How do I know if my marketing agency is doing a good job?

Judge them on two things: how many customers you got, and what each one cost you. Everything else is supporting evidence. If you cannot get a straight answer to those two questions, that is itself the answer, and it does not depend on how good the monthly report looks.

Here is how to check properly, and what the common evasions sound like.

Ask the two questions in writing

"How many enquiries or sales came from your work last month, and what did each one cost?"

A good agency answers with a number, a caveat about attribution, and an explanation of what changed since the previous month. Attribution is genuinely hard and an honest answer acknowledges that. What an honest answer does not do is change the subject.

Watch for these replies:

• "Impressions are up." Impressions are not customers and never were.
• "Engagement is up." Same.
• "It takes time to build." Sometimes true, especially for SEO and content. It should come with a date by which you will see something, set in advance rather than moved each month.
• "Here is the dashboard." A dashboard is not an answer. Ask them to read it to you.

Check that the tracking is real

Before you judge anyone's numbers, confirm the numbers exist. Submit a test enquiry through your own website and check it appears in the reporting. A surprising number of accounts measure the wrong thing, double-count, or track nothing at all, and we go through how to check in the five reports you actually need.

If the tracking is broken, nobody knows whether the work is good, including the agency. That is a fixable problem rather than a firing offence, but it needs fixing before anything else is discussed.

Look at what they say no to

The strongest signal in the relationship. An agency that has never talked you out of anything is selling, not advising. Over a year you would expect at least one "do not spend that", one "this channel is not for you", and one "you could do this yourself".

An agency that agrees with every idea you have is charging you for your own judgement.

Look at who is actually doing the work

Ask who wrote the last thing you received and who will be in the next meeting. There is nothing wrong with junior people doing delivery, as long as somebody senior is reading it before it reaches you. The problem is when the person who sold you the work has not looked at your account since.

Four things that are genuinely reasonable to expect

• A monthly answer to the two questions above, in plain English, without you having to chase it.
• Account access in your own name. Your ad accounts, your analytics, your domain. If an agency holds these and will not transfer them, that is a serious problem and it is worth solving now rather than at the end.
• Being told about bad months before you notice them yourself.
• A plain answer to "what would you do if this were your money".

When the answer is that they are doing fine

Sometimes the work is good and the business problem is somewhere else: the pricing, the offer, the sales follow-up, or a website that loses people who were ready to buy. Agencies get blamed for all four fairly regularly.

If the marketing is bringing the right people and they are not converting, the problem has moved and changing agency will not fix it. That is worth establishing before you start again with someone new, and it is usually a short piece of work rather than a long one. If you want a second opinion on which it is, book a call.