Six questions to ask before you sign an agency's ad proposal

A plumbing firm with ten staff has a proposal from an agency on the desk. Twelve pages. The first four are about the agency. Pages five to nine are about reach: search volume for "plumber" in the region, impressions, a projected click-through rate, a chart that goes up and to the right. Page ten is the monthly management fee, page eleven the recommended ad budget, page twelve a twelve-month term with a signature line.

Nowhere in the twelve pages does the word "voicemail" appear. Nowhere does it say where the calls go, what counts as a lead, or who owns the account if the firm leaves. The proposal is not dishonest. It is simply written by people whose job ends at the click, for a reader whose job starts there.

Before signing anything of this kind, we ask the agency six questions. The answers tell you more than the twelve pages.

Question one: where does the call go?

Ads for a plumber produce calls, mostly to a mobile or the office line, often at the hours the office is thinnest. Ask the agency what happens to a paid call that rings out. Most have never been asked. With ads billed by the click, the click has been paid for before the phone rings, whether or not anyone answers.

Two American figures on missed calls get quoted a lot. Invoca, a call-tracking provider, wrote in February 2024 that about 26 percent of calls on its customer platform never get answered, across its customers in general. 411 Locals, an SEO firm, monitored the calls of 85 small businesses in 58 industries for 30 days and published in January 2016 that 62 percent did not reach a person, voicemail included. Neither is about paid calls or about your firm. Both say that unanswered calls are common enough to ask about, and the proposal does not mention them.

If you have not counted your own missed calls for a week, do that before you sign. The missed-call audit takes one week and a notepad.

Question two: what exactly is a lead?

Proposals promise leads. Ask for the definition. A form submission with a fake phone number is a lead in most reporting. A call that lasted four seconds is a lead. A call from a supplier who clicked the ad by mistake is a lead. Ask whether the agency's reports distinguish calls over sixty seconds from the rest, and whether it will credit back leads that were obviously not customers.

This matters more now that Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads. According to Google's help page on the transition, existing Local Services Ads campaigns move to a Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals. The first phase began in August 2026 with selected home and shop-front service advertisers in the United States, plumbing and HVAC among them. Accounts outside the US follow in 2027. The billing model stays. In Google's words, you still "only pay for valid leads (such as phone calls and messages) rather than ad clicks". What changes is where you manage it. Budgets and replies to customer enquiries move from the separate Local Services Ads dashboard into Google Ads, and Google fills in the campaign setup from your Google Business Profile. The leads page in Google Ads shows which leads you were charged for and has a lead feedback form. Ask the agency how it will handle the move when your account's turn comes, and who will go through the charged leads and send feedback on the ones that were not customers.

Question three: who owns the account?

The Google Ads account, the conversion data, the history of what worked: all of it should be in an account the firm owns, with the agency as a manager. Some agencies run client campaigns inside their own accounts. When the firm leaves, the history leaves with the agency and the next campaign starts from zero. Ask, and ask to see the account structure before signing.

The same applies to the landing page. If the agency builds one on its own platform, the page goes when the contract goes.

Question four: what is the fee, and what is the spend?

Separate the two numbers and ask what the fee buys. A flat fee is fine. A fee that is a percentage of ad spend gives the agency a reason to recommend a bigger budget. Ask what happens to the fee in a month where the campaign is paused because the firm is full, which in a good trade business happens.

Then ask what the fee does not include: landing page changes, call tracking, monthly reporting calls, the work when Google moves your Local Services Ads account. Anything not listed will be an invoice later.

Question five: what happens to the enquiry in the first five minutes?

A form enquiry from an ad is worth most in the minutes after it arrives. Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington wrote in the Harvard Business Review in March 2011 that, across 1.25 million sales leads at 42 US companies, firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later. In a separate audit of 2,241 US companies, the average reply time among firms that replied within 30 days was 42 hours. That study is fifteen years old and not specific to trades, but nothing since has reversed its shape.

Ask the agency whether the campaign includes any follow-up on the enquiries it produces. Almost none do. The proposal ends at the form submission; the Saturday evening enquiry begins there.

Question six: what is the exit?

A twelve-month term is normal in proposals and unusual in what actually makes sense. Ask for a three-month trial with a defined result, in booked jobs rather than clicks, and a thirty-day notice after that. An agency that believes its own projections will accept the trial. An agency that will not is telling you something about the projections.

The one condition under which we say sign

We are not against ads. Paid ads are the seventh employee in the Aristotle System, and the order is the point. We tell a client to sign when the firm can answer yes to each of these, with evidence: the site loads in under two seconds on a phone and asks for one thing; every web enquiry gets a reply within five minutes at any hour; every call is answered by a person or an assistant that takes details and books; new reviews arrive every month and get replies; the person who quotes can hold a price; and the past-customer list is being written to with consent.

A firm that can say yes to all six has a funnel that holds water, and ads into it produce booked jobs at a cost the owner can measure. A firm that cannot has a bucket with holes, and the twelve-page proposal is a hose. The how it works page describes the order, the paid ads page describes what the seventh employee does when its turn comes, and the calculator shows what the holes cost before you decide whether to buy water.

The plumbing firm did not sign. It asked the six questions, got clear answers to two of them, and put the proposal in a drawer while the phone and the follow-up were fixed. It came back out in the spring, and by then the question was not whether ads would work but how much to spend.