How to evaluate an HVAC marketing trial, ours or anyone's

What a useful trial should produce

By day seven you should have four things in writing.

1. A picture of where your calls come from now. Even a rough split between Google, referrals and other sources is useful. If the agency can't produce one because tracking is missing, it should say so plainly.
2. A list of specific problems, ranked. Not "improve your SEO", but "your Business Profile lists a service area that excludes two of your best towns".
3. A comparison with named competitors. The companies you actually lose jobs to, compared on reviews, page coverage, site speed and ad presence.
4. A recommended first month. What would be done first, in what order, and why.

If any of those is missing, ask for it before you decide anything.

The day-seven scorecard

Score each line from 0 to 2: 0 if missing, 1 if vague, 2 if specific to your company.

A total of 16 or more suggests a provider that did real work. Under 10 suggests a template with your name on it.

Questions to ask during the week

The trial is also your chance to interview the agency. These questions reveal a lot.

• "Who will actually do the work?" You want a straight answer, not a description of a department.
• "Whose name will the accounts be in?" The only acceptable answer is yours. Our onboarding checklist lists every account to ask about.
• "What will I receive each month, and how will I check it?" Ask to see a sample update with the numbers removed.
• "How do you decide whether a campaign is working?" Listen for cost per booked job. Be wary if the answer is about clicks, impressions or rankings.
• "What happens if I want to leave?" Notice terms, account handover and website ownership should all be explained before you sign.
• "Have you worked with HVAC companies before? Can I see them?" Real case studies name the company and link the site. Ours are on the results page.

Red flags

Some answers should end the conversation, or at least slow it down.

• A promised ranking or a fixed number of leads. No one controls Google's results. The Competition Bureau's guidance on misleading representations is a useful reminder that performance claims should be backed by evidence.
• Accounts created in the agency's name. It can make leaving painful, or impossible without starting again.
• A long contract right after a free trial. If the work is good, the agency shouldn't need to lock you in.
• Generic findings. If the audit could be about any HVAC company in any city, it wasn't really about yours.
• Plans to message your customer list without discussing consent. Commercial emails and texts in Canada fall under anti-spam rules. The CRTC's CASL guidance explains the consent, identification and unsubscribe requirements. An agency suggesting a blast to an old customer list without raising this hasn't done its homework.
• No questions about your business. An agency that never asks about job values, capacity or seasonality is planning to sell you something it already had on the shelf.

Running two trials at once

Some owners trial two agencies in the same week. That is reasonable, and it can be revealing, as long as you manage access carefully.

• Give each agency its own access, granted from your accounts, so you can remove one without affecting the other.
• Ask both the same questions from the list above, so the comparison is fair.
• Don't let either agency make changes during the trial. Two sets of edits to the same Business Profile will confuse Google and you.
• Compare the findings side by side. Where both agencies find the same problem, it is almost certainly real.

Deciding at day seven

The decision is simpler than it looks. Ask yourself three things.

1. Did I learn something specific and useful? If yes, the trial did its job, whatever you decide next.
2. Do I trust how they would measure the work? If the answer depends on numbers you can't check, keep looking.
3. Do the economics work? Take your average gross profit per job and divide the monthly fee (with your GST/HST) by it. That is the number of extra jobs needed to break even. If it looks unreachable, start smaller.

It is fine to take the findings and fix the top items yourself. Many owners do, and a good agency will be glad the work was useful. If you decide to go ahead, the next step should be a clear onboarding plan, not a rush to launch ads.

A worked example

Picture a three-truck heating company in a mid-sized city. Agency A sends a 40-page deck of charts: traffic trends, keyword lists, a domain authority score. Agency B sends six pages: the company's Business Profile lists the wrong primary category; the heat pump page loads slowly on phones and has no click-to-call number; two competitors have three times as many recent reviews; and no calls are tracked at all, so nobody knows what the current ads produce.

Agency B's six pages are worth more. Every finding is specific, actionable and tied to calls. That is the standard to hold any trial to, including ours. If you would like to see how we would do it for your company, the contact page explains how to start.