An electrician marketing agency should be accountable for four things: Local Services Ads and paid search, your Map Pack position and review velocity, a website with a real page for every job type in every town you cover, and capture of the calls that arrive when nobody is sitting at the desk. Retainers for that scope typically run $800 to $1,500 a month on top of ad spend. If the proposal in your inbox does not name all four, you are buying reports.
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I am Mandeep Singh. I started Sprout Sage Solutions in 2020 in Chandigarh, my team and I have shipped 450+ websites since, and trades businesses are a steady part of that work. I lead every account personally, supported by a team of 17. The electricians who call me have almost always done a tour through the lead platforms first, and they open with the same sentence: I am paying for leads that three other guys are already dialing.
Three ways to buy an electrical lead, and what each one really costs
Shared marketplaces sell one homeowner’s form to as many as four contractors at once. An electrical lead on those platforms commonly prices between $30 and $100. Your close rate on a lead that four companies are racing to sits around 10% to 20%, so a $60 shared lead at a 15% close is roughly $400 per booked job. Not per lead. Per job you actually win.
Local Services Ads behave differently. You still pay per lead, but the call rings only your phone, Google screens the business, and the badge does real work on a homeowner who has never heard your name. Google’s own Local Services Ads guidance puts electrician leads in a range of about $25 to $85 depending on metro and job type, and the owners I work with close 40% to 50% of the calls they answer. Same $60, different structure, closer to $130 per booked job.
Standard Google Ads search is the third lane and the least forgiving of a weak website. Electrical service clicks routinely cost $8 to $30, and a decent landing page turns 5% to 12% of those clicks into a call or a form. Run that arithmetic and you are somewhere between $80 and $300 per lead. That is why I rarely switch search campaigns on in month one. They magnify whatever your site already does, including nothing.
Check these seven things tonight, before you hire anybody
You do not need an agency for the diagnosis. Forty minutes and your own accounts will tell you more than any audit deck.
Your missed-call log. Open the phone that jobs ring on and count missed and unanswered calls for the last 30 days. Then count how many you returned the same day. Most owners find 15 to 40 missed calls a month and have never seen that number written down. At an average residential ticket of $400 to $900, that column is the biggest line on your P&L that does not appear on your P&L.
Time-stamp those calls. Sort them by hour. In the accounts I review, a quarter to a third of calls to a residential electrician land before 8am, after 5pm, or on a weekend, because that is when a homeowner discovers the dead outlet or the panel that keeps tripping. If a voicemail greeting is what handles that window, the window belongs to whoever picks up instead of you.
Your Google Business Profile call count. Inside the profile, pull calls and website clicks for 90 days. If calls are flat month over month while your ad spend climbs, your paid layer is renting volume that your brand layer is not compounding.
Review velocity, not review total. Find the date on your most recent review. Now count how many reviews the top three electricians in your Map Pack collected in the last 90 days. A 4.9 rating with 60 reviews and nothing new since March loses to a 4.7 that adds five every month, because recency is both a ranking input and a trust signal.
The proximity test. Search “electrician near me” from your phone while parked in each town you claim to serve, and write down where you land. Nearly every electrician I check is top three in the town on their invoice and invisible eight miles out. That gap is the pages you never built.
Count your service pages. Open your own site and count the pages that target exactly one job in exactly one town. Panel upgrade in the suburb you actually want. EV charger install in the subdivision full of new builds. If your answer is “we have a services page,” you have one page trying to win forty different searches.
Your search terms report. In Google Ads, pull the search terms of the last 90 days and read them line by line. Look for “electrician salary,” “electrician apprenticeship,” “electrician jobs near me.” In the accounts I audit, that junk is often 20% to 35% of spend inside a campaign nobody has pruned since it launched.
Three or more of those landing badly means you have a capture problem, not a traffic problem. Buying more leads on top of a capture problem is how contractors spend $50,000 and end up exactly where they started.
The leak nobody puts on a dashboard
Here is the one I would fix first, and it has nothing to do with marketing.
A homeowner with a burning smell at the breaker panel at 7:40pm calls three electricians in six minutes. The first human voice wins. Not the best reviews, not the prettiest van wrap, not the cheapest hourly rate. The first human voice. Everything else on this page is an argument about how to get your number onto that homeowner’s screen, and it is all wasted if the number rings out.
