Most Agency Checklists Are Useless

They ask whether you trust your agency, whether the strategy still feels aligned, whether communication is good. You already know the answers, and knowing them has never once changed anything.

A checklist earns its place only when every item can be answered with evidence rather than impression, and when a bad answer is recognisable the moment you see it.

So this one is organised by how long it takes rather than by subject. Ten minutes monthly, an hour each quarter, half a day once a year. If you only ever do the first, you’ll still catch most of what goes wrong.

For why each check matters and how to read what you find, the full audit guide covers the reasoning. This page is the working document.

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Ten Minutes, Every Month

Four things, straight after the monthly report lands.

• Open the platform change history yourself. Google Ads keeps it under Tools, and Meta under the account activity log. You’re looking for whether anything happened, and when. Bad answer: three weeks of silence, then a cluster of edits dated just before your review call.
• Check one reported number against the platform. Pick a different one each month. Cost per lead this month, spend the next. Bad answer: the figures don’t reconcile and nobody can say why within a day.
• Ask what was tested and what the result was. Not what’s planned. What ran, and what it showed. Bad answer: a description of activity with no outcome attached, or the same test described two months running. If the account genuinely hasn’t moved, you may be paying for management that isn’t happening.
• Look at what the report leads with. The first chart tells you what the agency wants you looking at. Bad answer: impressions, reach or engagement in the top slot, with anything connected to revenue further down or absent.

Ten minutes. Do it in the same sitting as the report and it becomes habit rather than confrontation.

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One Hour, Every Quarter

• Reconcile the money properly. Fees paid, platform spend, and reported spend, for the whole quarter, side by side. Include production charges and software fees. Bad answer: a gap the agency explains differently on two separate occasions.
• Work out your real cost per customer. Not cost per lead, which flatters everyone. Total spend divided by customers who actually bought. The full calculation includes the fee, which most agency versions quietly leave out. Bad answer: you can’t calculate it because nobody tracks that far down the funnel.
• Ask how many hours went on your account. A direct question with a numerical answer. Bad answer: “the whole team contributes”, or a figure that would make the hourly rate absurd against your retainer.
• Confirm the account isn’t being subcontracted. Ask plainly whether any work is outsourced or white-labelled, and to whom. Bad answer: hesitation, or a partner you’ve never heard of appearing in the change logs.
• Check your admin access still works. Log in. Actually log in, don’t assume. Access quietly degrades during platform migrations and staff changes. Bad answer: you’re a viewer where you used to be an admin, and nobody mentioned it. Here’s why that matters more than it sounds.

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Half a Day, Once a Year

• Find your four contract dates and diary them. Term end, notice window opening, notice window closing, renewal date. This is the single highest-value hour in the whole checklist, and missing the third date costs a year.
• Name the people on your account and check them. Ask for the LinkedIn profile of everyone touching the work, which is a fairer request than CVs and tells you more. Bad answer: the senior strategist from the pitch has no involvement, and the person running it has eighteen months’ experience. That’s the bait-and-switch, and it’s structural rather than personal.
• Export a full backup while relations are calm. Performance history at maximum date range, audience definitions, conversion tracking configuration, creative files in editable formats. Once a year, filed somewhere you’ll find it.
• Compare this year against last. Same metric, same months, same definition. Bad answer: the definition changed partway through, which conveniently makes the comparison impossible.

If three or more items across this page produce a bad answer, the pattern matters more than any single finding. The wider warning signs are worth reading at that point.

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Before You Sign Anything

Five things to establish while you still have leverage. The reasoning behind each sits in the contract guide.

• Deliverables stated as quantities. Twelve posts a month, not “content marketing”.
• Success stated as a figure you can check, in a system you control.
• Accounts opened in your business’s name, with you as owner rather than user.
• The named people, at named seniority, written into the agreement.
• A pricing breakdown separating fee, media, production and software.

Any of these that an agency won’t put in writing is worth more attention than everything it agreed to verbally.

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If You’re Leaving

Work through this before you give notice, not after. The sequencing matters more than the speed.

Export

• Analytics history at maximum date range, in CSV rather than screenshots
• The full Google Ads account structure, using Google Ads Editor, which exports campaigns, ad groups and keywords in a form that can be re-imported elsewhere
• Custom audiences, remarketing lists and lookalike definitions
• Conversion tracking configuration, documented rather than assumed
• Every lead and customer record generated through marketing

Own

• Google Analytics: you should be the owner, not a user on the agency’s property
• Google Ads: the account in your name, you as admin. Google’s access settings show your actual level
• Meta: you own the Business Manager, not the agency
• Every social profile, every other ad platform, admin on all of them
• Creative files in editable formats, website credentials, email templates and automations

Accounts sitting in the agency’s name need transferring before you give notice. Afterwards it becomes a negotiation, and you’ll be negotiating from the weaker side.

Ask for

• The current strategy and the reasoning behind the campaign structure
• What’s been tested, and specifically what failed. This is the most valuable document in the handover and the one least likely to exist
• Audience insights, in writing rather than over a call
• Any third-party relationships held on your behalf

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What Resistance Tells You

Nothing on this page is unreasonable. You’re asking a supplier what it did with your money and who did it.

Agencies doing good work tend to enjoy these conversations, because most clients never ask and being asked is a chance to show the working. I felt that myself, running one. The month a client finally wanted detail was the month the relationship improved.

Which is why resistance is worth more than any single answer. An agency that treats a request for its own change logs as an accusation has told you something no report will.

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Or Have Someone Else Run It

Free, written, and yours to keep either way.

What you receive:

• Every check on this page, completed against your actual accounts
• Spend reconciled against platform records, with any gap named
• Your four contract dates, written out
• A written specification your agency can work to, if the relationship is worth keeping

Most owners who do this find the second outcome rather than the worst one: thin work, fixable, no need to change agency at all.

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