The 4-Question Test: How to Tell If Your Agency Is Actually Working (Before Your Next Renewal)

Key Takeaways

• Four diagnostic questions you can ask your agency this week, designed to surface opacity rather than start a fight.

• If your agency can't answer any one of them within 24 hours, that's a real signal about how the account is being managed day-to-day.

• The questions work for any paid channel, whether you're spending on Google, Meta, LinkedIn, or TikTok.

• A senior strategist should be able to answer all four off the top of their head, while a junior account manager rarely can without a panicked Slack message to someone above them.

• You'll see what good answers look like, what evasive answers look like, and what to do with each.

Why Most Agency Reviews Get You the Wrong Information

I've seen this a hundred times. A founder sits down for a quarterly review, opens the deck the agency sent over, and walks out feeling either reassured or vaguely uneasy without being able to say why. The reassurance comes from polished slides and rising line charts. The unease comes from a sense that nothing in the deck actually answered the question they came in with: is this making me money?

Default monthly reports are built to manage the relationship, not measure it. They show impressions trending up and CTR holding steady because those are the numbers that make the agency look busy. They show ROAS at the campaign level because campaign-level ROAS is easy to make presentable. What they almost never show is the connection between every dollar that left your bank account and every dollar that came back. That gap is where opacity lives, and that gap is where most renewal decisions get made on bad information.

The four questions below are designed to close that gap fast. None of them require new tools or new reporting. They just ask your agency to surface things that should already exist. If the answers come back clear and confident, you've got real signal. If they come back hedged or delayed, that's also signal, and it might be more useful than anything in the last twelve quarterly decks.

Question #1: "What was the worst-performing campaign last month, and why is it still running?"

This question does two things at once. It tells you whether the team is actually looking at the account at the campaign level, and it tells you whether they have a point of view about what they see. Both matter, and both are easy to fake in a slide deck.

A good answer is specific and short. It sounds like, "Our prospecting campaign on the cold audience pulled a 1.4 ROAS against a 2.8 target. We kept it live because we're testing three new creative angles this week and we want clean data on whether the audience or the creative is the issue. If the new creative doesn't move it by the 15th, we kill it." That answer tells you the team knows the number, has a hypothesis, and has a kill date. You can disagree with the strategy, but you can see it.

An evasive answer sounds like "everything is performing as expected" or "we're tracking all campaigns and adjusting weekly." Both of those mean nobody on the agency side has formed an opinion about which campaign is the weakest link. That's the real problem, not the underperforming campaign itself. Underperformance is normal. The absence of conviction about what to do with it is not.

Question #2: "Show me how every dollar of last month's spend ties to revenue."

This is the transparency question, and it's the one most agencies cannot answer in real time. Not because they're hiding anything sinister, but because the work to map spend to revenue at the campaign level is real work, and a lot of agencies have built reporting that stops short of doing it.

A good answer comes back as a table. Columns for campaign, spend, attributed revenue, attribution method, and the math that gets you from one to the other. The attribution method matters because no method is perfect and any honest agency will tell you which model they're using and where it has gaps. Last-click, data-driven, post-purchase survey, MMM, whatever the source, you should hear it explained in plain English in under sixty seconds.

The evasive answer is "we report ROAS at the campaign level." That's the same thing, except it isn't. ROAS at the campaign level is a ratio your agency calculated. Spend tied to revenue is the underlying data that produced the ratio. The first one is interpretation. The second one is the source. If your agency can give you the ratio but not the source, you're getting a story, not a system.

If your agency can't answer these, the audit we run is essentially these four questions answered for you with the data behind them. No pitch, just the answers your current agency probably can't give you.

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Question #3: "If this were your money, what's the one decision you'd make today?"

This is the conviction test, and it's the question senior strategists love and account managers dread. The reason is simple. Answering it requires having a real point of view about your business, your offer, and your numbers. It requires being willing to be wrong on the record. Junior staff are trained out of doing that early in their careers because being wrong on the record gets them in trouble, so they learn to deflect into roadmaps and frameworks instead.

A good answer is specific, current, and tied to something happening in your business right now. "If this were my money, I'd cut Meta prospecting in half this week and put that budget into Google branded plus a Performance Max campaign on the new product line.

The Meta prospecting CAC has been climbing for six weeks and the new product line has search demand we aren't capturing." You can hear the bet inside that answer. You can also push back on it, ask why, and have a real conversation.

An evasive answer is "we'd want to look at a few more weeks of data" or "let me get back to you with a proposal." Both of those are stalling. Your strategist should know your account well enough to have a working theory of where the next dollar belongs at any given moment, even if they want to validate it before pulling the trigger. The absence of a working theory is the signal you're looking for.

