How to Tell If Your Marketing Agency Is Actually Working
The metrics that actually show whether your agency is delivering, and the ones that just make everyone feel busy.
The real test is whether an agreed number moved
The clearest way to know your agency is working is that a specific number, one you both agreed to track before the campaign started, is moving in the right direction. If no one wrote that number down at the start, you don’t actually have a way to answer this question, and that’s the first thing to fix.
The number should be tied to the business, not the platform. Cost per qualified lead, pipeline value from a channel, booked calls, repeat purchase rate: these connect to revenue. “Engagement” and “visibility” don’t, because you can’t spend either one.
Vanity metrics don’t answer the question
Impressions, reach, follower counts and open rates measure activity, not outcomes. An agency can hit every one of these targets and still not move revenue, bookings or qualified leads, because none of them require a customer to actually do anything.
These metrics aren’t useless. They’re diagnostic, not evidence of success. A drop in open rate might explain why replies fell. But if a report leads with them and nothing underneath connects to money, that’s the report telling you it doesn’t have a stronger story to tell.
What “working” looks like, channel by channel
Each channel has a metric that reflects real progress and one that looks good but proves nothing. Knowing the difference is what separates a useful monthly report from a wallpaper report.
| Channel | The signal that matters | The number that doesn’t tell you much | |
Questions people ask
- How often should a marketing agency report results?
- Monthly at minimum, tied to whatever metric you agreed on at the start, not a generic dashboard of impressions and reach. On top of that, a short quarterly conversation about what changed in the account and what to do next matters more than the monthly report itself.
- How long should I give an agency before judging their performance?
- Long enough to cover a full sales cycle, plus some buffer for the account to settle. Paid channels usually show direction within a few weeks, but SEO takes longer because it depends on search engines re-crawling and re-ranking pages, so judging it on the same timeline as paid ads will give you the wrong answer.
- What if the agency's reported numbers look good but sales haven't grown?
- Check whether the number they're reporting was ever tied to revenue in the first place. It's common for an agency to optimise for a proxy metric like clicks or leads that technically improves while the leads themselves are low quality or never get followed up on, so the gap is often in the handoff, not the ad account.
- Should I fire an agency that isn't hitting its targets?
- Not before ruling out whether your own process is the bottleneck. Slow creative approvals, an unclear brief, or a budget that keeps changing mid-campaign will suppress results no matter who is running the account, so fix the scope and give it one more measured cycle before deciding the agency itself is the problem.