Agencies · 5 min read
Three Questions to Ask Your Agency This Week
If their answer to the third is "I'll send it in the monthly report," you already have your diagnosis.
You do not need an exhaustive procurement audit to determine whether the agency on your payroll is actually working. You only need three questions, sent via email so the answers remain in writing.
1. “What is the latest thing you detected about one of my competitors, and when?”
This is the question that separates teams that monitor your entire market from teams that only stare at your ad account. There are three possible responses. Yesterday, and here is what happened: good, you are paying people who do their job. In the monthly report: in that case, ongoing surveillance does not exist—only an archive exists. It is not part of our scope: an honest answer, and at least you know exactly what you are paying for.
Be careful not to mistake competitor surveillance for a canned screenshot pulled from an off-the-shelf software subscription. Anyone can log into a dashboard and display rough third-party estimates. The question is not whether they own the tool; it is whether an experienced operator examines the output every morning and executes a countermove.
2. “Which search queries are we losing, and for how long?”
Search engine positioning is not an abstract leaderboard; it is an itemized inventory of questions your target buyers are actively trying to answer. An agency doing genuine organic search work can tell you precisely which of those questions are currently going to a competitor, how long that has been happening, and what is required to win them back.
If their answer defaults to vague rhetoric about “brand visibility” and “domain authority” without ever naming a specific search query, the question was either not understood—or they simply have no answer.
Traffic is not a business result. Qualified inquiries are a business result. If one metric grows while the other stagnates, something in the middle is broken, and someone needs to say so plainly.
3. “How much did we spend last week, and on what?”
Paid advertising is measured week by week because campaigns are paused week by week. If the freshest data they can produce is thirty days old, you are discovering this month’s expenditure next month—long after the capital has left your account.
The correct response arrives in under sixty seconds, because the numbers are directly accessible to you. If answering requires “compiling a report,” the issue is not administrative slowness: it is that nobody was monitoring that metric in the first place.
What to Do with the Answers
If the answers are solid, your doubts are settled and you can get back to running your business. If they are poor, you do not necessarily need to fire everyone overnight: many clients retain their existing agency for collateral production while bringing us in specifically for organic search and competitor surveillance. What never makes financial sense is continuing to write checks without knowing which of those three answers you would receive.