Seven numbers to ask your agency for this week
If the monthly report is impressions, clicks and a chart that goes up, you're being told a story. These seven figures tell you whether the agency is earning its fee.
Marketing leaders often come to us with the same complaint in different words: “the reports look fine and I can’t tell if it’s working.” The reports look fine because they were designed to. Ask for these seven numbers instead. A competent agency has all of them within a day. The interesting part is what happens when they don’t.
1. Cost per outcome, where the outcome is the thing you get paid for
Not cost per click, not cost per lead. Cost per qualified pipeline, per paid signup, per booked appointment, per first order. If the agency optimises to a form fill and your sales team disqualifies half of those, the reported cost per lead is roughly half the truth.
Ask for it monthly, by channel, with the definition written down.
2. Share of spend on brand terms
In search, ads on your own name are the cheapest, best-converting traffic you’ll ever buy, and most of it would have found you anyway. If brand is a large share of search spend, the blended cost per outcome flatters everything else. Ask for brand and non-brand separately, always.
3. Impression share lost to budget, and lost to rank
Two figures the platforms give for free. Lost to budget means there was demand you couldn’t afford to serve. Lost to rank means demand you weren’t good enough to win. The first is a budget conversation. The second is a creative and landing page conversation. An agency that reports neither is asking for more budget without knowing which one you need.
4. The number of changes made last month
Open the change history yourself if you have to. Bid changes, budget moves, negatives added, ads paused, audiences excluded. An account that’s being managed has dozens of changes a month. An account on autopilot has a handful, and the retainer is paying for a monthly call.
5. Tests run, with results
Not “we’re always testing”. Which tests, against what hypothesis, with what result, and what changed because of it. Two or three concluded tests a month is healthy for most budgets. Zero concluded tests for two months in a row is the clearest signal that the account is being maintained rather than improved.
6. Time to first response on your last three requests
Pull your own emails. How long did it take to get an answer to each of the last three things you asked for? Not an acknowledgement, an answer. This isn’t a vanity metric. It measures how much of the account manager’s week you’re actually getting, and it predicts how quickly a real problem would be caught.
7. Spend that went to placements you’ve never heard of
For display, video, Performance Max and any “automated” campaign type: the list of sites, apps and channels the money went to, with spend against each. Most leaders who ask for this the first time find a meaningful chunk on placements they would never have approved. The agency isn’t hiding it. It just wasn’t in the report.
What the answers tell you
Fast, complete answers with no defensiveness: keep the agency and ask for these seven in the monthly report from now on.
Answers that take a week, arrive as a deck, or come with a reason why the number “isn’t really meaningful for your account”: the account is being run by someone junior, and the senior person you met at the pitch has moved on to the next pitch.
No answers: that’s your answer.
We’re often brought in as a fractional lead to get an agency back on target rather than to replace it. The first thing we do is ask for exactly this list. It takes a week and it usually settles the question either way.