Independent marketing oversight · Australia-wide
Your agency manages
your marketing.
Who checks the agency?
AgencyGuard gives Australian business owners independent marketing reporting, honest second opinions and experienced support.
We don’t replace your agency. We keep them accountable.
Two-minute questionnaire. No cost, no call, no obligation.
The problem
Plenty of numbers.
Very few answers.
Most marketing reports are generated by the same people being paid to produce the results. They are usually accurate. They are rarely the questions a business owner actually needs answered.
You end up with impressions, reach, click-through rates and a cost per conversion that nobody has checked against your bank account. Then you are asked to approve more budget on the strength of it.
Questions the report should answer
- 01Are the leads actually good?
- 02Can the conversions be verified?
- 03Is the agency improving the campaigns?
- 04Why is the cost increasing?
- 05Should I approve more budget?
- 06Is tracking telling the truth?
- 07What should happen next?
Our position
A good agency has nothing to fear from independent oversight.
This is not a business built on the idea that agencies are dishonest. Most are not. The overwhelming majority are competent people doing genuine work for clients who cannot easily judge it.
That last part is the problem. Not dishonesty — asymmetry. You are buying something you have no practical way to evaluate. Independent oversight closes that gap, and a confident agency welcomes it.
How AgencyGuard works
Four steps. No account access required to start.
Share the information
Upload the report you already receive from your agency, or give read-only access where that is appropriate. We never ask for your passwords.
We independently review it
We look at commercial outcomes, tracking, account activity, transparency and the recommendations being made — not just whether clicks got cheaper.
Receive the truth in plain English
You get a clear verdict, the issues requiring attention, and the specific questions to take back to your agency. No jargon, no hedging.
Ask before you approve
Use the Priority Question Line before approving a budget increase, proposal, strategy change or new contract. Get a second opinion while it still matters.
What you actually receive
The Honest Marketing Report.
This is the product. Every month you receive a plain-English verdict, a Marketing Oversight Score, the issues that need attention, and the exact questions to take back to your agency. Here is a real one, redacted.
Honest Marketing Report
Redacted — Home services, South East Queensland
Reporting period 1–31 October · Channels reviewed: Google Ads, Meta Ads
Executive verdict
Spend is producing enquiries at an acceptable cost, but roughly a third of the reported conversions cannot be verified against the CRM. Do not approve the proposed budget increase until conversion counting is corrected.
Marketing Oversight Score
Marketing Oversight Score
Account ownership and accessweight 20
100%
Tracking and verificationweight 25
40%
Reporting clarityweight 20
65%
Management transparencyweight 20
55%
Commercial alignmentweight 15
47%
Spend and outcomes
Advertising spend
$8,420
+12% vs prior month
Agency fee
$1,950
Unchanged
Reported conversions
134
+18%
Verified in CRM
89
66% of reported
Cost per verified lead
$116
+9% vs prior month
Booked jobs attributed
21
Est. $47,300 revenue
Tracking confidence
Confidence in reported numbers: Low to moderate
- The Google Ads conversion action counts every phone-number click as a conversion, including repeat clicks from the same session.
- Meta and Google are both claiming the same 22 enquiries, so the two platform reports cannot be added together.
- The contact form fires its conversion event on page load rather than on submit, inflating counts by an estimated 15–20%.
- No offline conversion import is configured, so genuinely booked jobs are invisible to bid optimisation.
Issues requiring attention
Conversion counting is materially overstated
Approximately 34% of reported conversions cannot be matched to a CRM record. This affects every cost-per-conversion figure in the agency report.
Budget increase requested without a verified baseline
The proposed $3,000/month increase is justified using the reported conversion figure, not the verified one. On verified numbers the case is materially weaker.
Brand and non-brand spend are not separated
Without a split you cannot tell whether the agency is generating new demand or being paid to capture people already searching for you by name.
Wasted spend on irrelevant search terms
$612 in the period went to search terms with no commercial relevance. A negative keyword review has not been run since June.
A paused campaign is still included in reporting
It contributes no spend but inflates the apparent size of the account.
Questions for the agency
- 01Can you show me one reported conversion traced end to end — from the ad click through to the record in our CRM?
- 02What is our cost per conversion when brand searches are excluded?
- 03Which of the three ad variations added on 8 October won, and on what measure?
- 04Why has the service-area radius not been tightened after 17 out-of-area enquiries?
- 05Can you re-present the budget increase using CRM-verified conversions rather than platform-reported ones?
Recommended next actions
1. Do not approve the budget increase this month
Revisit once conversion counting has been corrected and one clean month has passed.
2. Fix the form conversion trigger
It should fire on successful submit, not page load. This is a 15-minute change.
3. Split brand and non-brand into separate campaigns
This is the single change that will most improve the honesty of your reporting.
4. Request a negative keyword review
Ask for it monthly, in writing, as part of the standard report.
5. Set up offline conversion import
Feeds booked jobs back to the platforms so bidding optimises toward revenue.
This is an illustrative example using anonymised figures. AgencyGuard reports are opinions based on the information supplied and are not findings of misconduct against any marketing provider.
What we review
The whole acquisition system, not just cheaper clicks.
Marketing does not fail one channel at a time. A campaign can be well built and still lose money because tracking is wrong, the landing page does not match the ad, or nobody follows up the enquiries. We look at all of it.
Facebook and Instagram advertising
Whether the money is buying enquiries you can use, or reach you cannot bank.
- Campaign structure
- Cost per result
- Lead quality
- Creative fatigue
- Audience strategy
- Conversion tracking
- Landing-page alignment
- Budget allocation
Google Ads
Where the budget is going, what it is buying, and how much of it is waste.
- Search terms
- Conversion accuracy
- Wasted spend
- Campaign structure
- Brand versus non-brand
- Budget restrictions
- Landing pages
- Lead quality
SEO
Whether organic work is producing commercial visibility or just activity reports.
- Search Console trends
- Indexation
- Keyword positions
- Commercial traffic
- Local visibility
- Cannibalisation
- Weak pages
- Content opportunities
Website and conversion performance
The part of the system that turns paid attention into a customer — or quietly loses it.
- Landing-page conversion rates
- Form friction
- Mobile experience
- Message matching
- Tracking gaps
- Lead handling
- CRM reconciliation
Memberships
From $49 a month.
Less than most businesses spend on a single day of advertising, for an independent read on every dollar of it.
Monitor
For businesses wanting an independent check on what they are being told.
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Most popularFor businesses making regular marketing decisions and spending meaningful amounts.
See what is includedPartner
For businesses wanting an experienced marketer actively sitting on their side of the table.
See what is includedThe Priority Question Line
Ask before you approve.
The most expensive marketing decisions are made in the moment — a proposal arrives, a budget increase is recommended, a contract needs signing this week.
Send it to us first. You get an experienced, independent second opinion in writing before you commit, with a response target as tight as the same business day.
Independent oversight
A good agency has nothing
to fear from this.
Two minutes to find out where your visibility gaps are. No cost, no call, no pitch.