Questions to Ask a Deck Marketing Agency Before You Sign

I have watched deck builders hire the wrong company over and over, and it is almost never because they failed to ask about strategy. It is because the whole conversation stayed at the level of "what will you do for me" instead of "show me the numbers from an account like mine." The questions below are the ones that actually separate a company that runs deck accounts from a company that runs a sales process.

Fair warning on my bias: I run these accounts for a living. Brian W. and Jessica M., who run a fence and deck company in Bend, Oregon, had already paid another ads company and gotten 15 dead leads in two months before they found me. Brian was burned badly enough that it took three calls over three weeks before he would sign. Justin W. had hired six other companies. Billy S., a deck builder, told me he had spent at least a quarter million dollars over his career on Angie, HomeAdvisor, and a rotation of "Facebook guys." Every one of those men asked better questions the second time around. This page is me handing you their list up front.

Why the Generic "Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency" Lists Fail You

I read the pages that rank for this search before I wrote this one. They are competent and they are all written for the same imaginary company: a B2B software brand with a marketing director. They tell you to ask what software the agency uses, whether you get access to their project management tool, how they handle feedback and revisions, and what sets their team apart.

Here is what not one of them asks about, across the whole first page of results: who owns the ad account, whether the homeowner's details also go to your competitors, what a booked estimate costs, what share of booked estimates actually get sat, how fast somebody follows up when a form comes in at 7pm on a Saturday, or what voids the guarantee. Those six things are the entire difference between a deck company with a full calendar and a deck company with a full inbox.

The Three Questions That Settle It in the First Five Minutes

If you only get a short call, ask these three and listen to the shape of the answer rather than the content. You are testing whether this person has run deck accounts or read about them.

1. How many deck accounts are you running right now? A real answer is a number, and two of them by name, in your trade, this month. "We work with lots of contractors" means a generalist shop where decking is one of forty industry landing pages. Decks are not roofs. The ticket is bigger than a repair and smaller than a remodel, the decision takes weeks, and the homeowner is usually choosing between you and two neighbors' recommendations. That changes the creative, the qualification questions and the follow-up cadence.

2. Who else gets a homeowner who fills out my form? The only acceptable answer is "nobody." Chip P., a 33-year veteran general contractor out of Loomis, California, is the cleanest example I have of why. He had 45 inquiries come in from Yelp. Forty-five. He got two people on the phone. One was a tire kicker. The other one he sent his son out to bid, and the lot turned out to be bare dirt. Half an afternoon and a tank of diesel for a project that did not exist. Buying shared leads, Chip was reaching about 2 of every 10 homeowners. On an exclusive qualification funnel he was talking with at least 8 of 10. Same man, same phone, same trade.

3. What does a booked sales appointment cost in a market like mine? Watch whether they reach for cost per lead instead. Cost per lead is the cheap half of the problem and the half that does not connect to your revenue. If they cannot talk in cost per completed appointment and cost per signed job, they are not measuring the part you get paid on.

Questions About Ownership: What You Walk Away With

This is the set that costs deck builders the most money and gets asked the least. Agencies that intend to keep you by holding your assets hostage will answer these vaguely, every time.

• Whose name is on the ad account? Real answer: yours, and they are a user on it. If the account is theirs, every dollar of learning you paid for walks out the door with them.
• Who owns the pixel and the conversion data? That history is what makes the next campaign cheaper. It should be on your asset, not theirs.
• Do I keep the creative? You paid for the footage of your own crew on your own job site. Get it in writing.
• Do I keep the phone number and the CRM records? A list of every homeowner who ever asked you for a price is worth more in year three than the ads were in month one.
• What do I walk away with if I leave in month four? A company that changes the subject here has told you the real answer.

Questions About the Numbers, With Real Ones to Compare Against

The hardest thing about interviewing marketing companies is that you have nothing to benchmark the answers against. So here is a real account, start to finish, that you can hold up next to whatever anybody quotes you.

Chris W. and his dad Edward run a deck company on the Alabama Gulf Coast. They were a word-of-mouth company that had never hired an agency. Over about 60 days on $5,109.15 of Meta ad spend at $100 a day, they logged 106 homeowner inquiries, 89 opportunities in the CRM, 42 completed sales appointments, and 12 jobs marked won.

Notice the drop from 106 to 42. That is not a failure, that is the normal shape of the funnel, and it is the part nobody puts in a pitch. An agency that quotes you inquiry counts without a show rate is quoting you the top of a funnel and letting you imagine the bottom. Ask them: of the inquiries you generate, what share become a sat appointment, and what share of those close? If the answer is "that depends on your sales process," that is actually correct, and the good ones will then tell you what the range looks like across their accounts.

