Every month the report arrives on time. Impressions are up, clicks are up, the cost per click is down, the follower count keeps climbing, and the slides are beautiful. Then you open the sales figures and nothing has changed. If you are trying to evaluate a marketing agency in that situation, the report itself will not help you: it measures what the agency controls, not what your business needs.
The easy conclusions are that the agency is dishonest, that marketing does not work in your market, or that sales is dropping the ball. Any of them can be true, but usually the problem is simpler and fixable: the agency and the business are counting different things, and nobody has connected the two. That can be checked in an evening with your own accounts and records.
Why agency reports look good while revenue does not move
The report measures activity, not outcomes. Impressions, reach, clicks, engagement and cost per click are easy to show and easy to improve. They say how much the campaigns were seen, not whether anyone bought. The sign: the report has no line for enquiries, orders or revenue, or only mentions them in passing.
Conversions are counted, but the wrong ones. The ad account reports “conversions” that turn out to be page views of a thank-you page, clicks on a phone number, newsletter sign-ups or duplicates of the same form. The count grows every month while your inbox does not. The sign: the agency’s conversion number is much larger than the enquiries you actually received.
Nobody sees what happens after the enquiry. The agency hands over leads and never learns which ones became customers. It keeps optimising towards more leads, including the ones that never buy. The sign: no one sends the agency the outcome of each lead, and the agency never asks.
The targets were never tied to money. The contract promises reach, traffic or a number of posts, because those are the things an agency can deliver without access to your sales. Everyone meets the targets and the business stands still. The sign: nobody can say what revenue the marketing budget was supposed to support.
You cannot open the numbers yourself. The ad accounts, the analytics and the tag manager sit on the agency’s logins. You see what is put on the slides and nothing else. The sign: to answer a simple question, you have to ask the agency and wait.
How to tell which one is yours
You need your own sales records, your inbox or CRM, and ideally read access to the ad accounts. Go in order; the first check that fails is usually the cause.
- Put last month’s report next to your own records. Take the agency’s figure for enquiries or conversions and count what actually reached you in the same month. A big gap means the conversions are counted wrongly.
- Ask what one conversion is. Ask the agency to name the exact action that counts as a conversion in each account. If the answer is a page view, a click or “any engagement”, you have found the second cause.
- Find the last line of the report. Scroll to the bottom and see where the story ends: at clicks, at leads, or at revenue. If it ends before money, the report measures activity.
- Check who owns the accounts. Try to log into the ad accounts and analytics with your own business address. If you cannot, or they were created under the agency’s company, ownership is part of the problem.
- Read the contract or proposal. Look for what was promised: reach, traffic, posts or enquiries and sales. That tells you what the agency is working towards.
- Trace ten recent customers back to their source. Ask each how they found you, or check the source field if you have one. If few of them came through the agency’s channels, the agency’s success and yours have drifted apart.
The fix, in order
Cheapest first. Most of this is conversation and access, not spending.
- Take ownership of your accounts. Ask the agency to move the ad accounts, analytics property and tag manager under your business, with the agency added as a user. It costs nothing and it is the basis for everything else; no reasonable agency refuses.
- Agree on one definition of a conversion. A conversion is a real enquiry or a real order, counted once. Everything else can stay in the report as a supporting number, but not under that name. In our paid advertising campaigns this is the first thing we fix before touching bids or audiences.
- Record the source on every lead. A hidden field in the form, a question on the phone, a tag in the chat, carried into wherever sales records the outcome. We described that logic in how to tell which channel actually brings revenue.
- Send the outcomes back to the agency. Once a month, the list of leads with source and result: won, lost, never answered, not a fit. This is what lets the agency stop buying leads that never buy; we wrote separately about enquiries that never turn into sales.
- Rewrite the report around money. One page: spend, real enquiries, qualified enquiries, deals and revenue by channel, then the activity figures underneath. Connecting the ad accounts to the CRM so this page fills itself is what our CRM and analytics projects are usually about.
- Rewrite the targets. Replace reach and traffic targets with targets on qualified enquiries or cost per sale, agreed together and reviewed monthly. If the agency cannot work towards those, you have learned something useful.
- Only then judge the agency. With shared numbers and access to outcomes, give it a fair period. If revenue from its channels still does not move, the decision to change is based on facts, and the next agency starts with a clean setup.
What to measure
- Real enquiries against the agency’s reported conversions, monthly; the two numbers should converge.
- Revenue by channel from your own records, monthly, after the source field has been in place for a while.
- Cost per qualified enquiry or per sale, monthly, instead of cost per click.
- Leads with a recorded outcome sent back to the agency, monthly, until it is all of them.
Where we come in
An owner with an evening, the sales records and access to the accounts can see whether the agency is measured on the right things, and most of the fix is a conversation. What we bring is the setup that keeps it honest: accounts owned by the business, one definition of a conversion, the source carried from the ad to the deal, and a report that starts with revenue. If you would rather have a second pair of eyes on your current reports, a short brief with what you receive each month is enough to start.
