Ex-agency owner. Now working for you
Your Marketing Agency Is Probably Robbing You Blind. I Know Because I Used to Run One.
Autopilot campaigns. Junior work billed at senior rates. Reports built to hide failure. I ran an agency for six years and watched competitors win with these tactics. Now I audit them.
Get Your Free Marketing AssessmentNo sales call. Written report in 5 working days. Yours to keep.
The doubt
If Any of This Sounds Familiar, Your Doubt Is Justified
Your agency is coasting if:
- You can’t log in to your own Google Ads or Facebook accounts
- The reports are full of charts, yet you still can’t answer the one question that matters: is this working?
- Hard questions about ROI get soft answers, or silence
- Six months of “testing” has produced no clear winner
- You bought senior strategy and got junior tactics
- Leaving costs more than staying. The contract made sure of it
- Every month you pay, then hope
“We’re constantly being told to market this way or that way, but without any of my own expertise, I admit that it always feels like I am just throwing money to the wind with our marketing budget and seeing what sticks.”
UK business owner, construction industry
The worst part? Most owners sense the problem months before they can prove it. Agencies count on that gap. I close it.
Every unchecked month is another invoice paid on trust, and trust is not a metric. When you can verify instead, you should.
The playbook
What Is Actually Happening Behind Those Reports
I ran an agency for six years and lost pitches to every one of these tactics. Here is how each one works.
The junior staff bait-and-switch
A director wins your account. A trainee runs it. The agency pockets the difference between the fee you pay and the salary they pay.
The reporting black box
Impressions, reach, engagement: numbers that rise whether or not you sell anything. The numbers that decide your year never make the report.
The data hostage situation
The agency opens your ad accounts under its own name. Leave, and years of performance data and audiences stay behind. Rebuilding them costs thousands.
The contract trap
Ninety days’ notice. Automatic renewal. A cap on their liability. The terms protect the agency, and few clients read them until they want out.
The accountability dodge
When results fall, the algorithm changed, the market softened, a competitor outspent you. The strategy is never the problem.
The minimum attention fee
The retainer arrives whether anyone opens the account or not. Some accounts sit untouched for weeks. The invoice never does.
“I repeatedly explained that our industry had specific seasonal buying patterns and regulatory requirements. The agency kept running the same campaigns year-round. We wasted around £25,000 before I finally terminated the contract, which was my mistake, I admit.”
Glass manufacturing business owner, London
The cost of waiting
The Hidden Cost of Giving It More Time
Most owners I speak to waited a year or more before acting on the doubt. Here is what waiting costs.
Direct waste
Suppose £750 a month of your budget buys nothing.
£9,000 a yearOpportunity cost
The leads that money should have bought, and the revenue those leads should have become.
Usually largerSwitching costs
A new agency starts from zero. Lost data. Lost momentum. Another three to six months of testing.
Lost ground
While your budget leaks into dead campaigns, a competitor’s is buying the customers you wanted.
the wasted spend, and the growth it should have funded.
Evidence
What Happens When You Get the Truth
Three recent audits. Details anonymised, figures rounded from the written reports.
Manchester manufacturer
- £847 a month on broad match keywords attracting DIY shoppers, not B2B buyers
- Campaigns targeting the whole UK when the firm serves only the North West
- No remarketing, so around 73% of visitors were never followed up
- A £1,200 monthly fee for an account nobody had touched in six weeks
Outcome: The owner renegotiated. The fee fell 30% and a senior manager took over. Within two months lead quality rose 34% and cost per lead fell 28%.
London law firm
- Around 70% of spend sent mobile users to the homepage instead of a landing page
- Remarketing kept advertising to clients who had already converted
- Phone calls brought in 40% of leads and none of them were tracked
- Display ads running on news sites, gaming apps and apps for children
Outcome: The firm implemented the fixes itself, ended the contract and brought the work in-house, with quarterly audits from me. Costs fell 38%. Leads rose 22%.
Birmingham retailer
- Weekly optimisation, visible in the change logs
- A senior manager genuinely working the account
- Conversion tracking in order on every channel
- Reports built on business results, not vanity metrics
Outcome: I told the owner to keep the agency and fund it with confidence. The real bottleneck was the website checkout, losing 44% of carts, so I referred a CRO specialist instead.
In my experience about one audit in five ends the way the third one did, and I say so when it does.
Why me
Why I Switched Sides
I started a marketing agency at 22 and ran it for six years: honest reporting, senior people on every account, prices explained line by line.
I kept losing pitches to agencies that promised the world and delivered slide decks. Agencies that billed premium rates for junior work. Agencies that made themselves impossible to fire.
The honest approach couldn’t compete with empty promises.
So I switched sides. I’d rather protect the businesses those agencies bill than keep losing politely to the people billing them. I speak their language. I know their playbook. I make them accountable.