Two more worth asking. What is your worst account doing right now, and why? And what does month one look like compared to month three? Billy S., a deck builder who had bought the shared-lead product for years, did $196,383 in his first week and crossed $300,000 in signed contracts and deposits within 17 days on less than $1,657 of ad spend, closing what he called "like 80-something percent" of his appointments. That is a real number from a real account and it is also not typical, which is exactly why you ask for the worst one too.

Questions About What Happens After the Form Comes In

This is the layer most deck marketing conversations skip entirely, and it is where the money actually leaks. The ads are the cheap half. The expensive half is the ninety seconds after a homeowner hits submit, and the three weeks after that.

• What happens in the first five minutes after a homeowner fills out the form? You want a named sequence with timing, not "we send you the lead."
• Who calls, me or you? Either can work. An unanswered question here means nobody calls.
• What happens to the ones who do not answer the first time? Ricardo C., a concrete and outdoor-living contractor in Colorado, described his version of it simply: "Every two days I see messages go out: 'Remember that you have an appointment with Ricky this day.' So the follow-up is automatic."
• What about the homeowners who say they are not ready until spring? That pile is inventory, not waste. Chip P. books work in November for six to eight months out while most of his competition waits for spring.
• How do you keep the tire kickers out? Ask what the qualification actually asks. On his first three weeks on a qualification funnel, Chip P. got 63 homeowner inquiries and exactly one of the 63 questioned him about his minimum.

If you want to see what that whole layer looks like built out for a deck company rather than described in the abstract, here is how I put the appointment side together for a deck builder, including the qualification questions and the follow-up cadence.

Questions About the Guarantee, Including What Voids It

Plenty of companies in this trade guarantee something now. The guarantee is not the interesting part. The void conditions are.

Ask them to send you the actual terms document, not a link to the sales page. Then ask: what voids this? What are my obligations under it, and what happens if I miss one? Who decides whether it was met, and on what data? Is there a window, and when does the clock start? What is the remedy, written down, in the terms?

An agency that will not put the remedy in a document is not offering a guarantee, it is offering a mood. For what it is worth, Brian W. said it plainly afterwards: he probably would not have signed without a guarantee that had money behind it. He was not betting on a pitch. He was betting on the fact that somebody else had something to lose.

Questions About the Contract and the Exit

Deck work is seasonal and cash flow is lumpy, so term length matters more in this trade than in most.

• How long is the initial term, and what happens at the end of it? Auto-renewal with a notice window is normal. Auto-renewal with a notice window you were not told about is not.
• Is there a termination fee? Ask for the number, not the policy.
• Can I pause for the off-season? The honest answer is usually that you should not, because the account loses its learning and the decision season is winter anyway. But you deserve the answer before you sign, not after.
• Who runs my account day to day, and will I talk to them or to a salesperson?
• What do you need from me every week for this to work? Any real answer includes your time. A company that says "nothing, we handle everything" is either lying or not planning to call your customers.

The Questions They Should Be Asking You

Half of this interview runs the other direction, and it is the fastest tell of all. A company that is about to do good work will qualify you hard, because they know what happens when the appointments show up and the builder cannot run them.

If they do not ask about your average job size, your close rate, how many estimates a week you can physically run, whether you have crew capacity for more work, how far you will drive, and what your minimum project is, they are selling a subscription rather than planning an account. Brian W. ran 60 estimates in his first six weeks and closed about 25 of them, which meant running five, six, sometimes seven appointments a day. Nobody should put that on your calendar without asking first whether you can stand it.

The Full List of Questions to Ask a Deck Marketing Agency, in Order

Ask them in this order. The first three tell you most of what you need before you ever get to price.

Three Answers That Should End the Call

Not red flags. Deal breakers.

"The leads are exclusive to you, mostly." Exclusivity is binary. A homeowner's details either go to one company or to several. "Mostly exclusive" means shared, with a softer word in front of it. Ricardo C. had used Angi, HomeAdvisor, CraftJack and Thumbtack before switching, and the difference he named was not volume, it was that the homeowners were "already like pre-qualified. They're ready to spend the money."

"We'll need about six months before you see anything." There are channels where that is honest, and search is one of them. Paid social is not one of them. If somebody is selling you paid ads and asking for a six-month patience window, they are asking you to fund their learning curve. Josiah W., who builds decks in Montana in a market of about 90,000 people spread across eight cities, went from advertising in a free local newspaper with one job left on the books to 40 to 50 opportunities a month. Everyone told him marketing would not work there.

"We can't share the terms until you're ready to move forward." The document that says what you are owed is not a closing tool. If it only appears after you commit, the commitment is the product.

How to Score the Answers

Run the same list past every company you are talking to, write the answers down in a document rather than trusting your memory, and compare them side by side a day later. Three things to look for when you read it back.

First, count the numbers. Real operators answer in digits. Second, count the names: accounts, people, sequences, documents. Vagueness clusters around whatever a company cannot actually do. Third, notice who asked you questions. The one that qualified you hardest is usually the one that has felt the pain of a builder who could not run the appointments.

