Key takeaways
- Judge an agency on booked calls and installs by source, not clicks, impressions or rankings.
- Your Google profile, ad accounts, website, call tracking and CRM must be in your company's name.
- Ask how they would treat a same-day repair call differently from a panel, generator or EV charger lead.
- Short commitments, written deliverables and dates protect you better than any promise.
A good marketing agency for an electrical contractor reports in booked calls and installs, keeps every account in your company's name, and can explain how it would market a same-day repair differently from a panel upgrade. Before you sign with anyone, ask the questions below. The answers will tell you more than the sales deck.
What to look for
Look for an agency that understands how your phone actually fills. Electrical demand comes from a few triggers: a power problem, a remodel, an EV purchase, a home inspection finding, and generator interest that spikes around storms. Each has its own search terms, its own urgency and its own value. An agency that treats them as one "electrician" campaign will spend money where it is easiest to spend, not where your margin is.
Use this as your interview sheet.
| Ask this | A good answer sounds like | Why it matters for an electrician |
|---|---|---|
| What will you report every month? | Calls, booked calls and installs by source, cost per booked call | Clicks do not pay for a truck. Booked work does |
| Whose name are the accounts in? | Yours: profile, ads, site, domain, tracking, CRM | Switching agencies should not mean starting your profile and ad history over |
| How do you track a call to a booked job? | Call tracking on the site and ads, with booked jobs sent back as conversions (Google Ads) | Most electrical leads phone in. Without call tracking, the ads optimize for nothing |
| How will you treat repairs versus installs? | Separate campaigns, pages and budgets for service calls, panels, EV chargers and generators | Install jobs carry larger tickets and longer decisions |
| What happens in storm season? | A plan to raise generator spend while you have install capacity, and pull back when booked out | Spending into a full calendar wastes money |
| What do pay-per-lead ads look like for us? | They know Local Services Ads are moving into Google Ads in phases by category (Google Ads Help) | You want someone current, not someone repeating last year's setup |
| What will you do in the first 30 days, by name and date? | A written list with owners and dates | Vague plans become monthly invoices |
Choosing a marketing partner
| Question | Look for | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts | Everything in your name | They own the ad account or site |
| Contract | Projects with outcomes and dates | Long lock-in with no exit |
| Reporting | Calls and booked jobs | Impressions and clicks only |
| Promises | Honest trade-offs | Promised top rankings |
Red flags
Some answers should end the meeting. Walk away when you hear any of these:
- "We'll set up the accounts under our agency." Whoever owns the profile and ad accounts owns your reviews and years of call data when you part ways.
- A long contract before any work is proven. A confident agency does not need to lock you in.
- Reports full of impressions, clicks and rankings, with no booked calls. Ask what a booked call cost last month. Silence is the answer.
- A promise of top rankings or a fixed number of leads. Nobody controls Google's results.
- No question about your capacity. An agency that does not ask how many installs your crews can handle a week will sell you leads you cannot serve.
- Fake or bought reviews offered as a service. That puts your Google profile at risk.
Agency vs hiring
An agency gives you several specialists for about the cost of one experienced hire. A hire gives you one person's skills and your own time to manage them. For most electrical contractors the work covers SEO, Google Ads, a website, a CRM and reviews, which is more than one person does well. The hire versus agency guide for electricians lays out a framework for comparing the cost with your own numbers.
Why VETS Growth Marketing
We run every account the same way, in four steps:
- Assess. We review your Google profile, website, ads, call handling and follow-up, and trace where last quarter's booked calls came from.
- Prioritize. We rank the fixes by booked work they should add, separating quick repair-call gains from install growth, and put a date on each.
- Execute. We do the work in accounts you own, with a written list of what changed each week.
- Measure. We report calls, booked calls, installs and cost per customer by source, then set the next priority ahead of storm season and the remodel calendar.
Everything is scoped as projects with outcomes and dates, with no long-term contract. If you want to start with one channel, the electrician SEO guide shows what that project includes.
How VETS Growth Marketing helps
We are a full growth team for owner-operated businesses, for about the cost of one senior hire, covering SEO, Google Business Profile, websites, ads, CRM follow-up and AI. Your accounts stay in your company's name, each piece of work has an outcome and a date, and we report in booked calls and installs, not clicks. Book a growth consultation and leave with your five highest-impact next moves, whether or not you hire us.
Sources
- About conversion measurement, Google Ads Help
- Set up tracking calls to a phone number on a website, Google Ads Help
- Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, Google Ads Help