What Should Your Marketing Agency Be Doing Between Monthly Calls?

1. Monitor performance for meaningful changes

Monitoring does not mean staring at dashboards all day.

It means knowing when something important has changed enough to deserve attention.

Depending on your business, the agency may be watching:

• revenue
• qualified leads
• acquisition cost
• conversion rate
• advertising spend
• campaign efficiency
• lead quality
• traffic quality
• email performance
• search visibility
• landing-page performance
• other agreed KPIs

The important word is agreed.

An agency should know which outcomes matter to your business rather than treating every available metric as equally important.

Monitoring should help answer questions such as:

• Did performance move outside the expected range?
• Did one campaign suddenly become more expensive?
• Did conversion rate fall?
• Is budget pacing too quickly or too slowly?
• Did lead quality change?
• Did tracking stop recording something?
• Is one channel creating a new opportunity?

Not every change requires action.

But meaningful changes should at least be noticed.

2. Make optimization decisions when the data supports them

This is where many agency relationships become difficult to evaluate.

You may hear:

We’re continually optimizing.

That sounds reassuring.

But what does it mean?

Optimization should result in identifiable decisions.

Depending on the channel, that could include:

• changing budgets
• adjusting bids
• reviewing search terms
• adding negative keywords
• changing audiences
• replacing creative
• restructuring campaigns
• improving landing pages
• adjusting offers
• changing email segmentation
• revising a content priority
• fixing measurement problems

The important point is not that something must change every week.

It is that when the evidence suggests a change is needed, the agency recognizes it and responds intelligently.

Sometimes the correct decision is to make a change.

Sometimes the correct decision is to collect more data.

Sometimes it is to leave something alone.

Active management is not the same as constant activity.

3. Manage where the budget is going

If your agency controls advertising spend, budget management should be happening throughout the month.

That includes more than checking whether you spent the total amount.

The agency should understand:

• whether spend is pacing correctly
• which campaigns or channels are consuming the budget
• where efficiency is improving or deteriorating
• whether additional budget can be deployed productively
• whether budget should be reduced somewhere
• whether allocation still reflects current business priorities

Suppose Google Ads is producing stronger qualified-lead economics while another channel is struggling.

The agency does not necessarily need to move money immediately.

But it should notice the difference and evaluate whether the allocation still makes sense.

Budget should follow a strategy.

Not simply last month's settings.

4. Test things that could improve the result

Good marketing management should gradually produce learning.

That usually requires testing.

Depending on what your agency manages, it might test:

• creative
• messaging
• audiences
• keywords
• landing pages
• calls to action
• offers
• email subject lines
• campaign structures
• bidding approaches
• forms
• positioning

But testing alone is not the goal.

A useful test should answer something.

Does this message generate better qualified leads?

Does this landing page improve conversion rate?

Is this audience more efficient at the same level of spend?

Does the new offer improve revenue enough to justify the lower margin?

A test without a decision attached to it can become activity for activity's sake.

The useful sequence is:

Question→Test→Result→Learning→Decision

5. Check that the measurement still works

Marketing decisions are only as useful as the information underneath them.

Tracking can break.

Websites change. Forms get replaced. Checkout systems are updated. Pixels stop firing correctly. CRM fields change. Attribution becomes inconsistent.

Your agency should not necessarily perform a full analytics audit every week.

But if it relies on conversion or revenue data to make decisions, it should have enough oversight to notice when that data becomes unreliable.

A sudden performance change sometimes turns out to be a marketing problem.

Sometimes it is a measurement problem.

Those require very different responses.

6. Investigate what is actually limiting performance

Not every marketing problem lives inside the channel your agency manages.

Paid media might be sending qualified traffic to a weak offer.

The ads may be working while the landing page is not.

Lead volume may be healthy while the sales team struggles to follow up.

Campaign efficiency may fall because inventory changed.

An email program may underperform because the list itself is unhealthy.

A strong agency should be willing to look beyond the easiest explanation.

That does not mean it is responsible for fixing every problem in the business.

It means it should help identify where the constraint may actually be.

There is a difference between:

Meta performance was weaker this month.

and:

Meta traffic remained stable, but the landing-page conversion rate declined after the promotion ended. We are reviewing the offer before increasing spend.

