Steps to Prepare Before Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency for Google Ads

Most contractors who have wasted money on paid search campaigns share one thing in common: they handed the keys to an agency before they were ready. Not because the agency was bad, but because the contractor had no tracking in place, no clear budget authority, and no idea who owned their ad account. Fixing those problems after the fact costs real money and real time. Getting them right before the first campaign goes live is straightforward, if you know what to look for.

Own Your Ad Account Before Anyone Else Touches It

This is the single most common mistake Lemur Marketing sees from contractors coming off bad agency relationships. The previous agency built the account under their own Google account, ran ads for 18 months, and when the contractor left, they took the entire account history with them. That means no historical data, no conversion records, no audience lists. Starting from scratch.

Create your own Google Ads account at ads.google.com using your business email. Then grant the agency manager access as an admin. That way the account is yours permanently, regardless of who manages it. The agency should never need to own the account to do their job. If they insist on it, that is a red flag worth taking seriously.

The same rule applies to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Your business owns those properties. The agency gets access. Full stop.

Set Up Conversion Tracking Before You Spend a Dollar

Running paid search without conversion tracking is the equivalent of mailing flyers with no phone number. You spend, you get clicks, and you have no idea what happened next. For home remodeling contractors, the two conversions that matter most are phone calls and contact form submissions. Both are trackable. Neither is optional.

Before engaging an agency, confirm that your website has Google Tag Manager installed and that someone has verified it is firing correctly. If your site was built on WordPress, a plugin can handle the container snippet. If it was custom-built, your developer needs to place the GTM code in the header and body. This takes less than an hour. Do it first.

Call tracking is worth setting up independently as well. Services like CallRail let you assign a tracked number to your paid campaigns and record which ads drove real phone calls. A kitchen and bath remodeler in Des Plaines, IL running campaigns without call tracking has no way to prove which ad group produced the call that turned into a $40,000 project. That data gap is expensive.

Lemur Marketing recommends that contractors have at least 90 days of tracked baseline data before scaling any paid campaign. Even rough data is better than none.

Clarify Your Budget, Your Geography, and Your Job Types

Agencies cannot build a useful campaign strategy around vague input. “We want more leads” is not a brief. A useful brief tells the agency your monthly ad spend ceiling, the geographic radius you actually serve and want to serve, and the specific job types you want to prioritize. For a contractor serving Des Plaines, IL and surrounding communities like Itasca, those details change the entire campaign structure.

Be specific about job types. A basement finishing contractor who also does additions should not run one generic campaign. Different services have different average project values, different search intent, and different seasonal demand curves. Separating them in the campaign structure from the start produces cleaner data and better optimization. If you are unsure how to think through service prioritization for paid campaigns, reviewing how basement and home addition contractors approach their marketing can give you a useful frame of reference.

Budget clarity matters just as much as geographic clarity. A $1,500 per month budget in a competitive market like the northwest suburbs of Chicago covers far fewer clicks than the same budget in a less competitive market. Know your number, know your floor, and know whether that figure includes agency management fees or sits on top of them. Those are two very different conversations.

Get Your Website in Shape Before Paid Traffic Arrives

Sending paid traffic to a slow, poorly structured website is a fast way to waste a campaign budget. Agencies can drive clicks. They cannot fix a site that loads in six seconds on mobile or a contact form that breaks on Safari. Those are your problems to solve before the agency turns anything on.

Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights and address any critical issues. Make sure your contact form works and sends confirmation emails. Check that your phone number is clickable on mobile. Review your service pages and confirm each one clearly describes what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. A fence contractor in the Des Plaines, IL area targeting Itasca homeowners should have a page that speaks directly to that geography, not a generic “we serve the Chicagoland area” statement buried in the footer.

If your site needs significant work before it is ready to convert paid traffic, it is worth addressing that first. Paid search amplifies whatever your site already does. If it converts well, you will get more leads. If it does not, you will spend more to get fewer.

Strong local visibility also supports paid campaigns by reinforcing credibility when users search your name after clicking an ad. Understanding the local SEO ranking factors that affect how your business appears in organic and map results can help you see the full picture before you invest in paid traffic alone.

Lemur Marketing works with home remodeling contractors in Des Plaines, IL and the surrounding area who want to run paid search campaigns that are built on solid groundwork, not guesswork. Their office is at 1574 Henry Ave, Des Plaines, IL 60016, and they can be reached at (630) 551-8493.

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