How to tell if your marketing agency is actually working
A ten-point checklist any business owner can run in an afternoon to find out whether a marketing retainer is earning its invoice. No technical skill required.
You pay a few thousand dollars a month. Around the first of each month a report arrives, full of charts that point up and to the right. You skim it, feel vaguely reassured, and file it away. If that describes your relationship with your marketing agency, this guide is for you.
Here is the uncomfortable part: most owners we talk to cannot answer the question "what did your agency do last month?" in one plain sentence. That is rarely carelessness. Default agency reporting is built for reassurance, and reassurance is easier to produce than results.
The good news is that real work is checkable. It leaves footprints in systems you can open yourself, in reports you are entitled to see, and in answers that hold up when you ask a second question. None of it requires technical skill, just an afternoon and the list below.
The ten checks
Run all ten and score them honestly. Each one says what healthy looks like, so you know what you are hoping to find.
- 01
Ask for last month's completed work, in writing
Healthy looks like concrete items in plain language: rewrote the titles on 14 product pages, added 212 negative keywords, fixed the checkout tracking. Vague activity such as "ongoing optimization" or "continued monitoring" is what a retainer sounds like when nothing shipped.
- 02
Log in to Google Search Console yourself
Search Console is Google's free report on how your site appears in search, and it should live in an account you own, with the agency added as a user. Healthy means you can open it today. If access "is handled for you" and you have never seen it, make getting in this week's ask.
- 03
Look at a full year of impressions
In Search Console, set the performance view to a full year. Healthy is a trend you can match to work you know happened: pages shipped, content published, fixes made. One flat quarter happens to everyone. Four flat quarters against twelve paid invoices deserves a conversation.
- 04
If you run ads, ask for the search-terms report
This report lists the actual searches your money bought. Healthy looks like receiving it without friction, along with evidence of negative keywords added within the last month. Negative keywords are the searches your agency tells Google to stop buying, and accounts drift weekly without them.
- 05
Ask what they chose not to do, and why
Prioritization is most of the job. A shop doing real work can tell you what it deliberately skipped last quarter and what that made room for. A shop that has never said no to a task is billing for motion.
- 06
Confirm you own your own accounts
Domain, hosting, analytics, the ad account, Search Console. Healthy means every one of them is registered to you, with the agency holding access that you can revoke. Anything the agency owns "on your behalf" is a switching cost being quietly built.
- 07
Have one recommendation explained in plain words
Pick any line from the last report and ask what it means for the business. Healthy is an answer a busy shop owner would nod along to. Jargon that survives a second request for plain English is usually covering for thin work.
- 08
Match invoices to outcomes by the quarter
Monthly judgment is noisy, so zoom out. Over any three-month window you should be able to name things that exist now and did not exist before: pages, rankings, tracking, creative, fixes. If a quarter passes and the only artifact is reports about the work, that is the finding.
- 09
Learn to spot report theater
The classics include rankings for phrases nobody searches, triple-digit growth percentages that turn out to be your own brand name, and dashboards with twenty charts but no sentence saying what was done. Healthy reporting answers three questions in order: what changed, what it did, and what happens next.
- 10
Ask one specific question about your own data
Something small and real, like which page earned the most new visitors last month. Healthy is a plain answer within a couple of business days. Weeks of silence on a specific question tells you more than any dashboard will.
What a good monthly report reads like
We publish the format we use on our services page: a short note with three headings, covering what changed, what it did, and what comes next. There is nothing proprietary about that structure, and we would honestly be glad to see the whole industry adopt it. If your reports cannot be summarized under those three headings, ask your agency to try. The request alone is clarifying.
If some checks failed, don't fire anyone yet
Treat a failed check as a question rather than a verdict. Agencies go through slow patches, key people leave, and some genuinely good shops are simply bad at showing their work. Switching agencies has real costs too: onboarding, lost context, and the two quiet months while a new team reads your board.
What a failed check does earn is an independent read. Have someone with no stake in the answer look at the same data and tell you, in writing, what is actually happening. If the answer is that your agency is doing solid work, that certainty is worth the fee many times over, and you can extend some overdue trust. If the answer is that the retainer is buying motion, you will know exactly where it leaks before you move a single dollar.
Fair questions
How long should I give a new agency before judging results?
Judge the process from week one and the results by channel. Tracking, access, and a prioritized plan should exist within the first month. Paid ads should show a readable trend inside a quarter. Search results compound over two to four quarters, which is exactly why the process checks matter early. They tell you whether the compounding has started.
What if my agency won't share reports or account access?
The data belongs to you. A professional shop hands over Search Console access and the search-terms report without friction, because the work stands up to daylight. A refusal, or a long stall dressed up as a security concern, is itself the answer.
Can these checks tell me whether the work is good, and not just happening?
They reliably detect absence. No shipped work, no access, and no plain answers are easy to spot. Judging the quality of work that does exist takes an experienced eye on the same data, which is what an independent audit is for.
Do you do these audits?
Yes. We call it the Foothold. It costs $1,500 to $2,500 one time, you get a written assessment either way, and the fee is credited against your first retainer month if you continue with us. Details are on our services page.