One owner I sat with last spring, a two-truck shop, played me his voicemail box. Nineteen messages over eleven days. Six were homeowners describing an active problem, and four of those six had already hired somebody by the time he called back the next morning. He was spending $2,300 a month on lead platforms while four booked jobs walked out through a voicemail greeting he recorded in 2018.
Answering that phone is cheaper than any retainer on the market.
What fixing it takes, including the parts you can do yourself
Some of this does not need an agency at all, and I would rather you did it in-house.
- Route after-hours calls to a live answering service. Trades-focused services run roughly $1 to $2 a minute or a few hundred a month, and the good ones book appointments straight into your calendar.
- Ask for a review at the invoice, by text, from the tech who did the work, with the link already in the message. A shop doing 40 jobs a month can hold four to eight new reviews a month with nothing but a saved text template.
- Post one job photo a week to your Google Business Profile with the town named in the caption. A before-and-after panel shot takes thirty seconds.
- Verify your Local Services Ads profile and turn it on yourself. The paperwork is license and insurance documents you already have in a drawer.
What is harder to do between service calls is the compounding part: the service-plus-city pages that take months to rank, the conversion work on a site that currently loads in five seconds on a truck’s hotspot, and the tracking that finally tells you your cost per booked job instead of your cost per click. That is sequencing and persistence, and persistence is the thing that dies first when your day starts at 6am in a crawl space.
Be honest with yourself about timelines too. Local Services Ads can produce calls in week one. The Map Pack usually starts shifting in two to four months of steady reviews and profile activity. Ranking for “panel upgrade” in a competitive suburb is a six to twelve month build. The payoff is real and it is back-loaded, which is precisely why owners quit at month three and go back to buying shared leads.
What working together looks like
My pricing is published, so there is no discovery-call reveal. Starter is $800 a month and Core is $1,500 a month, both on top of whatever you choose to spend with Google, and you can see what each tier covers on the pricing page. Starter is the capture-and-foundation layer: Google Business Profile management, review generation, Local Services Ads setup and monitoring, call tracking, and the first wave of service-plus-city pages. Core adds active paid search management, a wider page build across your full service area, monthly conversion work on the site, and reporting that ties spend to booked jobs rather than to impressions. There are no contracts. Cancel any month and keep everything we built, including the pages, the tracking, and the profile access.
This is not for you if
If you are booked eight weeks out on referrals and your problem is hiring a second licensed journeyman, marketing money is the wrong money. Hire first. Equally, if your gross margin is thin because you quote every job at the bottom of the market, paid channels only speed up the bleeding, because you will be paying $130 a booked job to win work that clears $90. And if you want somebody to hand a login to and never speak with again, I am a poor fit. This work needs a monthly conversation with the owner about which jobs were profitable, and I would rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise.
FAQ
Is an electrician marketing agency worth it at $800 a month?
It depends entirely on your average ticket and your close rate. At a $600 average residential ticket and a 40% close on answered calls, an $800 retainer needs to produce about four extra booked jobs a month to pay for itself, which is a low bar once the phone stops going to voicemail. Run your own numbers before you take anybody’s word for it, mine included.
Should I run Local Services Ads or regular Google Ads first?
Local Services Ads, in nearly every case. The leads are close to exclusive, you pay per lead rather than per click, the Google Guaranteed badge lifts your close rate, and bad leads can be disputed inside Google’s system. Standard search ads make sense once your site converts well enough to justify $8 to $30 clicks, which for most electricians is months in, not day one.
How long before I can drop the shared lead platforms?
Do not cancel anything in month one. Keep the shared leads running while your owned channels come up, then throttle them down platform by platform as your cost per booked job on Local Services Ads and organic beats theirs. Most shops I work with cut marketplace spend substantially inside six months. Pulling the plug early only creates a revenue hole and a panicked owner.
Do I have to sign a contract?
No. Month to month, cancel any time, and everything built during the engagement stays yours. If you want a second opinion on your own numbers before spending anything, book a free consultation or call me at +91 97297 12388 and bring your last 90 days of call logs and ad spend.
