The reliable signs are not bad numbers. They are a report that explains results rather than decisions, an account where nothing has structurally changed in months, a team that only raises problems after you do, and reporting built on a revenue number that does not match your shop. Bad numbers on their own prove nothing, because markets do get harder. Those four hold true whether the market moved or not, which is what makes them worth acting on.
How do you know if your marketing agency is doing a good job?
Read one month of reporting and count the decisions in it. Not the results, the decisions: what was changed, what it was changed to, and what the change was expected to do. A good report is mostly decisions with the results attached. A weak one is mostly results with an explanation attached, and the explanation always arrives after the fact, which is the tell. Anyone can write a story about last month. Only somebody actually running the account can tell you what they did and why, before they knew whether it worked.
Four checks that separate a failing agency from a harder market
- Open the change history. Every ad platform keeps one, and you can read it yourself. If the last structural change is months old while the reporting is full of activity, the activity was reporting.
- Compare the reported revenue to your shop. Pull the same date range from your own backend. Platform reported revenue is always higher, and the size of the gap is the point: a stable gap is attribution, a growing gap is a measurement problem nobody has named.
- Ask who found the last problem. If the answer is always you, the account is being monitored rather than run. This is the single most predictive question on the list.
- Ask what they would do with half the budget. A team that knows the account answers immediately and specifically. A team that does not will talk about testing.
If all four come back clean and the numbers are still down, the market probably did get harder, and switching agencies will cost you three months to land in the same place. That outcome is common enough to be worth ruling out first.
What are the red flags in a marketing agency?
Reporting you can only see inside a dashboard. A named lead who has never been in a call. Results attributed to work you cannot find in the change history. A refusal to give you admin on your own accounts. Contracts where the notice period is longer than the time it takes to prove anything. And the quiet one: every conversation about performance turning into a conversation about attribution, every time, in one direction only.
Should I fire my marketing agency?
Raise it before you replace it, once, in writing, with the specific checks above rather than a feeling. A team that can be fixed will respond with decisions and dates. A team that cannot will respond with a meeting and a deck. You will know inside two weeks, and you will have lost nothing, because the answer to that message is itself the diagnostic.
The exception is measurement. If the reported revenue and your shop have been diverging and nobody has raised it, that is not a performance problem to be discussed, it is a broken instrument, and every decision made since it broke was made on bad information.
How to switch agencies without losing the account
- Confirm you own everything, before you say anythingOpen your Meta business manager and your Google Ads account and check that your company is the owner, not the agency, and that the pixel, the conversion actions and the audiences sit under your business rather than theirs. Do this first. Ownership is far easier to establish while the relationship is still normal.
- Export the history you cannot rebuildConversion history, audiences, creative files, feed rules and the reporting archive. Performance data can be re-pulled. Audiences and learned conversion history cannot, and they are the assets that make a new team productive in weeks instead of months.
- Read the notice period and the data clauseBoth are in the contract you signed and almost nobody reads them until this moment. Note the notice period, whether it runs from the next billing date, and what the contract says happens to accounts and assets on exit.
- Overlap rather than gapBring the new team in while the old one is still running, even if that means paying twice for a few weeks. A dark month costs more than the overlap does, because paused accounts lose their learning and campaigns that stop rarely restart where they left off.
- Change access last, and change it yourselfRemove the outgoing agency's users from your accounts when the handover is done. Never ask them to remove themselves, and never let a transfer of ownership be the final step, because that is the one step that can leave you without an account at all.
What you should ask the next one
The same four checks, in advance. Who runs it day to day, what the reporting contains, who owns the accounts, and what you will be told when it is not working. That last one is the question this whole situation was caused by, and the answers to all four are worth having in writing. There is a longer version of them in the five questions.