How to audit your agency without firing your agency

Start from the assumption that nobody is at fault

Most leaks we find are nobody’s fault. Platforms drift, prices go stale, flows get built once and forgotten. An independent audit isn’t a vote against your agency. Many agencies use our findings as their next quarter’s roadmap. We never sell media management, so there’s no conflict of interest.

Accounts drift for ordinary reasons. Budgets rise faster than anyone can rebuild the targeting; a campaign that worked last year keeps running on habit; the brief the agency was given still rewards the metric it rewarded at the start. The agency optimizes what it was asked to optimize. An audit checks whether that is still the thing that pays, and whether a margin leak sits outside the agency’s brief altogether.

Six questions for your next budget meeting

How to run it without drama: send the six questions ahead, frame the meeting as budget planning, not an audit, and book 45 minutes. A good agency answers five of six easily, and the one they stumble on is usually where your leak lives. If the meeting turns defensive, that’s an answer too. Two artifacts to request before the meeting: last month’s search terms report and the date the negative keyword list last changed. If nobody remembers the second, that is the answer. And if all six come back clean, congratulations: you may be one of the two businesses that have claimed our guarantee.

What an agency review usually misses

Only the first two sit inside a typical media brief. The other three live in pricing, billing and the CRM, which is why an agency can run a clean account while the business behind it still leaks. The agency’s ‘winning’ campaign was the biggest loser shows the first kind: attribution credited a campaign for sales it did not drive, and the budget followed the credit. The ROAS attribution field guide explains why every platform claims the same sale, and the three checks that show it.

Check the money before the media

Before judging the campaigns, check what the budget bought. Ask for the split between media, fees and tools, and compare the media line with the invoices the ad platforms send directly. If the agency places your media on its own accounts, ask for read only access to them. If part of the budget runs programmatic, the money passes through more hands before it reaches a publisher; how to audit your media agency’s programmatic fees lists the documents to ask for. A markup is not a red flag by itself; an undisclosed one is. The guide to marketing agency markup walks through the four fee models and the three way reconciliation.

How to audit your media agency’s value

An agency’s value is two things you can check. The first is the media: every dollar of it bought at the price the platform actually charged, with fees shown as fees. Reconcile three numbers for the same month: the spend on the agency invoice, the spend in the agency’s report, and the spend the platform billed. They should match to the dollar once the stated fee is taken out, and any gap needs a line that explains it.

The second is the work: changes that moved blended CAC, not platform ROAS. Ask for the three changes the agency made last quarter that it believes lowered your cost per new customer, and check each against your own revenue data rather than the platform’s. An agency that can show both, media at cost and work that moved CAC, is earning its fee. The agency markup guide has the reconciliation workbook.

What to do with the answers

Write down each answer and the date. Two quarters of answers tell you more than any single meeting: whether the negative keyword list now changes monthly, whether blended CAC or MER is reported without anyone asking, whether anything was ever cut. Where an answer stays weak, that is the area to measure properly.

Measuring it properly means reconciling the platforms against your revenue data. You can run part of it yourself with the marketing audit checklist, in the order the marketing audit process sets out. An independent audit covers all five patterns in one pass, in 5 to 7 working days after kickoff, with read only access, and hands the findings to you and your agency at the same time. How that differs from an agency reviewing its own work is set out in independent audit vs your agency’s own review.