How to tell if your marketing agency is actually working

By Jimmy Dodgson, Client Services Director, Maitland

Published 2026-07-15

Paying a marketing agency and cannot tell if it is working? The five signs it is, the five signs it is not, and a 60 second test to run on your next report.

Executive summary

If you cannot tell whether your marketing is working, that is itself the answer: visibility is the agency's job as much as the work is. Working means one thing, pounds returned versus pounds spent, judged on the right clock for each channel and against a baseline that was set on day one. Use the five signs it is working, the five signs it is not, and the 60 second report test to make an evidence-based call, and diagnose the fault before you fire anyone.

Is your marketing agency actually working, or does it just look busy? And how are you supposed to judge that without being a marketing expert yourself?

You are in the right place. I run client services at Maitland, which means I read marketing reports for a living. I know what a working month looks like on paper, and I know all the ways a report can be dressed to hide a quiet one.

Here is what you will get: what working actually means, how long each channel honestly takes, the five signs your agency is delivering, the five signs it is not, a 60 second test you can run on your next report, and what to do if you do not like the answer. Plus the situations where it genuinely is not the agency's fault, because that happens too.

Start with the uncomfortable truth

If you cannot tell whether your marketing is working, that is itself the answer.

Not necessarily the answer you think. It does not automatically mean the work is bad. It means the visibility is bad, and visibility is the agency's job as much as the work is. An agency doing good work makes absolutely sure you know about it, because the numbers are the easiest sales pitch it will ever have. Strong results do not hide.

So if you have been paying for months and your honest answer to "is it working?" is a shrug, something is already wrong. The rest of this article helps you work out whether it is the work, the reporting, or the setup around them both.

What "working" actually means

Working means one thing: the marketing returns more than it costs, in pounds, within a sensible timeframe.

Not impressions. Not engagement. Not rankings, even. Those are all instruments on the dashboard, and they matter, but they are not the destination. A campaign can win awards while the business that paid for it stands still. The only honest definition of working is the ratio between what went in and what came back.

As a rough rule of thumb for lead-driven businesses, a healthy programme returns something like £3 to £5 of pipeline for every £1 invested once it is up to speed. Your right target depends on your margins and your sales cycle, and a good agency will agree that number with you rather than leave it vague.

One thing working requires that almost nobody sets up: a baseline. If nobody wrote down where you started, no one can honestly say how far you have come. If your agency never took one, that tells you something about how they expected to be judged.

How long each channel honestly takes

Judging a channel on the wrong clock is the most common way businesses get this wrong, in both directions.

Paid search and paid social should show meaningful signal within 30 to 60 days. The traffic is immediate, so if nothing is happening by month two, questions are fair. SEO and content are the opposite: six to 12 months before the compounding shows properly, which is why judging an SEO programme at week six tells you nothing except your own patience level. Email works fast once a list exists, and conversion work moves in test cycles of weeks.

This is also why our GROW partnerships run 13 months. Month one is the Deep Dive that sets the tracking and the baseline, and the next 12 exist because compounding needs runway. Any agency promising meaningful SEO results by week six is selling you something other than SEO.

Five signs your agency is working

• Tracking went in before promises came out. The first weeks were spent making results measurable, an in-person visit and a baseline included. That is what an agency that expects to be judged looks like.
• You can read the report without a translator. What was spent, what came back in pounds, and what happens next, all visible inside a minute. Plain English is a sign of confidence.
• Changes come with reasons. They test, they tell you what they learned, they double down on what works and cut what does not. The plan this quarter is not identical to last quarter, and you know why.
• They flag their own misses before you find them. A quiet month appears in the report with an explanation and an action, not buried under a bigger font on the good numbers. Honesty in the bad months is the strongest signal there is.
• The trend points the right way, quarter on quarter. Not every month is green, and anyone who promises that is lying. But zoom out three months at a time and the line should be climbing.

Five signs it is not

• Every report is green and the business is flat. If the dashboards say brilliant and the bank account says nothing, the dashboards are measuring the wrong things.
• The report is all activity. Posts published, keywords tracked, impressions served. That is a list of effort, not results. Effort is what you pay for. Results are what you pay it for.
• There is no baseline. Nobody can show you where you started, which conveniently means nobody can be judged on the distance travelled.
• Numbers questions get word answers. You ask what it returned and receive a paragraph about brand awareness and long-term positioning. Sometimes those words are true. A pattern of them is a tell.
• The report looks the same every month. Same format, same charts, suspiciously similar commentary. Marketing that is genuinely being managed changes shape as it learns. Marketing on autopilot does not.

