How to Tell If Your Marketing Agency Is Actually Working

Most agency reports are designed to be reassuring. That's not the same as being useful.

If you've ever sat through a monthly review where every arrow pointed up and you still could not say whether the money was working, you already know the problem. Reach was up. Engagement was up. Impressions grew nicely. And nobody mentioned revenue.

We run an agency, so treat this with appropriate suspicion. We have also written the questions we would least enjoy being asked, which is the only version of this article worth reading.

1. Can they tell you your cost per qualified lead?

Not cost per lead. Cost per qualified lead, meaning someone your sales team agreed was worth talking to.

This is the single most revealing question in the list. It requires the agency to have connected ad spend to something that happens after the form submission, which means they have talked to your sales team and closed the loop. Plenty of agencies never do.

An agency that only knows cost per lead is optimising a number that can be improved by attracting worse people. That's not a hypothetical. Broad targeting reliably produces cheaper leads and fewer customers, and a report built on cost per lead will show that as an improvement.

2. What did they stop doing last quarter?

Good campaign management is mostly subtraction. Killing an ad set that's not working, dropping a keyword that attracts the wrong search, turning off a placement that eats budget quietly.

If the answer is that nothing was stopped, one of two things is happening. Either nothing is being tested, or things are being tested and nobody is acting on the results. Both are expensive.

3. Do you have access to your own accounts?

You should own the ad accounts, the analytics property and the domain. Not the agency.

This is the most common way clients get stuck. When the account sits under the agency's business manager, leaving means losing the pixel data, the conversion history and the audience lists you paid to build. That's years of learning gone in a day.

Ask to be made the owner. A reasonable partner says yes immediately. The reaction to this question tells you a lot.

4. Can they explain a bad month without blaming the algorithm?

Every account has bad months. Seasonality, a competitor bidding aggressively, a landing page change, a tracking break.

What matters is whether the explanation is specific. "Costs went up across the platform" isn't an explanation, it's a shrug. "Our cost per lead rose 40% because a competitor entered the auction on our three highest-intent keywords, so we shifted budget to long-tail terms while we test new creative" is an explanation. You can agree or disagree with it. That's the point.

5. Is anyone testing creative, or just budgets?

On Meta especially, creative is the targeting now. Budget adjustments and audience tinkering have far less leverage than they did five years ago, and an agency still spending its time on bid tweaks is solving a 2018 problem.

Ask how many creative variations ran last month and what was learned. If the answer is one video and some copy changes, you're not testing. You're publishing.

6. Are the leads getting better, or just cheaper?

These pull in opposite directions more often than anyone admits.

We ran a travel campaign where the honest move was to reduce lead volume on purpose. The client had plenty of enquiries and almost none worth calling, because the targeting was catching people idly comparing packages. Narrowing it to genuine trip-planning behaviour meant fewer leads and 600+ that were actually worth a phone call.

That conversation is uncomfortable when the client has been watching lead counts climb for months. An agency willing to have it anyway is worth keeping.

7. What happens to the work if you leave?

Some marketing investments compound and stay with you. Others stop the moment the invoice does.

Paid media stops. That's the deal, and there's nothing wrong with it. Organic search doesn't. When we did technical and on-page SEO for an elevator manufacturer, the 25+ keywords that started ranking kept producing enquiries with no ongoing media spend behind them.

A balanced programme builds some of both. If everything you're paying for switches off with the ads, you're renting demand rather than building it, and you should at least be choosing that deliberately.

The short version

You don't need to audit your agency to know whether it's working. Ask what a qualified lead costs, what got switched off last month, and who owns the accounts.

The answers, and how quickly they come, will tell you almost everything.