Half the time the agency is the problem. The other half it is the brief, the offer or the speed of the follow-up, and changing supplier fixes none of those. At The Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, we have inherited enough underperforming accounts to know the diagnosis is almost always available before anyone sends a termination email.
So this is the test that separates the two cases, what to ask for before you decide, what a fair handover looks like, and the account assets you should own whatever happens next. It is deliberately as blunt about the client side as the agency side, because a switch made for the wrong reason costs you a quarter and buys you the same result.
If nobody set a baseline, the first ninety days with an agency describes what should already have happened.
How do you know if your marketing agency is underperforming?
Three signals together, never one alone. Cost per qualified enquiry has risen or held flat for three consecutive months with no explanation offered. Nothing has been switched off or tested in that period. And you cannot get a direct answer about what changed, only a report that leads with reach.
One flat month is noise. Three months with no hypothesis, no failed test and no decision is a process that has stopped running, which is a different finding from a campaign that is struggling. Struggling accounts produce arguments about what to try next. Abandoned accounts produce slides.
The fourth signal is response time. If a question asked on Monday is answered on Thursday, nobody is working the account, whatever the report says. Reading the document itself is covered in how to read a marketing report.
What problems look like agency failure but are not?
Most of them. An unwritten brief, an offer the market does not want, a landing page that contradicts the advert, no outcome data going back to the agency, and enquiries sitting unanswered for a day. Each of those produces the same symptom, which is leads that never become customers.
- The brief was never written down. If nobody can state the target customer, the offer and the one number that defines success, the agency has been guessing. The fix is an hour of work, set out in how to brief a marketing agency.
- The offer is the constraint, not the advertising. No amount of media buying rescues a proposition that is priced wrong or asks for too much commitment too early.
- Nobody defined a qualified enquiry. Without a written definition the agency optimises towards whatever the platform counts, which is covered in what a qualified lead actually is.
- Follow-up is slow. Enquiries answered the next day convert at a fraction of those answered in minutes, which is why speed to lead usually explains more of the gap than the media does.
- Outcome data never goes back. An agency never told which leads closed is flying on form fills, and the account gets good at producing enquiries nobody wants.
- The budget never ran long enough to learn anything. Spend moved every month, so no campaign ever accumulated enough data to be judged.
If three or more of those are true, a new agency inherits the same constraint and you will be having this conversation again in two quarters. The uncomfortable version of this check is in why leads do not convert.
What should you ask for before deciding to change agency?
Three things, in writing. Administrative access to every ad account, analytics property and tracking container. The raw monthly data behind the reports rather than the slides. And a written diagnosis: what the agency believes the constraint is, what it would do next, and what it needs from you to do it.
The diagnosis request is the most useful test available and it costs nothing. A capable agency welcomes it, because it moves the argument onto the real problem. An agency with nothing to say sends back a plan to spend more. The quality of that one document settles the question more reliably than the last three months of numbers do.
Ask for it with a date attached and treat silence as the answer. The independent version of the same exercise is what a marketing audit covers.
What does a fair handover look like?
Access transferred rather than recreated, nothing deleted, and a written list of what exists. That means admin rights on the ad accounts, the analytics property, the tag container and the CRM, plus the creative files, the audience definitions, the conversion setup and ninety days of raw performance data.
It takes days rather than weeks, because none of it is new work. A handover that forces the next agency to rebuild tracking destroys your comparison history, the one asset that makes the next decision cheap, which is the point of conversion tracking that survives.
Give notice in writing, name the handover date, and do it before the next billing cycle rather than after an argument. Everyone behaves better in a planned exit than in a surprise one, and you may want a reference later.
Which account assets should a business always own?
All of them. The business should hold the ad accounts, the analytics property, the tag manager container, the domain, the CRM and the creative source files in its own name, with the agency added as a user. Ownership decides whether leaving costs you a week or a quarter.
- The advertising accounts on every platform, under your own business manager.
- The analytics property and the tag container, with historical data intact.
- The domain, the hosting and the DNS records.
- The CRM, the contact database and the automation logic.
- Creative source files, not only exported adverts.
- The conversion and event definitions, documented well enough to rebuild.
If any of that currently sits inside an agency account, fix it while the relationship is still good. The request is routine and nobody sensible refuses it. Made during a termination, the same request turns into a negotiation.
When is changing agency the right call?
When the written diagnosis never arrives, when the same mistake repeats after being raised twice, when you are quoted results you cannot verify, or when the capability you now need is not in the building. Those are structural. Everything else is a conversation you have not had yet.
Capability drift is the most common honest reason and the least discussed. An agency that built a working local lead flow is not automatically the agency to build an outbound pipeline, and saying so is not a complaint about its work. That is the moment to compare lead generation and Decision Maker Pipeline work with what you are buying.
Trust is the other structural one. Once you are checking everything you are told, the relationship has ended and only the date is open.
How long does it take to recover after changing agency?
Plan on sixty to ninety days before new numbers mean anything, and expect a dip first. The incoming team spends the early weeks on access, measurement and the brief, platform learning restarts on anything rebuilt, and your comparison baseline is only as good as the data you kept.
That is why the diagnosis step matters. A quarter of recovery is worth paying when the problem is structural, and wasted when the problem was the brief.
Two things shorten it. Keep the account history, and hand the incoming team the written version of what went wrong. Where enquiries stop becoming meetings is measured separately in the pipeline scorecard, still the fastest way to tell a media problem from a sales one.