Our Marketing Agency Isn't Working and I Can't Tell Why

Why it is hard to judge an agency

When founders tell me "the agency isn't delivering and I can't judge why", it is usually one or more of these five.

The agency is measured on what it controls, not on what you need

Click-through rate, cost per click and platform-reported conversions are numbers the agency can move. Qualified pipeline and revenue depend on your offer, your sales follow-up and your tracking, so they rarely appear in the report.

The tracking flatters the work

Ad platforms count conversions their own way. Branded search often takes credit for demand that started somewhere else. If nobody reconciles platform numbers with your CRM and billing data, both you and the agency are guessing.

The brief changes every month

New priorities, new offers, new audiences. An agency can execute a clear brief; it cannot set your strategy for you.

Several vendors, nobody orchestrating

Paid with one agency, SEO with another, the website with a freelancer. Each optimizes its own piece, and the handoffs between them belong to no one.

The problem sits after the click

Sometimes the ads work and the leads die in follow-up. If sales takes days to reply or the landing page does not answer the buyer's question, a better agency changes little.

Before you switch, check these

Pull last quarter's data and answer these. You will know whether to fix the agency, the brief or the system around it.

• Leads from the agency's campaigns can be traced in your CRM to opportunities and closed deals.
• The agency's reported conversions roughly match what your CRM or billing system recorded for the same period.
• You gave the agency one written goal with a number, and it did not change during the quarter.
• You know how many hours of senior attention your account gets, not only the junior team's.
• Sales replies to new inbound leads within a business day, and you can show it.
• Someone on your side owns the agency relationship and reviews the work against revenue, not activity.

Measure, give it an owner, then decide

First, measure before you switch. I start by reconciling what the platforms report with what the CRM and billing records show, for the same definition and time window. That step shows whether the spend can be judged at all, and, where it can, where it leaks.

Second, give the work one owner on your side. Someone has to write the brief, judge the agency against revenue and decide what stops. That is the gap a fractional CMO fills, whether the agency stays or goes.

Third, decide with evidence. If the agency is executing a clear brief and the numbers still do not move, change the agency or bring the work in-house. If the brief or the tracking was the problem, fix those first; the fractional CMO vs agency comparison and the agency replacement programme cover both paths.

A measurement rebuild I led

At Riverside.fm I led paid acquisition across Google, Meta and YouTube. My Riverside.fm case study describes the starting point: platform-reported conversions were inflated and branded search was getting credit for demand that started elsewhere. I rebuilt the measurement layer before scaling any channel, and the program reported MRR attributed to paid against real post-trial paying users.

The published case reports 337% Net MRR growth during my paid-acquisition work, alongside the work of Riverside's own teams. It does not isolate how much came from each change or show that paid spend alone caused it, and it was not an agency review.