You are paying a marketing company every month. They send a report. The report shows impressions, clicks, a cost-per-click figure, maybe something about ad performance. You read it, you nod, and you honestly have no idea whether the jobs you booked last month came from those ads or not. When things slow down, you ask them about it and get a reassuring explanation. Nothing changes.
This situation is more common than most electricians realize. And the core problem is not always a dishonest marketing company. Often it is an account that was set up reasonably, handed to someone to monitor, and has been sitting on autopilot ever since. The monthly fee comes out. The report gets generated automatically. Nobody is actually doing the work.
This post gives you a practical way to evaluate whether your marketing company is genuinely driving jobs, or just sending paperwork.
What Active Management Requires for a Local Electrical Business
First, establish what real management looks like. This is the baseline against which to compare what you are receiving.
A Google Ads account for an electrician needs regular, specific attention. Not every day, but regularly, with clear outcomes. On a monthly basis at minimum, a manager doing their job should be doing these things:
Reviewing the search terms report and adding negative keywords. Every month, new irrelevant queries appear that trigger your ads. Job-seeker searches, DIY searches, searches from outside your area. A manager who is actively working on the account catches these and adds them to the negative keyword list. Over a year, a managed account builds up a strong list that prevents budget waste. An unmanaged account stays with whatever was there at setup.
Checking that call tracking is working correctly. Phone calls are the whole point of the account. If a tag breaks, if the number forwards incorrectly, if a website change disrupts the tracking, the account stops seeing conversions. A manager who checks regularly catches this within a week. A manager on autopilot may not notice for months.
Reviewing ad performance and testing new copy. Ads get stale. The click-through rate declines. New angles get tested. A manager actively running an account will have ad test history showing what was tried and what won.
Monitoring the cost per lead trend. If the cost of a phone call or form submission is rising steadily, something changed: competition increased, keyword settings drifted, the targeting widened. An active manager identifies this and responds. A passive one sees the same report numbers and sends them to you.
Reviewing geographic performance. Are the calls coming from the service area? Are there areas producing lots of clicks and no booked jobs? These reviews inform targeting adjustments.
Making and documenting changes. This is the clearest proof of active management. A real manager makes changes to the account regularly and can tell you specifically what changed and why. If you ask “what was done in my account last month” and the answer is vague, or if the answer is “we monitored performance and everything looks good,” that is a signal.
What Autopilot Management Looks Like
An account on autopilot was often set up correctly at the start. Then it was handed to someone who monitors the dashboard and generates reports, but does not actively work on it.
Signs your account is on autopilot:
The report only shows top-level numbers. Spend, clicks, impressions, sometimes a click-through rate. No mention of search terms reviewed, no negative keywords added, no call tracking check, no ad copy changes. This report is auto-generated by Google. It requires no analytical work to produce.
The account looks the same every month. Same keywords, same ads, same structure. Nothing new was tested, nothing was retired, nothing was changed in response to what the data showed.
Recommendations from the company match Google’s own automated suggestions. “We recommend expanding to broad match to reach more people” and “Google suggests increasing your budget to capture more impressions” are not strategic recommendations. They are Google’s recommendations, passed through a human. They benefit Google’s revenue. They may or may not benefit yours.
No discussion of call quality or tracking. A company managing a local service business that never mentions whether the calls are working, whether tracking is intact, or what percentage of calls converted to booked jobs is not doing the core job.
Questions That Reveal Whether Work Is Actually Being Done
These questions are specific enough that vague answers become obvious:
“Can you show me the search terms report from last month and walk me through what negatives you added?”
A manager actively doing this work will produce the list and walk through specific examples. Someone who is not will give a general answer about keyword optimization.
“What specific changes were made to the account in the past 30 days, and why?”
The answer should be a list. “We added 14 negative keywords after reviewing the search terms, paused the low-performing ad in the emergency services ad group, and tightened the location radius after we saw 8% of clicks coming from outside your service area.” If the answer is not a list of specific actions, the work was not done.
“Is call tracking working correctly right now? How do you verify it?”
The correct answer involves comparing call conversions in Google Ads against what the business is actually receiving. “It’s working because Google shows conversions” is insufficient. That tells you something fired. It does not tell you whether the right thing fired for the right reason.
“What is the cost per lead trend over the past 6 months?”
A manager watching the account can answer this without looking it up, or can pull it up immediately. The cost per call should be tracked over time, not just reported as a monthly average. If it is rising, the manager should have a view on why.
“How many calls last month came from outside your service area?”
This requires looking at geographic data and, ideally, matching it to call data. If the manager cannot tell you, or says they do not track that, the geographic targeting is probably not being actively managed.
What You Should Expect to Receive
Beyond the questions, here are minimum expectations for professional management of a local electrical contractor’s Google Ads:
A monthly report that includes actual interpretation, not just numbers. What happened, why the manager believes it happened, and what is being done about it. Data without context is useless.
A specific list of what changed in the account that month. Not “we made some optimizations.” A list.
Proactive communication when something unusual happens. A large drop in calls, a tracking break, a sudden spike in cost per lead. These things should come to you before you notice them and ask.
Access to your own account. You should have direct access to your Google Ads account, as a manager or owner, at all times. Any company that holds your account without giving you access is creating a dependency that serves them, not you.
Honest attribution. The company should be able to tell you where your calls are coming from: Google Ads, Google organic search, referrals, Local Services Ads. A company that cannot distinguish between these cannot tell you what is actually working.
Getting This Fixed
If this picture is raising doubts about your current management, those doubts are worth acting on. An account sitting on autopilot for six months or more accumulates problems: wasted spend on bad searches, geographic drift, tracking gaps, and stale ads. The monthly fee you are paying is not buying those fixes.
I do independent audits for electrical contractors that give a clear picture of what is happening in the account, separate from whoever currently manages it. And I manage Google Ads for local trades businesses that need it done properly.
Reach out at adnanagic.com/#contact.
Part of the Google Ads for Electricians series, written for electricians who want their ad budget to bring real jobs, not junk calls.
Related Posts
- A Google Ads Audit for Electricians: What Is Quietly Wasting Your Budget
- Are You Tracking Phone Calls from Your Ads, or Guessing
- Why Your Google Ads Bring Calls but Not the Jobs You Want
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