How to tell if a marketing agency has actually worked in your trade before you give them money

You've done this before. You paid someone, waited, and watched nothing happen. Maybe you got leads that were looking for jobs instead of work. Maybe you got leads from the wrong city, the wrong service, or no leads at all. By the time it was clear the agency had no idea what they were doing in your specific trade, you were already locked into a contract with no way out and no refund coming.

Now you're looking at another agency. They're using the right words. They have a website. They say they specialize in home services. But so did the last one.

Here's how to actually check.

Ask for a case study from your exact trade, then ask the follow-up question

Most agencies have a case study. The case study is usually from their best client, in their best niche, in their best month. That's not necessarily dishonest, but it's also not proof they can do it in your trade.

If you run epoxy flooring, ask for an epoxy result. If you do junk removal, ask for junk removal. Concrete, pest control, auto detailing, same principle. Watch what happens next. An agency that has genuinely run ads in your trade will pull up a real number without hesitating: cost per lead, number of leads generated, total ad spend, time frame. Something specific and verifiable.

What you'll hear instead from most agencies is a variation of one of two things. Either they'll offer you a result from a loosely related trade ("we did roofing, that's similar to concrete"), or they'll show you ROAS without explaining what the underlying lead quality actually looked like. Neither of those tells you whether someone like you, in your specific trade, got real jobs out of it.

This matters more than most contractors realize going in. On a real sales call with one agency, a prospect running bottled water delivery got shown an LED lighting case study as proof of capability. He rejected it immediately. Not because he was being difficult, but because he understood that targeting, creative, and buyer intent in water delivery have nothing to do with LED lighting. He was right to reject it. The agency hadn't worked in his niche. The case study proved it.

Look at the numbers they use and notice whether they're specific

Vague claims are easy to generate and impossible to verify. Specific numbers can be checked, questioned, and compared.

An agency that has genuinely worked in your trade will be able to tell you cost per lead in that trade, not just ROAS. ROAS (return on ad spend) is a useful number when you're selling products with clear revenue attribution, but for a service contractor, what you need to know is: how many leads did the campaign generate, what did each lead cost, and what was the total spend? Those three numbers together let you do real math on whether the economics work for your business.

As a point of reference: a well-run Meta campaign in a home service niche can produce results like 247 leads at $11 cost per lead on $2,800 in total ad spend. That's a real result, verifiable, specific, with enough detail to evaluate whether it's relevant to your trade and your market. That's what a real case study looks like. When an agency can't give you numbers at that level of specificity, it's usually because they don't have them.

One other thing to look for: whether the case study numbers come from the client's own Meta Ads Manager or from a third-party report the agency generated. Screenshots from the actual Ads Manager account are harder to fabricate than a PDF with nicely formatted charts.

The contract and setup fee tell you more than the pitch does

This one sounds like a financial detail. It's actually a confidence signal.

An agency that charges a large upfront setup fee and requires a multi-month contract before delivering a single lead is, structurally, asking you to take all the risk. The fee and the contract are collectable whether or not the leads show up. If the campaign fails, they've been paid. You're the only one with skin in the game at the moment it counts.

Agencies that have worked in your trade and know what they can produce don't need a contract to keep you around. If the leads come in, you stay. If they don't, you leave. That's a model built for agencies that have genuine confidence in their own results, because results are the only thing keeping the client relationship alive.

This doesn't mean every no-contract agency is good, or that every agency requiring a contract is bad. But when you're already carrying the memory of a prior loss, the structure of the ask tells you a lot about who's absorbing the risk. An agency asking for $1,000 to $2,500 upfront before they've shown you a single lead from your trade is asking you to trust them more than you trusted the last person who burned you. That's worth noticing.

The question to ask any agency before you give them money: "What do you get paid if the leads don't show up?" The answer tells you everything about how the model is structured.

What to do before you agree to anything

Before you sign anything or hand over a card, ask for three things:

First, a case study with real numbers from your trade or the closest adjacent trade, with enough detail to evaluate cost per lead and total spend. If they can't produce one, that's your answer.

Second, a straight answer on what happens if the leads don't materialize in the first 30 days. A real guarantee is specific and doesn't require you to fight for it. "We'll work on it until it does" is not a guarantee. A defined lead count with a defined consequence for missing it is.

Third, a clear explanation of where leads go after they come in. Leads that sit for hours before anyone follows up convert at a fraction of the rate of leads contacted within minutes. Ask whether there's any follow-up infrastructure built into what they're offering, or whether you're on your own the moment someone fills out a form. The lead generation side is only half the equation.

If you're weighing whether to try again

The fear of getting burned twice is legitimate. It's not paranoia, it's pattern recognition. Every contractor who went through a bad agency experience built that pattern from real evidence.

The checklist above won't eliminate all risk, but it will separate agencies that have actually worked in your trade from agencies that are guessing. The ones that have real numbers from real trades, operate without requiring a contract before proving anything, and have a clear answer for what happens to leads after they arrive, are worth a second conversation. The ones that can't answer those three questions directly probably aren't.

If you want to see how ASN answers those questions for your specific trade, the contact page is the right place to start.