Eight months in, the reports look busy, the meetings are pleasant, and you genuinely cannot tell whether any of it is working. This is the most common position a marketing buyer occupies, and the reason is almost always that the reporting was designed to describe activity rather than to answer a question.
The reports that tell you nothing
Impressions and reach. Both are a function of budget, not skill. Follower growth, which correlates with revenue so weakly that we have stopped putting it on the first page. Engagement rate as a single blended percentage, which conceals whether the engagement came from buyers or from other marketers.
Keyword rankings with no traffic attached, which are easy to improve by targeting terms nobody searches. And the activity dashboard: posts published, keywords optimized, ads launched, hours logged. Activity is an input. Presenting it as an outcome is the oldest trick in agency reporting and it works because it is genuinely difficult to argue with.
Four checks that tell you whether your marketing agency is working
One, blended acquisition cost. Total marketing cost, including the retainer and every fee, divided by new customers acquired, from your own system rather than any platform. Track it as a rolling quarter. It is crude and it cannot be gamed, which is exactly why it belongs on the first slide.
Two, branded search. Are more people typing your name this quarter than last? Nobody searches for a company by accident, so it is the cleanest available proxy for whether demand is being created rather than merely harvested. It moves slowly, six to nine months behind sustained upper funnel work, so review it quarterly and never monthly.
Three, the quality of what arrives, not the count. Average order value, cash on delivery refusal rate, lead to meeting rate, close rate. An agency can double lead volume and halve lead quality and the top line number will look like a triumph for two months.
Four, a holdout. Once or twice a year, switch one channel off across a matched set of governorates for three weeks and compare revenue against the control regions. It is the only test that tells you what a channel is actually adding, and a good agency will propose it before you do.
The relationship checks matter as much as the numbers
Do they bring you bad news before you discover it yourself? Do they ever say no? Are they still asking questions about your business in month nine, or has the curiosity stopped? Does the monthly meeting produce two decisions, or is it a slide read out?
A team that is still arguing with you at month nine is engaged. A team that agrees with everything has quietly moved you to maintenance.
If the answer is no, do this before you fire anybody
Check upstream first. In a meaningful share of the underperforming accounts we review, the constraint was on the client side: approvals taking three weeks, a website nobody was allowed to change, sales not calling leads back the same day. Replacing the agency does not fix any of that, and the next one will fail identically.
If the constraint really is the agency, put a written sixty day reset in front of them with three specific outcomes and a named owner for each, then act on the result without a second extension. Sentiment is not a metric, and neither is how much you like the account manager.
If you want an independent read before that conversation, the free audit looks at the accounts and the tracking rather than the reporting, which is usually where the honest answer lives.
