This is an uncomfortable question to ask, which is why so many business owners pay for another six months instead. You do not need to understand the technical work to judge it. You need access, a few specific questions, and a willingness to sit through a slightly awkward call.
First: make sure you own your own accounts
Before anything else, check whose name your assets are in. You should own, in your own account, with admin access:
- Your domain name.
- Your website hosting and the site files or platform account.
- Your Google Ads account.
- Your Google Analytics and Tag Manager accounts.
- Your Google Business Profile.
- Your social media accounts and ad accounts.
An agency can and should have access to these. It should not own them. If your ads run inside an account you cannot see, or your website sits on a platform you have no login for, then leaving is expensive by design. Ask for ownership to be transferred to you and access granted back to them. A good partner will do this without any fuss, because they know it is normal.
The questions that reveal everything
"What did you change last month, and why?"
This is the single best question. You are looking for specifics: which campaigns, which pages, which keywords, what the reasoning was, and what happened afterwards. Vague answers about optimisation and monitoring, month after month, usually mean nothing much happened.
"What did it cost us per enquiry?"
Not per click, not per thousand impressions. Per enquiry, or per booked job if you can get that far. If nobody can answer, either the tracking is broken or nobody has looked. Both are your problem to insist on fixing.
"Show me the search terms report"
For Google Ads, ask to see the real searches your money went on. Then read it yourself. If it is full of obviously irrelevant searches, the basics are not being maintained, whatever the report summary says.
"What are we going to do next month, and what will tell us it worked?"
A plan with a measure attached is the mark of someone doing the work. A plan with no measure is a wish list.
"Who actually does the work?"
You are allowed to know whether it is the person you met, a junior, or a subcontractor in another company. None of those answers is automatically wrong. Not being told is.
How to read the report you already get
Reports are often designed to look busy. A few tests you can apply without any technical knowledge:
- Does it lead with money and enquiries, or with impressions, reach and followers?
- Does it compare against the goal you agreed, or only against last month?
- Does it explain the bad numbers as well as the good ones?
- Would it be different if last month had gone badly? If not, it is a template.
- Does it end with what happens next, or just with a summary of what happened?
Check the work yourself, in ten minutes
You do not need tools for these.
- Search for your main service in your town, on a phone, and see whether you appear at all.
- Click your own advert and see which page it goes to.
- Fill in your own enquiry form and time how long it takes for anyone to respond.
- Look at when your last social post went out, and whether comments have been answered.
- Ask three recent customers how they found you, and see whether that matches the report.
Genuine reasons results can be flat
Not every disappointing month is negligence, and a fair assessment includes the honest explanations:
- Seasonality. Some trades go quiet at predictable times of year.
- Budget that is too small to compete for the searches that matter.
- A website that undoes good traffic: slow, unclear, or with no obvious way to get in touch.
- Enquiries arriving and not being followed up quickly at your end.
- A new competitor with deeper pockets.
- Work that takes months to show, such as SEO on a site that started with nothing.
The difference between a good agency and a bad one is not whether these things happen. It is whether they told you about them early, in plain English, with a plan.
Warning signs worth acting on
- You cannot get access to your own accounts.
- Every report is the same shape regardless of what happened.
- Nobody can tell you the cost per enquiry.
- Contracts that renew automatically with long notice periods and no defined deliverables.
- Guarantees of first place on Google, which nobody can honestly promise.
- Work you are billed for that you cannot see anywhere.
- Questions answered with jargon rather than answers.
If you decide to leave
Do it in an orderly way. Confirm ownership and admin access on everything first. Ask for the account structure, keyword lists, tracking setup and any content that was produced for you. Get the final invoice agreed in writing. Then give notice. Doing it in that order avoids the situation where your ads stop, your site breaks, and nobody will pick up the phone.
And if they pass?
Say so. Agencies that get clear, specific questions from a client usually raise their game, and the relationship gets better rather than worse. The point of asking is not to catch anyone out. It is to make sure the money you spend every month is buying work you can see.