Contractor PPC management, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a contractor PPC agency

1. Write down your service area and your job economics first. Bring three numbers to every call: the radius you will genuinely travel, your average job value, and the share of quoted jobs you win. Without them nobody can tell you whether a lead at a given cost is profitable, and every proposal becomes a debate about click prices rather than about money. With them, the conversation takes ten minutes.
2. Insist the ad account is yours. Your account holds the conversion history and the learning that makes bidding work, and rebuilding it from scratch costs months of performance. Create the account under your own billing and grant the agency access, never the reverse. Ask explicitly what happens to the account, the conversion data and the call tracking numbers when the relationship ends.
3. Agree how a lead is counted, and how calls are handled. Most contractor leads arrive as phone calls, so tracking has to capture them or the reporting is fiction. Agree a minimum call duration that counts, agree that wrong numbers and existing customers are excluded, and check your call recording practice against your state's consent law, since several require all parties to consent.
4. Separate management fee from media spend. Ask for two numbers: what you pay the agency and what reaches the platform. Percentage-of-spend fees reward increasing budget, flat fees do not, and per-lead pricing shifts risk to the agency at a higher unit cost. None is wrong, but you cannot judge value until the two lines are separated on the quote.

What contractor PPC agencies publish, and what they hold back

Our index records what each provider states on its own site, with the date we checked it. Agencies serving trades publish pricing more often than general digital shops do, because their buyers are owner-operators who want a number before a meeting and will leave a site that does not offer one. What is published is usually a management fee floor plus a minimum monthly media spend, and the second number is frequently the binding one.

What almost nobody publishes is the account structure they will build or the lead cost they expect in your trade and your metro, and that is reasonable, because both depend on competition where you work. Ask instead for an anonymised example from a comparable trade in a comparable market, showing spend, leads, cost per lead and booked jobs. A provider who cannot produce one has not run this kind of account.

What moves the price and the results

Competition in your trade and metro moves click costs most, and neither you nor your agency controls it. What is controllable is waste: unmatched service areas that pay for clicks outside your radius, broad keywords that catch job seekers and DIY researchers, no negative keyword discipline, and landing pages that make a phone number hard to find on a small screen. Most underperforming contractor accounts fail on those four before they fail on strategy.

Seasonality is the second factor. Trades tied to weather see demand and click costs spike together, which means a fixed monthly budget spends the same amount at very different values. Ask any candidate how they handle a storm week or a heat wave, whether budgets flex, and who has authority to change them at short notice. The answer separates providers who manage accounts from providers who set them and report on them.

Questions people actually ask

What should we pay an agency to manage contractor PPC?

Fee structures vary between flat monthly, a share of media spend, and per-lead pricing, and published floors differ widely. Judge the fee against the total cost per booked job rather than in isolation, because a cheaper manager who wastes budget is more expensive than a dearer one who does not.

Is paid search better than SEO for contractors?

They answer different questions. Paid search buys demand today and stops when the card stops. Search visibility compounds and costs nothing per click but takes quarters. Most established contractors run both, funding paid while organic coverage is built.

How do we know the leads are real?

Listen to the calls, at least weekly at the start. Agree a duration threshold, exclude existing customers and wrong numbers, and reconcile the agency's lead count against your own booking system monthly. Check your state's call recording consent requirements before you record anything.

How long before we can judge an account?

Enough clicks to be meaningful, not a fixed calendar period. In a low volume trade that might be two or three months. Agree in advance how many leads or conversions constitute a fair test, and do not restructure the account halfway through it.

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