What I do
I Don’t Replace Your Agency. I Make Them Deliver.
I audit marketing agencies, verify their claims and translate their jargon into plain English. Then I go further: I hand you specific recommendations that make your agency work more efficiently for you, so the retainer you already pay buys more results.
Independent performance audits
- Check every reported number against the platform data
- See whether campaigns are actively managed or parked on autopilot
- Confirm who really works on your account
- Calculate your true cost per lead and return
- Identify wasted spend, in pounds
Plain English answers
- Is this working or not?
- Where is money leaking?
- What should be happening that isn’t?
- Are you being overcharged?
- Should you stay or go?
Accountability that lasts
- Direct access to your own advertising accounts, in your name
- Dashboards that track leads, sales and cost, not impressions
- Contracts reviewed for exploitative terms before you sign
- Ongoing recommendations that keep your agency working, not coasting
Pricing
What It Costs
Start here
Free marketing assessment
£0
- A full audit of your accounts, your reports and your contract
- A written report in 5 working days
- Wasted spend identified in pounds, in plain English
- Priority fixes you can hand straight to your agency
- Yours to keep whether you hire me or not
The ongoing work
Monthly oversight
£600 to £1,500 a month
- The audit catches last quarter’s waste. Oversight prevents next quarter’s
- Every month I verify the reports, check the accounts and flag drift before it costs you
- Ongoing recommendations that make your agency more efficient with the budget you already pay
- My aim: save you at least twice my fee. When I can’t, I’ll say so
- No long-term contract. Cancel with one email
The price depends on how many channels you run and how complex they are, not on arbitrary tiers.
Start with the free assessmentMinimum: at least £3,000 a month in ad spend. Below that there is rarely enough data for a reliable verdict, unless the problems are blatant.
The process
Find Out What Is Really Happening
Here is what happens when you request an assessment.
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You send me your data
Fifteen minutes. Three to six months of agency reports, read-only access to your advertising accounts, your contract, and what you are trying to achieve. No sales call required.
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I audit everything
Five working days. Where your money goes, what works and what is waste, whether you are being overcharged, and where the agency cuts corners if it does.
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You get a written report
Wasted spend in pounds, performance against benchmarks, whether your agency is optimising or coasting, contract terms that need renegotiating, and priority fixes with expected impact. You keep it either way.
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You decide
Hand your agency the findings and make the retainer earn itself. Or leave with evidence. Or keep me on monthly oversight so the waste never builds up again.
Or write to me directly: info@themarketingwatchdog.com
Based in Warsaw, services provided remotely across the UK.
Questions
Common Questions
Will my agency know you are auditing them?
No. I use read-only access that looks like you checking your own data. Nothing reaches the agency unless you share it, or ask me to speak to them for you.
What if the audit shows my agency is performing well?
Then the report says so, with the evidence. In my experience about one audit in five ends that way. You keep the proof, stop second-guessing a good partner, and know your money is working.
Won’t this damage my relationship with my agency?
The report is yours and you control what happens next. Use it to demand better work, to negotiate an exit, or as third-party confirmation that your agency earns its fee. The agency never knows I am involved unless you tell them.
What if I am locked into a contract?
The audit includes your contract. I map the notice period, penalties and exit routes. Most contracts have more outs than agencies advertise, and I will find them.
I am spending under £3,000 a month. Is this still worth it?
The assessment still works, but with less data the findings carry less certainty. Blatant waste still shows. If you spend £2,000 a month and a quarter of it is wasted, that is £6,000 a year. Write to me and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth your time.
How do I know you are legitimate?
A fair question in this industry. You pay nothing until after you have read the free report, so you judge the work before any money moves. I work under NDA, and your data is deleted once the audit ends unless you ask me to keep it.
What exactly do you audit?
Campaign structure and targeting, bids and budget allocation, landing pages, conversion tracking, reported metrics against platform reality, contract terms, who works on your account, and whether campaigns are managed or parked.
What happens to my data afterwards?
Everything is handled under NDA. Once the audit is complete and you have your report, your data is deleted from my systems. Nothing is stored, shared or reused unless you approve it.
You are based in Poland but serve UK businesses?
Yes. I lived and worked in the UK from 2015 to 2022 and now audit UK accounts remotely from Poland. An audit happens inside the ad platforms, and they look the same from Warsaw as from Watford. Same-day responses.
You’re Not Paranoid. You’re Right.
You noticed the silence after hard questions. You noticed the charts that never become sales. You noticed the invoice that never changes while the results do.
You couldn’t prove it because verifying an agency takes specialist knowledge you shouldn’t need. That is exactly what poor agencies count on.
If your agency is performing well, I’ll show you the proof and you can stop worrying. If they’re not, I’ll show you exactly where the money goes and what to do about it. Either way, you stop guessing.
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