How do I know if my agency is doing real work?
The ten-minute audit anyone can run
Google Ads, the change history tab. Filter to the last sixty days. Every keyword added, every budget change, every ad written shows up here, each one stamped with a date and the name of whoever made it. Three changes in two months? That account is on autopilot while you pay a retainer.
Search Console comes next. Look at the pages indexed over time, and the query list beside them. New pages appearing means content is genuinely shipping, while a page count that stays dead flat for a whole quarter, set against a content retainer you keep paying every month, is simply a contradiction sitting there in front of you.
Then your own website. Sort by publish date. Count what actually went live against what the monthly report claimed went live, line by line, and this is usually the very place where the gap first shows itself.
Ask for the analytics access, if you do not already hold it. Watch the reaction. Any hesitation there tells you something all on its own.
Reading the report properly
Reports get built to look busy. Impressions, reach, engagement, keyword positions averaged across a basket the agency picked itself. None of it is dishonest, exactly. It has just been carefully selected.
Put three questions to any report. What changed this month, specifically, and why? What did we learn that changes next month? And how many leads or orders actually came from this, matched against your own CRM rather than the platform dashboard?
An agency doing good work answers all three without preparation, because those are the exact things they argue about internally anyway, and none of it needs a slide. One doing very little steers you back to reach and impressions, promises a deeper analysis next month, or says the algorithm changed. Watch that third answer. It surfaces whenever there is nothing else to say, and it is almost never the real reason.
Being fair about it
Some months genuinely have little to show. SEO goes through quiet stretches. A rebuild can eat six full weeks with nothing public until the day it lands, and effort and results are not the same thing anyway, so a good agency will sometimes hand you one of them without the other.
What you are really testing for is whether decisions are being made. Tests run. Hypotheses stated out loud. Options ruled out. Activity with no decisions behind it is the failure mode here, and it looks identical to good work on a monthly report, right up until the day you finally open the accounts.
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Want this handled: Digital marketing · All answers.
Log into the accounts and read the change history yourself. Google Ads records every single edit, with a date and a username against it. Search Console shows you what actually got indexed. Your CMS shows what was published. Ten minutes of that tells you more than any deck ever will, and an agency doing genuine work will happily walk you through the whole thing.
Treat that as serious, not administrative. You should own the ad accounts, the analytics, Search Console and the domain outright, with the agency simply added as a user on top. Anything less makes switching agencies expensive by design, which is usually the whole point of it.
For most engagements, yes. A short weekly conversation surfaces problems while they are still cheap to put right, whereas a monthly report arrives far too late to change anything at all about the month it is describing.
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