Question #4: "Walk me through your account live, right now."

This one is the literal show-me question. You ask your agency lead to share their screen, open the ad platform, and walk you through the live account. No prep, no slides, no deck pulled together the night before. Just the account as it sits.

What you're watching for during the walkthrough is the small stuff. Are they navigating to your account or searching for it because they haven't opened it in a while? When they pull up campaigns, do they recognize the names without reading them, or are they reading the screen back to you? When you ask about a specific ad set, do they remember what's running in it? Senior strategists who actually run your account know it the way a chef knows their kitchen. They open it and start cooking.

The other thing to watch for is what they show you without being asked. A strategist who's actually living in the account will point out something interesting before you ask. A campaign that picked up steam this week, a creative that's getting unusual engagement, a search term that surprised them. If you have to drag every observation out of them with questions, the account is being managed reactively, not actively.

What to Do With the Answers

Once you've run the test, you'll likely land in one of these patterns.

If you got clean answers to all four, your agency is doing the work. Renew with confidence and use the renewal conversation to ask for stretch goals instead of haggling on price. Senior strategists who can pass this test are worth keeping, and the right move with a partner who's earning their fee is to push them harder, not squeeze them on retainer.

If you got mixed answers, two strong and two evasive, ask for a strategy review and a 60-day improvement plan with measurable outcomes. Be specific about which questions weren't answered well and tell them what good would look like. A real partner will hear that as useful feedback and step up. If they don't, you've learned something.

If you got evasion across the board, your renewal decision just got easier. Don't make it about blame. Make it about fit. The agency you have right now is built for a different kind of client relationship than the one you need, and dragging it out another quarter doesn't fix that.

The Renewal Conversation You Should Be Having

The renewal call most founders walk into is a pricing call. The renewal call you should be having is a business call. Bring the actual goals you have for the next six months, the pipeline visibility you need to make decisions on the rest of the business, and the specific outcomes you want this paid spend to produce. Then ask the agency to commit to a plan that gets you there.

A senior partner who can pass the four-question test will welcome that conversation. They've been waiting for you to push the discussion past tactics and into outcomes, because that's where their work actually shows up. An agency that can't pass the test will resist the framing, because the new framing exposes the gap they've been operating inside.

Either way, you've gotten what you came for. Real signal about whether the money is working, in language you can defend to your CFO, your board, or yourself.

FAQ

What questions should I ask my Google Ads agency?

What questions you should ask depend on what you're trying to surface, but the four in this post work for any paid channel including Google. The two that hit hardest specifically for Google are the spend-to-revenue mapping question and the live walkthrough. Google accounts pile up complexity fast (legacy campaigns, dormant ad groups, search term reports nobody has filtered in months), and a strategist who actually runs the account can show you that complexity in real time. One who doesn't will fumble.

How do I know if my marketing agency is actually working?

You know your agency is working when you can answer one question without hesitation: did last month's spend turn into more profit than it cost. If you can't answer that, the agency is failing at the most basic level of transparency, regardless of what their reports look like. Run the four-question test in this post and you'll have your answer inside a week.

Should I cancel my marketing agency or give them more time?

Give them one structured chance to step up before you cancel. Sit down with the agency lead, walk through the four questions in this post, and tell them honestly which answers came back clean and which didn't. Ask for a 60-day plan to fix the gaps with specific weekly check-ins. If they meet that bar, you've got a real partner who needed pressure to perform. If they don't, you've made the cancel decision with evidence behind it instead of a gut feeling.

What's a normal turnaround time for an agency to answer reporting questions?

Same business day for any question that touches data they should already have, and 24 hours for anything that requires light analysis. If you're waiting three or four days for a basic spend-to-revenue answer, that's a process problem on the agency side and it tends to get worse during busy seasons, not better. Senior strategists answer the easy questions in their next break between calls. Junior account managers route the question up the chain and you wait.

Is it normal to not understand my own ad account?

Yes, it's normal, and that's the actual problem. Most founders running paid spend feel some version of "I don't fully get what's happening in there" because the platforms are complicated and the agency they hired didn't make a habit of explaining the work. Normal isn't the same as okay. The whole point of working with a senior strategist is having someone who closes that gap for you instead of widening it with jargon.

Get the Test Run for You

If you ran this test on your current agency and the answers didn't come back clean, we'll run it for you with the data behind every answer. The audit is free, takes about a week, and is built to give you the visibility your agency should already be giving you. You'll see exactly where your spend is going, exactly what it's returning, and exactly which decisions are worth making in the next 30 days.

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