12 Questions to Ask Your Marketing Agency on Your Next Monthly Call

2. Are we ahead, behind or on plan?

Metrics are difficult to judge without a target.

Ask whether the current results are ahead of, behind or roughly in line with what both sides expected.

The relevant target could be revenue, qualified leads, acquisition cost, conversion rate, pipeline or another agreed business outcome.

The important part is having a shared definition of progress.

3. Which result matters most right now?

Reports can contain dozens of metrics.

Your agency should be able to tell you which one or two deserve the most attention right now and why.

For one business that may be customer acquisition cost.

For another it may be qualified pipeline, revenue, conversion rate or lead quality.

If every metric is treated as equally important, prioritization becomes difficult.

4. What did you actually change since our last call?

This is one of the most important questions you can ask.

Results can change even when nobody changes anything. Demand, competition, seasonality and customer behavior all move.

Ask what the agency actually changed.

Depending on the channel, that might include:

• budgets
• bids
• audiences
• keywords
• creative
• offers
• landing pages
• email flows
• campaign structure
• tracking
• testing priorities

You do not need a giant activity log.

You need to understand the decisions being made.

Related reading:how to tell if your marketing agency is doing a good job

5. What did you learn from those changes?

Activity is not the same as learning.

A useful optimization process should gradually reveal more about what works, what does not and what the team should try next.

Ask what the agency learned from the changes it made.

A creative test may reveal a stronger message. A search-term review may uncover unexpected demand. A landing-page test may show that traffic quality was not actually the problem.

The strongest agency relationships accumulate knowledge, not just completed tasks.

6. What is underperforming right now?

Good agency relationships should have room for bad news.

Ask directly what is not working as well as expected.

It could be a campaign, audience, creative, landing page, keyword group, product category or entire channel.

The goal is not to blame the agency.

It is to make problems visible early enough to act on them.

7. What are you doing about it?

Finding a problem is only the first step.

Ask what specifically is changing because of it.

Compare:

“Mobile conversion rate was down.”

with:

“Mobile conversion rate dropped, so we are reviewing traffic quality and landing-page behavior before increasing spend.”

The second answer connects a problem to a response.

8. What are you testing next?

Ask what the agency plans to test and why.

A useful answer should explain:

• what is changing
• why it is changing
• what metric will be watched
• what decision will follow

Testing should produce learning, not just more activity.

9. Where would you increase, reduce or reallocate budget?

This question forces prioritization.

Ask where the agency would put the next dollar and where it would pull money back.

The answer should consider more than surface-level ROAS or CPA.

Depending on the business, factors such as scale, margins, lead quality, inventory, saturation and customer lifetime value may matter too.

10. What is currently limiting performance?

Not every marketing problem lives inside an ad account.

The real constraint may be:

• the offer
• pricing
• creative volume
• the website
• tracking
• inventory
• sales follow-up
• approval speed
• budget
• demand

Ask what the agency believes is currently holding performance back.

The answer may reveal something your internal team needs to fix.

11. What are the three priorities before our next call?

Long action lists often hide what actually matters.

Ask the agency to identify the three highest-priority actions before the next meeting.

Each should ideally have:

12. What should be different by the time we meet again?

End by closing the loop.

Ask what should reasonably be completed, changed or learned before the next meeting.

That could mean:

• a test has enough data to evaluate
• new creative is live
• a tracking issue is fixed
• budget has been reallocated
• a landing-page change has launched
• a weak campaign has been restructured

The next meeting should begin by reviewing what both sides previously said would happen.

Related reading:what your marketing agency should report every month

If you only have 10 minutes, ask these five

You do not need to ask all 12 questions every month.

If time is limited, ask:

1. What changed since our last call, and why?
2. Are we ahead, behind or on plan?
3. What did you actually change?
4. What is underperforming, and what are you doing about it?
5. What are the three priorities before our next call?

Those five questions cover performance, optimization, problems and next steps without turning the meeting into an interrogation.

When should the answers concern you?

One vague answer does not mean you have a bad agency.

Patterns matter more.

Pay closer attention when you repeatedly see:

• reporting without explanation
• explanations without evidence
• activity without clear decisions
• problems without a response plan
• no clear record of what changed
• the same unresolved issue month after month
• no connection between marketing metrics and business goals

If those patterns continue, the problem may not be one campaign.

It may be how the marketing is being managed.

Related reading:How Do I Know If My Marketing Agency Is Doing a Good Job?