For the record, my own numbers so you can run the same list past me: about 20 active builders, about $250K a month in managed ad spend, $10M+ lifetime ad spend, tracked across 100+ contractor accounts since 2024, with $100M+ in client-booked jobs behind it. Every example on this page is a real account of mine with a named client behind it, not a composite and not a round number I reverse-engineered.

Common Questions

What questions should I ask a deck marketing agency before signing?

Start with three: how many deck accounts are you running right now, who else gets a homeowner who fills out my form, and what does a booked sales appointment cost in a market like mine. Those three sort the operators from the generalists before you ever discuss price. After that, work through ownership (whose name is on the ad account, who keeps the pixel and the creative), the funnel (what share of inquiries become sat appointments), the follow-up (what happens in the first five minutes, and what happens to the ones who do not answer), and the paperwork (what voids the guarantee, is there a termination fee, who runs the account day to day). Write the answers down and compare them a day later.

How do I know if an agency has actually worked with deck builders?

Ask for a number of live deck accounts this month and two of them by name, then ask to talk to one. A company running deck accounts can tell you things that only come from the account: what a completed estimate costs, what the show rate looks like, what the not-until-spring pile does to your pipeline, how the creative changes between new builds and repair work. A generalist shop with a decking landing page will answer in industry language instead. One more tell: ask what they would change about your ad account in the first five minutes. Somebody who has run these accounts will name three specific things before you sign anything.

Should a deck marketing agency guarantee results?

A guarantee is worth having, but the guarantee itself is not the thing to evaluate. The void conditions are. Ask them to send the actual terms document rather than a link to the sales page, then ask what voids it, what your obligations are under it, who decides whether it was met and on what data, when the clock starts, and what the written remedy is. An agency that will not put the remedy in a document is not offering a guarantee. Brian W., a fence and deck builder in Bend, Oregon, said it plainly afterwards: he probably would not have signed without a guarantee that had money behind it. He was betting on the fact that somebody else had something to lose.

Who should own the ad account, me or the agency?

You should, and the agency should be a user on it. This is the single question that costs deck builders the most money when they get it wrong. The ad account accumulates conversion history, and that history is what makes your next campaign cheaper than your last one. If the account belongs to the agency, every dollar of learning you paid for leaves when they do, and you start over from zero with the next company. The same logic applies to the pixel, the creative you paid to have shot on your own job sites, the phone number and the CRM records. Ask what you walk away with if you leave in month four, and get the answer in writing.

What is a good cost per appointment for a deck company?

It depends on your market and your average ticket, so be suspicious of anybody who quotes a universal number. What you can do is benchmark against a real account. On the Alabama Gulf Coast, Chris W. and his dad Edward spent $5,109.15 over about 60 days at $100 a day and logged 106 homeowner inquiries, 42 completed sales appointments and 12 jobs won. That works out to about $48 per inquiry, about $122 per completed sales appointment and about $426 in ad spend per signed job, against jobs averaging just under $27,000. The two numbers that matter there are the last two, because they are the only ones that connect to revenue. Ask any agency to produce those two for an account they actually run.

How long should I give a deck marketing agency before judging it?

Long enough for the account to get out of the learning phase and for you to run a meaningful number of estimates, which in practice is a couple of months rather than a couple of weeks. But be careful about who is asking for patience and for what. Six months is an honest timeline for search. It is not an honest timeline for paid social, and if somebody selling you paid ads asks for a six-month window before you see appointments, they are asking you to fund their learning curve. What you should see early is activity and data: inquiries coming in, a follow-up sequence firing, and a cost per completed appointment you can actually read.

What should I ask about lead follow-up?

Ask what happens in the first five minutes after a homeowner hits submit, who makes the call, and what happens to the ones who do not answer the first time. You want a named sequence with timing, not "we send you the lead." This is where most of the money leaks. Chip P., a 33-year veteran general contractor in California, was reaching about 2 of every 10 homeowners on the shared leads he was buying, and on an exclusive qualification funnel he was talking with at least 8 of 10. Same man, same phone, same trade. Also ask about the homeowners who say they are not ready until spring, because that pile is inventory rather than waste. Chip P. books work in November for six to eight months out while most of his competition waits for spring.

What is a fair contract length for a deck marketing agency?

There is no single fair number, but there are fair terms. Ask how long the initial term is, what happens at the end of it, whether it auto-renews and how much notice you have to give, and whether there is a termination fee and exactly how much. Ask whether you can pause for the off-season. The honest answer is usually that you should not, because the account loses its learning and the decision season for decks is winter anyway, but you deserve that answer before you sign rather than after. The question that matters more than term length is what you keep when it ends: the ad account, the data and the creative should be yours either way.