The second gives you something you can act on.

7. Keep track of what changed and what was learned

One of the simplest ways to evaluate active management is to ask:

What changed since our last meeting?

You should not need a 40-page activity log.

But the agency should be able to explain the meaningful work.

For example:

• budget shifted toward a stronger campaign
• three underperforming ads were replaced
• a new landing page entered testing
• irrelevant search terms were excluded
• a broken conversion event was corrected
• an email segment was changed
• an SEO priority moved because a larger opportunity appeared

Then comes the more important question:

What did you learn from those changes?

Activity tells you that someone did something.

Learning tells you whether the work is improving the next decision.

Related reading:What Should a Marketing Agency Report Include Every Month?

8. Turn what was learned into the next priorities

Marketing management should not reset every month.

It should compound.

What happens this month should influence what happens next month.

If a creative message consistently performs better, that may influence the next creative brief.

If one product category attracts more profitable customers, that may affect budget allocation.

If a landing-page problem is limiting paid media, fixing that may become more important than launching another campaign.

The strategy should become more informed as the agency learns more about your business.

If the priorities never change despite new information, ask why.

How much activity should you actually expect?

There is no universal number of changes an agency should make every week or every month.

The appropriate cadence depends on things such as:

• the services you hired the agency to manage
• advertising spend
• traffic volume
• how much data exists
• campaign maturity
• how quickly the business changes
• the type of marketing channel
• the size of the account
• the testing plan

A large paid media account may require frequent intervention.

A small campaign without enough conversion data may need more patience.

SEO work may operate on a very different rhythm from paid search.

A mature email automation program may need fewer structural changes than a newly launched one.

This is why counting changes is usually a weak way to evaluate an agency.

The better question is whether the level of attention and decision-making is appropriate for the account.

The Agency Management Evidence Test

You do not need access to every internal task to know whether active management is happening.

Ask for evidence across five questions:

You do not need a dramatic answer to every question every month.

You should be able to see the chain over time.

If months pass and all you receive is performance data with no decisions, learning or next steps, that deserves a closer look.

What should not automatically worry you

It is also possible to overcorrect.

These situations are not automatically signs of poor agency management:

Nothing changed this week

If the agency is waiting for a test to mature or does not have enough information to justify another change, leaving the account alone may be appropriate.

Performance declined temporarily

Marketing performance moves.

A weak period matters, but the more useful question is whether the agency noticed it, investigated it and has a sensible response.

The agency needs something from you

Sometimes progress depends on creative approvals, inventory information, pricing decisions, access, development resources or sales feedback.

Agency accountability does not eliminate client responsibility.

The strategy did not change

A good strategy should not be rewritten every time a metric moves.

The agency should distinguish between normal variation and evidence that the underlying plan needs to change.

When “we're monitoring it” is not enough

Monitoring can be legitimate.

It can also become a convenient way to avoid explaining what is happening.

Pay closer attention when you repeatedly hear that the agency is monitoring performance but:

• no meaningful decisions can be identified
• the same problems keep appearing
• budget continues drifting toward weak areas
• tests are discussed but never completed
• tracking problems stay unresolved
• every explanation ends with seasonality or the platform
• nothing is learned from unsuccessful work
• the next month's priorities remain vague
• issues are only discovered when you raise them

One of those does not prove the agency is doing a poor job.

A persistent pattern is more meaningful.

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

What to ask on your next agency call

You do not need to audit every task.

Start with five questions:

1. What materially changed since our last call?
2. What did you do because of it?
3. What did you learn?
4. What are you testing or changing next?
5. What is currently the biggest limitation on performance?

Those questions move the discussion from reporting toward management.

For the full list, see:

Related reading:12 Questions to Ask Your Marketing Agency on Your Next Monthly Call

When an independent marketing review makes sense

Sometimes the agency's answers are clear and the work makes sense.

That is useful information.

Sometimes the performance problem is real, but the agency is responding appropriately.

That is also useful information.

And sometimes you cannot connect the results you are seeing with the work that is supposedly happening.

That is where an independent review can help.

The purpose should not be to find evidence against the agency.

It should be to understand whether your marketing is being actively managed, whether the decisions make sense, and whether something important is being missed.

Related reading:When Should You Fire Your Marketing Agency?