What We Find Inside Contractor Marketing Accounts

I audit the marketing accounts of home service companies for a living. HVAC, plumbing, roofing, chimney sweeps. Some are one-truck operations. Some spend $20,000 a month across agencies, ads, and lead platforms.

Here is what this year’s audits actually turned up. Names removed, numbers real.

16,962 conversions that never happened

A Midwest HVAC and plumbing company was spending close to $20,000 a month across two agencies and a stack of lead platforms. Their Google Ads account reported thousands of conversions. It felt like winning.

Three of the five conversion goals in the account were misconfigured. The big one was counting page views as conversions. Somebody loads the contact page, that is a “conversion.” 16,962 of them.

The real number of search conversions in the period we reviewed: 21. At the account’s spend, that worked out to $482 per real conversion, before anyone answered the phone.

Nobody inside the company knew, because the report the agency sent every month was built on the inflated number. The dashboard was not lying, exactly. It was just measuring applause instead of revenue. That account’s full breakdown is its own story.

The website traffic that was 71 percent robots

A Texas HVAC company’s agency dashboard showed hundreds of website visitors a month. Steady line, up and to the right.

We pulled the raw analytics. 71 percent of the traffic came from two data centers, one in Oregon, one in Virginia. Server farms visiting the website. Actual local homeowners in a month: about twelve.

The company had been making budget decisions on that traffic line for years. When your baseline is fiction, every decision built on it inherits the fiction.

The Google Guaranteed account with the wrong phone number

Same Texas company. Their Local Services Ads account was verified, carried the Google Guaranteed badge, and had weekly budget allocated behind it. Through the first three and a half months of the year it produced two leads, and the owner assumed the market was slow.

The account had the agency’s tracking phone number on it, and the routing was broken. Several job types were switched off entirely. The platform was set up to spend and all but unable to deliver a call.

This one took a fifty-minute call with Google to unwind. The fix was not clever. Someone just had to look. We have found broken phone numbers in live LSA campaigns more than once, which is why calling the number is the first check in every LSA audit we run.

$7,783 a month into a lead platform returning $475

The Midwest company again. One line item: $7,783 a month going to a home-services lead marketplace. We matched the leads against booked revenue using their own call reports. The return was about $475 a month.

Not every lead platform is a scam. Their plumbing leads actually penciled. But nobody had ever split the number by trade, so the profitable slice was subsidizing a fire pit.

The company whose own domain belonged to its lead vendor

A young home services company went to cancel its lead-generation vendor and discovered the vendor controlled its domain. Cancel the service, lose the website and everything attached to it.

This is the quiet cousin of the agency-owns-your-website contract. Nobody reads the fine print on who registered the domain until the relationship ends. By then the leverage runs one direction. The fix is sequencing: secure your own domain, your own website, and your own Business Profile first, and only then make the cancellation call. Cancel first and you negotiate for your own name from zero.

The company where nothing was measured at all

A Northwest service company had a website for years. No analytics on it. Not broken analytics, none. No tracking on calls, none on forms. Every marketing decision the owner had ever made was made on feel.

He is not an outlier. A surprising share of the companies we audit are measuring nothing at all. Their agencies still send reports.

The pattern

Four companies, one pattern: the report and the reality had come apart, and nobody inside the building had the access or the time to check.

None of these owners were careless. They run crews, they answer emergencies, they carry payroll. They did what owners do: they trusted the dashboard. The dashboard was measuring page views, robots, and a phone number that did not ring.

The three questions that would have caught all of it

1. What exactly counts as a “conversion” in my account? If nobody can answer in one sentence, that number is decoration.
2. How much of my website traffic is human, and local? If your report cannot split that, it is not a report.
3. If I call the number on my own ads right now, what happens? Try it. Today.

We run these checks, and a much longer list behind them, in the audit we do before we ever propose anything. It is free, it takes about 15 minutes of your time to start, and you keep the findings whether or not we ever work together.

All figures come from audits performed inside the companies’ own Google Ads, Google Analytics, Local Services Ads, and call reporting accounts in 2026, with owner permission. Companies anonymized.