabox, we work with trade businesses across Austin and Central Texas who've been burned by agencies that overpromised and disappeared. We build AI agent systems, ad funnels, and websites that are designed to produce trackable, attributable revenue — not impressions. If you just ran this audit and didn't like what you found, reach out to us at Bizinabox. We'll tell you honestly what we think is wrong and what it would take to fix it.