For six years I lost pitches to agencies promising things they couldn’t deliver. Now I check what they actually did with the money.
There’s a reason the monthly report runs to forty pages and still doesn’t answer the one question you asked. Information sits on their side of the table. You carry the risk. I spent six years watching that gap from the agency side and eventually got tired of what it does to businesses that can’t afford the lesson.
The short version
Twelve years in performance marketing. Six of them running my own agency, the rest doing the work: paid media, tracking setups, the automation that stops a sales team retyping the same customer record four times a day.
Different countries, different industries, and the job never changed: prove the money went somewhere useful. Whatever metric happened to be fashionable that quarter was somebody else’s problem.
Then I started pitching for my own clients.
I kept losing to people making promises I knew were rubbish. They’d arrive on the call polished and confident, deck already open, talking about tripling leads inside thirty days. I’d sit there explaining that you need one quarter to get clean data and another to act on it. Guess who got signed.
It happened often enough to stop being bad luck. Honesty is expensive in this trade, and the people paying for it are rarely the ones lying.
What I saw from the inside
Running an agency puts you in the same pitch rooms as your competitors, and in the pub afterwards with the people who work for them. You hear things.
Month one is busy. Kickoff, strategy session, creative briefs, a lot of visible movement. By month three the person who won the pitch is off winning another one, and your account has quietly gone to someone who joined in the spring. Nobody mentions the handover, and the retainer stays exactly where it was.
Then there are the reports. Beautifully built, genuinely. Charts trending up and to the right, a summary slide, a section on next month’s priorities. None of them contain a line telling you whether the money came back. None of that is accidental either. Reports get designed, and one that answers the profitability question in the opening paragraph ends the relationship faster.
Smaller businesses come off worst, and it has nothing to do with how clever the owner is: reading a paid media account properly takes a skill set nobody expects the MD of a plumbing firm to have.
I felt like I was playing a game where only they knew the rules.
UK business owner, from the forum research behind this siteThat’s one line out of roughly three hundred I collected off UK business forums and review sites before deciding this was worth building. The wording changes from post to post. Underneath it’s always the same complaint: they know how the account works and you’re the one paying for it.
I couldn’t do much about that from where I was sitting, so I left.
Those are career figures, mine, self-reported. Nothing on this page is a savings promise. Some audits find the agency doing decent work, and when that happens the report says so.
Fixed retainers pay the same whether or not anybody opened your account that month. You can’t check the claims in an opaque report. Long contracts keep you in place well after the thing has stopped working, and the job is technical enough that most clients can’t separate someone who knows what they’re doing from someone who’s good at sounding like it. None of that needs the staff to be incompetent. Mostly they aren’t.
Give me a few hours inside an account and I can usually tell which of those two you’ve got.
Why no name, no face
There’s no photograph on this page and no LinkedIn profile to check. Two reasons, and the practical one comes first.
When I go through an agency’s work, they don’t know I’m there: the client grants read-only access, and nothing about the arrangement reaches the agency until the client decides to raise it. I’ve watched what happens when a business so much as mentions it’s thinking about outside oversight. Dormant campaigns get restructured overnight. Negative keyword lists untouched since setup suddenly start growing. The account begins to look managed, right about the time somebody might check.
The second reason is duller. This industry is small and it talks. A named person publishing what I publish becomes an inconvenience to firms whose margin depends on clients not asking questions.
There’s also an argument I’d rather not lose. My whole case is that agencies use polish to distract from performance. Opening with a headshot, a founder story and a wall of client logos would undercut that inside ten seconds.
You’ll judge this by whether the analysis holds up. And the anonymity stops the moment somebody becomes a client, because before anyone commits to anything I’m on a video call, face on, answering whatever you want to ask.
Why the incentives differ
Structurally, not in the sales pitch. It shows up in the advice you get.
I don’t run campaigns
I make nothing from your ad spend. Your agency’s revenue moves with it. That single difference is why I’ll tell you to switch off something that’s losing money while they’ll tell you it needs another quarter to mature. Sometimes it genuinely does need more time. The problem is that you currently have no way of telling those two situations apart.
Usually the point is to fix the relationship
The normal outcome is a list of things your agency should be doing differently, handed to your agency. In my experience it’s somewhere around one in five accounts where they’re already doing solid work and the honest answer is to stop worrying. Leaving is what happens when the evidence forces it, and it’s the least common ending.
You need to read your own numbers
An agency that keeps you confused keeps you dependent. I need the opposite thing. If you can’t explain your own cost per acquisition to me by the end of the engagement then I’ve failed at the part that matters, because monthly oversight only works when you can push back on what you’re told between our calls.
Oversight is monthly, and you can stop any month
The audit is the starting point. What most people want afterwards is somebody reading the reports before they do, checking the account every month, and telling them which three questions to put to the agency this time. There’s no twelve-month term and no notice period. Stop paying the month it stops being useful, which is exactly the standard I’d hold your agency to on your behalf.
Six things I’ll always do
Break one of these and sack me. Say why in public.
-
Tell you when it’s your fault
If the campaigns are struggling because of your pricing, your website or a decision you made in January, that goes in the report. You’re paying for an outside opinion. One that only ever blames the agency is worth nothing.
-
Trace every pound
Across every channel, down to line items. Where the trail stops I’ll tell you it stopped and what that suggests. “In aggregate” isn’t an answer.
-
Explain it in English
If I can’t put something in plain language, the problem is my explanation. Jargon is how you end up dependent on somebody else’s reading of your own data.
-
Leave your data with you
You own the ad accounts, the tags and every report I write. Nothing sits behind my login. I’ve cleaned up after agencies that treated a client’s Google Ads account as company property, and I won’t be reproducing that.
-
Tell you when you don’t need me
If there’s a cheaper fix, you’ll hear about the cheaper fix. If the audit turns up nothing that justifies ongoing oversight, the oversight doesn’t start.
-
Turn work away
Budget too small and the data won’t support a reliable read. Wrong problem and I’m the wrong person. You’ll hear that before you’ve paid anything, because taking the fee anyway would make me the thing I audit.
The feeling that
something’s off is
usually worth checking
Fifteen minutes of form filling at your end. Five working days of work at mine. You get a written report and you keep it whether we go any further or not.
No discovery call with a sales pitch stapled to the back of it. If your agency is doing a decent job the report will say so, which is a useful thing to have in writing before your next renewal.
Get Your Free Marketing Assessment