I check the workyour agency invoices for.
I work from the same platforms, reports and invoices your agency does. I go through the lot and write up what I found, in plain English, with the fixes ranked by what they are worth. Your campaigns keep running throughout. I never contact your agency.
of SMBs who left or scaled back with their marketing agency gave inadequate return on investment as the reason.
inTandem by vcita, 2025 SMB Marketing Report. Survey of 500 small business owners.
You can’t tell whether it’s working, and asking feels like an accusation
Every report arrives on time and the charts slope the right way, yet the sales team is no busier than it was in January. So you ask. Your account manager tells you these things take time and the groundwork is paying off, and you have no way of knowing whether that is true.
Twelve years in marketing. Six of those running my own agency, which is where I learned to spot a report built backwards from the answer the client wants to hear. I have inherited accounts nobody had opened since the setup call. Plenty of work went to firms who would promise anything, and that is a fair part of why I do this now.
Four steps, and none of them need much from you
Total time on your side runs to about an hour. Two minutes on the form, then forty minutes or so digging out logins and old reports, most of which you already have somewhere. I do the rest.
Tell me roughly what you’re dealing with
Form or email, either is fine. Four questions, two minutes. I use the answers to work out whether this is worth either of our time, because there are accounts where I would tell you to save your money and stay where you are.
- What the business does and what you want more of
- Rough monthly spend
- Who the agency is and how long you have been with them
- What made you go looking for this
Read-only access, and nothing else
Read-only on the ad platforms and analytics, plus the last few months of reports and a copy of the contract. Admin access isn’t needed. Nothing I do registers as a change in the account, so there is no trail for anyone at your agency to notice and no reason for them to know. And if you would rather not hand over all of that, send whatever you’re comfortable with and I will work from it. I have done a useful audit off a stack of PDF reports before now, and where a gap in the data limits what I can conclude, the report says so.
- Three to six months of reports
- Read-only on Google Ads, Meta, GA4
- The contract and the last few invoices
- Anything you have already queried and not had answered
I go through the account properly
I compare what the reports claim against what the platforms show, then read the change history to work out when anyone last touched the account. Fees and markups go back into the cost per lead, so you end up with a real number instead of a media-only one. This is the slow part. Most of what I find is ordinary neglect. Deliberate deception is rare, and I say so plainly when the evidence points that way.
- When the account was last meaningfully changed
- Your real cost per lead once fees and markups are counted
- Whether the reported figures match the raw platform data
- Budget sitting on segments that have never converted
- Contract terms that will cost you if you ever want to leave
- Which of your agency’s recommendations were worth taking
You get a report you can hand to your agency
Plain English. Fifteen to twenty-five pages, depending on how much there is to say, with findings first and fixes in the order I’d tackle them. You can pass it straight across to your agency. Most of the time that is the right move. A decent agency handed a specific, evidenced list will usually act on it, and you keep the working relationship along with everything they already know about your business.
- What the money bought, measured against outcomes you care about
- The gap between reported performance and platform data, itemised
- A fix list in priority order, costed where costing is possible
- Contract clauses worth renegotiating at the next break
- Whether the account justifies the fee, and my reasoning either way
- Anything else the account throws up, because the more room for improvement I find, the more you get
That is the whole process
There is no discovery call and no three-week onboarding. Fill in the form and I will come back on whether there is anything in your account worth looking at.
Request your free assessmentWhat the report covers
The shape changes with the account. These six sections are in all of them.
What a lead really costs
I add the retainer, platform fees, markup on third-party tools and the management hours you are billed for, then divide by leads a salesperson would recognise as a lead. Media spend is only part of it. The figure that comes out is usually higher than the one on your dashboard.
Whether anyone is working on it
Change logs, keyword additions, negative lists, creative refresh dates, bid adjustments. Platforms timestamp the lot. If the last meaningful edit was eight months ago and you have been billed every month since, that shows up in black and white.
Reported against actual
Your agency’s deck next to the raw platform export, line by line. Where the two disagree I note the size of the gap and, where it is possible to tell, the cause. Mismatched date ranges explain a good deal of it.
The small print
Notice periods, auto-renewal dates, who owns the ad accounts and the creative, what happens to your data if you leave. Most of it is standard. I flag the clauses worth renegotiating at the next break, whether or not you are thinking of going anywhere.
Benchmarks, with caveats
Where public benchmark data exists for your sector and spend level, I use it and name the source. If it doesn’t exist, I say so. Inventing a figure to fill the gap is how most of this industry ends up quoting statistics nobody can trace.
The fix list
Ranked by what it is worth against what it costs to do. Some of it your agency can action next week. A couple of items will need a conversation about scope, and one or two might mean deciding whether the retainer is the right shape at all.
The report is yours regardless
You get the full written report whether or not you take anything further with me. There is no cut-down version. Nothing gets held back for a follow-up call. What I won’t do is promise a saving before I have opened the account, because nobody can put a percentage on something they have not seen, and the ones who try are guessing at your expense.
Common questions
Not from me. Read-only access doesn’t generate a notification and I never contact them directly, so nothing changes on their side. You choose whether to tell them. For what it’s worth I usually suggest you do, once you’re holding the report, because that conversation goes very differently when you have specifics rather than a general unease.
Five to ten working days from the point I have everything. Larger spend and multiple platforms push it towards ten. The hold-up is almost always access, so if read-only permissions are granted in the first couple of days, the whole thing runs at the short end.
Then that is finding number one. An agency that holds your accounts and won’t grant read-only access has answered a question about the relationship before I have looked at anything. I can still work from reports and invoices, and the refusal goes in the report.
Partly, yes. I run a monthly oversight service and clients who find the audit useful tend to move onto it, because the problems it turns up are the sort that come back within six months if nobody is watching for them. The report stands on its own. Plenty of people act on it and never contact me again, and that is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
UK businesses paying an external agency at least £3,000 a month. Below that there usually isn’t enough in the account to be worth the time on either side, and I would say so rather than take the work. Above roughly £20,000 a month there is more to go through, so it takes longer.
Because I don’t want your media budget. An agency running a free audit is pitching, and the finding at the end is reliably that you should move the account to them. I don’t run campaigns and I’m not going to start. The only thing I sell after this is the monthly oversight, and you can read the report and decline it.
Have someone read the account
Four questions and about two minutes. Most people have been wondering about this for months before they get round to asking.
Request your free assessmentNo contract at this stage, and no follow-up sequence if you go quiet.