How do you tell if your marketing agency is working?

The structural problem with assessing an agency is that the agency usually supplies the measurement. That is not necessarily bad faith — they have the tools and you asked them to report — but it means the metrics chosen are ones that can be moved by the work being done, and a great many of those move independently of whether the business gained anything.

Impressions can rise because a platform changed how it distributes. Rankings can improve on queries nobody with intent searches. Engagement can climb on content that attracts an audience that will never buy. Traffic can grow while enquiries stay flat, which is the single most common pattern in agency reporting and is presented as progress because the line points upward.

The only assessment that survives is downstream and it belongs to you. Count enquiries received, by channel, per month. Count how many became customers. Count what they were worth. Those three numbers are the business's own, they are unaffected by which tool measured what, and any agency doing useful work will show up in them within a reasonable period. If they do not, no amount of platform reporting compensates.

Which means the prerequisite is instrumentation rather than scrutiny. A business that cannot count its own enquiries by channel cannot evaluate anyone, and will be permanently dependent on whichever narrative is presented. Setting up that counting is a week of unglamorous work and it changes the relationship permanently, because the conversation stops being about interpretation.

The timing question deserves more honesty than it usually gets, in both directions. Paid channels should show enquiry movement quickly — within weeks — because the mechanism is direct. Organic and content work genuinely takes months, and demanding evidence at sixty days will cause the right work to be cancelled. The way to hold both is to agree at the start what should be visible by when, in enquiry terms, and then hold that agreement rather than renegotiating it whenever a report is disappointing.

There is a diagnosis that gets misattributed to agencies more than any other, and it is worth checking before concluding anything. If enquiries have risen and revenue has not, the failure may be in intake rather than in marketing — enquiries arriving and not being answered, answered too slowly, or not followed up. That is not the agency's fault and it is frequently blamed on them. Counting response times alongside enquiry volume distinguishes the two cases immediately and prevents replacing an agency that was working.