Marketing Agency Red Flags, From the Other Side of the Pitch

I audit sites that other agencies built, usually because the owner has a feeling something's wrong but can't point at it. Almost every time the work is real, and somebody clearly did it. The problem is that it was never connected to anything that makes money, and nobody in the reporting relationship had a reason to say so.

So I've stopped looking for incompetence when I evaluate this stuff, because that's rarely what's going on. I look for a specific set of tells that show up months before the results do. Here are the ones I trust, what a real audit finds underneath them, and the questions that surface them in a first call rather than in month seven.

The reporting is all inputs, no outcomes

This is the big one and it hides in plain sight, because input reporting looks like diligence.

Posts published. Impressions. Keywords ranked. Traffic up 40%. All real numbers, all measurable, and none of them are the thing you hired anyone for. I ran this on my own site recently and found every service page and every industry page sitting at zero impressions over ninety days, and everything we were visible for was coming from the blog. Our own numbers had looked fine the whole time because traffic was real and growing, and all of it was pointing at pages that could never sell anything.

The numbers are real, which is what makes this hard to spot. What should bother you is that nobody has ever shown you one with a dollar sign or a booked appointment attached, and nobody seems bothered by that either.

They never ask what happens after the lead arrives

If someone is pitching you on more leads and hasn't asked how you currently handle the ones you get, they're selling volume into a bucket with a hole in it.

On an audit for an equipment manufacturer we crawled fourteen dead pages that buyers were actively searching for, and two of them were the quote request pages. The most motivated visitor on that site, the one ready to ask for a number, hit a 404. Everything upstream was competent. The site ranked, the pages loaded, the traffic was real. It evaporated at the last step, and no report anyone was reading went that far down.

Whoever you hire should be uncomfortable until they know what happens in the first five minutes after somebody fills that form in. If that question never comes up, the engagement is going to be measured on the part that doesn't matter.

The deliverables scale by count

Twenty blog posts a month should worry you, and so should any package priced by how many things arrive rather than what they do.

Volume is easy to sell because it's easy to verify, and you can see twenty things. What you can't see from the invoice is whether any of them were aimed at something a buyer actually searches, or whether they cannibalize each other, or whether the twenty-first will do anything the first twenty didn't. On that same audit, sixty-odd blog posts were carrying the entire domain while the money pages, the ones describing what we actually sell, were the weakest thing on it.

Ask what they would cut. Anyone who's thought seriously about your business has an opinion about what you're wasting money on. Anyone selling a package will tell you it all works together.

What does a real audit find that a pitch deck never shows?

A pitch deck shows you their best client. An audit shows you your own plumbing, and the findings are usually boring and expensive.

The uncomfortable part is that the audit findings are usually cheaper to fix than the thing being pitched. That's precisely why they rarely come up in a pitch.

The marketing agency questions to ask before you sign

Most advice on how to choose a marketing agency stops at "check their case studies", which is the one thing they control completely. These four are harder to stage, and they take about ten minutes.

"Show me a client where it didn't work." Everyone has one. An honest answer includes what they misjudged. A defensive answer, or a claim there isn't one, tells you how month six goes when something's underperforming.

"What would you look at first in my business, before doing any work?" You're testing whether they diagnose or prescribe. A prescription that arrives before a diagnosis is a package, and you'll be fitted into it.

"What does this look like if we stop after six months?" Find out what you own. Whether the site, the content, the data and the automations stay with you, or whether leaving means starting over. This is the one people forget to ask and regret most.

"Who is actually doing the work?" This means the person touching your account, not whoever is on the call. The person on the call is frequently the best communicator in the building and won't touch your account again.

If you want to see how we answer those, it's laid out in our process overview, and the builds we've actually shipped are there too, including the parts we don't do.

When the pitch and the plumbing disagree

None of this is an argument for avoiding agencies, only for noticing when the story being told upstairs has drifted from what is actually happening in the pipes, because that gap is where the money goes and it never announces itself.

If you have that feeling and can't point at it, that's usually enough to go on. Get a free audit and we'll tell you what we find, including if the answer is that it's working fine.