Every few months I talk to a plumber or HVAC tech in Austin who's been paying a marketing agency $1,500–$3,000 a month and genuinely doesn't know if it's working. Not because they're not paying attention — because the agency never showed them anything that mattered. Just a PDF with a bunch of green arrows and the word impressions used like it pays the mortgage.
It doesn't. Booked jobs do.
Here's a 10-minute audit you can run yourself, right now, that will tell you whether your marketing company is earning their fee or just cashing a check.
Step 1: Pull Your Actual Lead Numbers (Not Vanity Metrics)
Log into whatever your agency calls a dashboard. Ignore traffic, impressions, and follower counts. Find these three numbers for the last 90 days:
- How many inbound calls came from your Google Business Profile or website? If they can't show you a call tracking number tied to your ads or organic listing, they're not tracking anything that matters.
- How many form submissions or chat leads did you get? Not visits to the contact page — actual completed submissions.
- What's your cost per lead? Total spend divided by total leads. In competitive Texas markets like Austin, Round Rock, or San Antonio, a realistic Google LSA cost per lead for HVAC runs $40–$90 depending on the season. If your agency can't tell you your number, that's the answer.
According to WordStream's 2025 Google Ads benchmarks, the average cost per lead across home services nationally is around $66. That's a real number to compare against. If you're paying $200 per lead for a $350 drain cleaning job, the math doesn't work — and your agency should have flagged that six months ago.
Step 2: Google Your Own Business Like a Customer Would
Open an incognito browser. Type in what your ideal customer would type: emergency electrician Austin, fence company Georgetown TX, AC repair Cedar Park — whatever fits your trade and your area.
Ask yourself four questions:
- Do you show up on the map pack (the three businesses Google shows at the top)?
- Does your Google Business Profile have reviews from the last 60 days? A stale review profile tanks your ranking.
- If you're running Google Ads, do your ads actually appear? Click one. Does it go to a landing page that makes sense, or just your homepage?
- What does your competitor's listing look like versus yours? If the plumber two miles away has 300 reviews and you have 40, that's not your agency's fault entirely — but if they haven't mentioned it once in your monthly calls, that's a problem.
This is a five-minute exercise that shows you exactly what a customer in Pflugerville or Buda sees when they need someone like you.
Step 3: Check What They're Actually Doing Each Month
Ask your agency for a plain-English list of what they did last month. Not a dashboard. A list. Things like: updated your Google Business Profile posts, added 10 location pages, ran an A/B test on your ad headline, built 5 local citations. Specific work.
If they send you a report with graphs instead of a task list, ask the question again. Good agencies can tell you exactly what they touched. Agencies running on autopilot can't, because they didn't touch much.
Also check: when did they last call you without you calling first? A proactive agency reaches out when something changes — Google updates an algorithm, your review rating drops, a competitor starts outspending you. If you've been the one initiating every conversation for the last three months, that's a managed decline, not active marketing.
Step 4: Match the Spend to the Revenue
This is the one most trade owners skip because it feels complicated. It's not.
Take your last 90 days of marketing spend. Now look at your job tickets from the same period and ask yourself: how many of these jobs came from online leads? Most field service software — ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro — lets you tag a lead source. If you've been doing that, you can pull the number. If you haven't, start now.
A simple benchmark: your marketing should return at least $3–$5 in revenue for every $1 spent, once you account for your average job value and close rate. A San Marcos HVAC company doing $400 average tickets should be able to trace real revenue back to real spend. If you can't draw that line, the system isn't set up to prove its own value — which benefits exactly one party, and it isn't you.
What to Do With What You Find
If you ran this audit and felt good about every answer, your agency is doing their job. Tell them. Good vendors stay when they feel like partners, not vendors.
If you hit two or more of these and felt that sinking feeling — the one where you realize you've been paying for vibes — you have two options: have a direct conversation with your agency about what changes in the next 30 days, or find someone who can show you the work.
At Bizinabox, we work specifically with trade businesses in Austin and Central Texas. We show our clients exactly what we're doing, what it cost, and what it returned. No dashboards full of green arrows. If you want a second set of eyes on what you've got, reach out and we'll take a look.