Almost every agency pitch ends with a case study. The case studies are useful but selective. Below, we’ve aggregated cost-per-booked-job data across 50 contractor engagements we’ve worked on or audited between 2022 and 2025—both Sparq accounts and competitor accounts we took over. The point is not to claim Sparq always wins (we don’t). The point is to show what the spread actually looks like.
Methodology
- Sample: 50 contractor engagements, U.S. east coast (FL, NY, NJ, MA, GA, NC). Trades: roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pool service.
- Cost per booked job: Total monthly marketing spend (ads + retainer + tooling) divided by booked-job count. Booked jobs verified via WhatConverts, CallRail, or CRM (HubSpot, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, GHL).
- Calls under 60 seconds excluded.
- Big-agency group: 22 engagements managed by agencies with 30+ employees. Sparq-style specialist group: 28 engagements.
- Time horizon: Months 4–12 only. Excludes the foundation sprint where cost-per-booked-job is artificially high while tracking and pages are being built.
The headline number
Median cost per booked job across the 50 engagements:
- Big-agency-managed accounts: $184
- Specialist-managed accounts: $112
That’s a 40% gap, not a 4x improvement. Specialist is not magic. But on a contractor doing 80 booked jobs per month, the difference is $5,760/mo or roughly $69K/year that flows to revenue instead of media spend.
Where the gap comes from
Three factors account for almost all the difference:
- Negative-keyword libraries. Specialist accounts had 200–500 baseline negatives across Search campaigns. Big-agency accounts averaged 40–120. The negative-keyword work is unglamorous and disproportionately impactful. Google Ads management done right starts here.
- Landing-page integration. Specialist accounts had service-specific landing pages with Quality Score 8+. Big-agency accounts more frequently routed traffic to a generic homepage with Quality Score 4–6, paying 30–40% higher CPC.
- GBP optimization velocity. Specialist accounts posted weekly on GBP and responded to all reviews within 24 hours. Big-agency accounts averaged monthly posts and 5–7 day review-response lag. Map-pack impressions correlated strongly with the cadence.1
Where big agencies actually win
It would be dishonest to pretend specialists win every category. Big agencies outperformed in two specific situations:
- Multi-location enterprise contractors (10+ branches). Above a certain operational complexity, the agency’s account-management infrastructure pays for itself. We saw big-agency CPC parity or better on engagements above $30K/mo media spend.
- Brand campaigns and PR. Specialist marketing teams generally don’t run brand campaigns or do PR placement well. If you need national or regional brand presence beyond local lead-gen, a generalist agency or a specialist PR firm is the right fit.
What this means if you’re comparing options
Ask your prospective agency two questions and compare answers:
- “What’s the median cost per booked job across your contractor clients in my trade?” If they can’t produce a number, they don’t track it. That’s the first answer.
- “Can you share an anonymized account audit from a similar contractor showing negative keywords, Quality Score, and GBP cadence?” If yes, you have a basis for comparison. If no, the optimization work is not happening at the depth they implied.
The 50-engagement spread above is a snapshot, not a prediction. Your account, your trade, your service area will move differently. But the gap is real, it’s measurable, and the reasons are not mysterious. The work is just unglamorous.
Citations
- BrightLocal, Google Business Profile Posting Frequency Study 2023: profiles posting weekly or more saw 28% higher direction-request rates than monthly-posting profiles.
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