The 60 second test

Open your latest report and try to answer three questions inside a minute.

What did we spend? What came back, in pounds? Is that better or worse than last month, and why?

If the report answers all three, you are in a small and fortunate minority, and the rest is detail. If it cannot answer them, the report was designed to impress you rather than inform you, and you should ask for one that does the opposite. Any agency that resists producing those three numbers is answering a bigger question for you.

If you suspect it is not working

Do not rage-quit. Businesses that fire an agency in frustration usually hire the same problem again with a different logo, because the real fault was never diagnosed. Do this instead.

First, write your baseline down today, even if it should have been done a year ago. Leads, revenue, traffic sources, cost per lead. Second, ask the direct question in writing: what did last quarter return in pounds, and what will next quarter return? Third, agree a fair timeframe on the right clock for the channel, and put it in writing too. Fourth, decide when the timeframe is up, on the evidence.

And check one more thing before you blame the agency: if you have several suppliers, the problem may live in the joins between them rather than in any one of them. If it does come to choosing a replacement, our guide to choosing an agency properly is written to be used on us and on everyone else.

When it is not the agency's fault

Honesty cuts both ways, so here are the cases where the agency is not the villain.

If the budget is a fraction of what the ambition needs, no supplier can bridge that. A £1,000 per month spend chasing a £1m growth target is not underperformance, it is arithmetic, and what marketing should cost is a conversation worth having before blame is assigned. If the strategy gets rewritten every six weeks from the client side, no channel ever gets long enough on the clock to prove anything. If tracking was broken when the agency arrived and nobody prioritised fixing it, the fog is a shared failure. And if it is month two of an SEO programme, the only honest report available is "too early to say", which is exactly what a good agency will tell you.

What we do about all this at Maitland

Everything in this article is the standard we hold ourselves to, so I will show our working.

Month one of every GROW partnership is a Deep Dive: we audit everything, visit in person, set the tracking and take the baseline, precisely so that every later claim can be checked. From month two you get a live dashboard you can open any day of the week, showing what went in and what came back, in pounds. One team owns the whole number across every channel, so there is nobody to point sideways at. And the quiet months go in the report with the loud ones.

What does that look like when it works? Kirkgate Dental Surgery saw traffic up 221 per cent, conversion growth of 429 per cent and a peak return on spend of 562 per cent. Northern Optical saw traffic up 400 per cent and conversions up 55 per cent. Across all our clients in the last 12 months, the average was 52 per cent growth. The rest are in our case studies , which is exactly where you should go to check claims like these.

Want to see what working would actually be worth to you? Our growth calculator shows what steady, compounding growth does to your revenue over a year or two. Put your own figures in and see the size of the prize. It sits on our pricing page, where the prices are published in full, because that is how we think this should work.

And if you want a second pair of eyes on whether your current marketing is delivering, book a free performance marketing review . We will look at what you are doing, show you what we see and what we would do about it, and if your agency is actually doing a good job, we will tell you that too. No pitch. No follow-up unless you want one. You still walk away with something useful.

Client results are specific to the named client and are not a guarantee of future performance. The 52 per cent average growth figure is correct as of July 2025. Benchmark ranges are indicative and depend on sector, margins and sales cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should I give a marketing agency before judging results?

Judge each channel on its own clock. Paid search and paid social should show meaningful signal within 30 to 60 days. SEO and content need six to 12 months to compound. Whatever the mix, tracking and a baseline should exist from month one, and leading indicators should be visible well before revenue moves.

What should a good marketing agency report include?

Three things above all: what was spent, what came back in pounds, and whether that is better or worse than last month with the reason why. A good report also shows what was learned, what changes next, and any misses, flagged by the agency before you spot them.

What return should I expect from a marketing agency?

A common benchmark for lead-driven businesses is £3 to £5 back in pipeline for every £1 invested once the programme is up to speed, though the right figure depends on your margins and sales cycle. The important thing is agreeing a target in writing and measuring against a baseline, not adopting anyone's generic number.

When should I fire my marketing agency?

After you have set a baseline, asked in writing what the work returned, agreed a fair timeframe on the right clock for the channel, and watched the evidence come back short. Firing an agency before diagnosing the real fault usually means hiring the same problem again with a different logo.

Why can I not tell if my marketing is working?

Usually because no baseline was taken, the reporting measures activity rather than pounds, or several suppliers each report their own slice and nobody owns the whole. All three are fixable, and fixing visibility comes before judging performance.