Is your agency underperforming? Ten questions that get honest answers

When performance slides, the relationship with your agency gets harder to read. The reports keep arriving, the calls stay upbeat, and yet the number that matters keeps going the wrong way. The problem is rarely that anyone is lying to you. It is that agency reporting is built to narrate effort, and effort is not what you are buying. These ten questions cut through to evidence. Ask them in writing, and pay as much attention to the shape of the answers as the content.

1. What changed in the account in the last 90 days?

The change history exists and takes minutes to export. A good agency sends it with dates and owners. A worrying answer is a summary of themes rather than a list of changes, because it means either they do not know, or they would rather you did not.

2. What does bidding actually optimise to?

Not “conversions”. Which conversion actions, counted how, valued at what? If the answer includes soft events like button clicks sitting as primary conversions, you may have found your problem: the algorithm has been chasing engagement while you wanted sales.

3. Which of our conversion actions are primary, and has that changed?

A quiet flip of a conversion action from secondary to primary changes what the whole account learns from, and it rarely gets announced. Ask for the current list and the dates each status last changed.

If these questions are making you curious what the answers would be for your account, an independent audit gets them all at once.

4. Show me the waste ledger

Every keyword and search term over, say, £100 in the last 30 days with zero sales. This is a five-minute pull. If it arrives quickly and honestly, that is a good sign in itself. If it arrives with reasons why the spend is strategic, ask what evidence would change their mind.

5. What basis are these numbers on?

Platform-recorded conversions, deduplicated purchases, analytics, or actual fulfilled orders? Most agency decks quote the most flattering basis without labelling it. You want every important number labelled with its basis, and the same basis used consistently.

6. How are tests isolated?

When they say the new landing page or creative “worked”, ask what else changed in the same window and how the effect was separated. A test without isolation is an anecdote with a chart.

7. What would you cut if our budget dropped 20% tomorrow?

Agencies optimise harder when spend is scarce. If they can name the cut instantly, ask why it is still spending today. If they cannot name it, they do not know the account as well as the retainer implies.

8. What is underperforming right now?

The single most diagnostic question on the list. Every account has something underperforming at all times. An agency that volunteers bad news before you find it is an agency you can work with. One that needs the question asked has told you how the relationship runs.

9. Who publishes changes, and who approves them?

Tag containers and ad accounts should have an approval step, not a free-for-all. Ask who holds publish rights and when your side last approved a change before it went live. Silence here explains a lot of mysteries elsewhere.

10. When were you last wrong, and what did you do about it?

Everyone managing complex accounts is wrong regularly. The good ones close their own theories in writing and issue corrections with the same visibility as the original claim. If the answer to this question is a blank, the reporting you receive has been curated.

Reading the answers

Score the answers on three things: speed, specificity, and whether evidence arrived attached. Slow, general and unevidenced does not mean your agency is bad, but it does mean nobody is currently accountable to the data, and that is fixable. Sometimes the fix is a better operating rhythm with the same agency. Sometimes it is independent oversight sitting between you and them. Occasionally it is a change. The questions do not make that decision for you, they just make it an informed one.