Expertise
We do not say we are experts. We show what we check.
Anyone can claim marketing expertise. Below is the actual checklist we run against a member’s account and reporting each month. If your agency can answer every item on it comfortably, you probably have a good agency — and you now have the vocabulary to confirm it.
Facebook and Instagram advertising
Whether the money is buying enquiries you can use, or reach you cannot bank.
Campaign structure
Whether the account is built so results can be read, or fragmented into so many ad sets that nothing ever exits the learning phase. We check budget concentration, audience overlap and whether the objective actually matches the commercial goal.
Cost per result — and which result
A falling cost per result means nothing if the result being counted changed. We check what the optimisation event is, when it last changed, and whether the trend survives being measured against real enquiries.
Lead quality
Instant forms produce volume cheaply and quality unevenly. We look at the ratio of leads to contactable leads to qualified leads, and whether qualifying questions were added or quietly removed to make the numbers look better.
Creative fatigue
Frequency, CTR decay and the age of the top-spending creative. Most Meta accounts that "stop working" have simply not been given anything new to show for two months.
Audience strategy
Whether retargeting is being credited with sales that broad prospecting actually generated, and whether exclusions are set so you are not paying to advertise to existing customers.
Conversion tracking
Pixel and Conversions API setup, event deduplication, and whether the same enquiry is being counted by both Meta and Google.
Landing-page alignment
Whether the promise in the ad survives the click. Message mismatch is the most common and least discussed cause of a good campaign producing bad results.
Google Ads
Where the budget is going, what it is buying, and how much of it is waste.
Search terms
The single most revealing report in the account, and the one most often skipped. We read the actual queries your money bought and quantify what was irrelevant.
Conversion accuracy
What is being counted, whether it double counts, whether page-load events are masquerading as form submissions, and whether phone-click conversions are being counted per click rather than per call.
Brand versus non-brand
If branded search sits in the same campaign as everything else, the blended cost per conversion flatters the account. We separate them so you can see what new demand actually costs.
Wasted spend
Irrelevant search terms, unprofitable locations, dayparting, device performance and placement exclusions on Display and Performance Max — quantified in dollars, not adjectives.
Campaign structure and budget restrictions
Whether campaigns are budget-limited, whether bid strategies have enough conversion volume to work, and whether Performance Max is quietly absorbing budget that Search was converting more cheaply.
Landing pages and lead quality
Whether the traffic lands somewhere built to convert it, and whether the enquiries reaching your inbox match the ones on the report.
SEO
Whether organic work is producing commercial visibility or just activity reports.
Search Console trends
Impressions, clicks, average position and CTR read over a meaningful window rather than a cherry-picked month. We separate branded from non-branded so growth is not just people searching for you by name.
Indexation
Whether the pages you are paying to have written are actually indexed, and whether anything important has fallen out of the index without anyone noticing.
Commercial traffic
A great deal of SEO reporting celebrates traffic to blog posts that will never produce an enquiry. We measure visibility on the pages that sell something.
Local visibility
Google Business Profile performance, map pack presence across your actual service area, review velocity and category setup.
Cannibalisation and weak pages
Where two pages compete for the same query and both underperform, and where thin or duplicated pages are dragging on the site as a whole.
Content opportunities
Queries you already rank on page two for, which are almost always a faster commercial win than new content.
Website and conversion performance
The part of the system that turns paid attention into a customer — or quietly loses it.
Landing-page conversion rates
Measured per page and per channel, because a 2% site-wide rate can hide one page converting at 8% and another at 0.3%.
Form friction
Field count, required fields that need not be, error handling, and whether the form works on the phone people are actually holding.
Mobile experience
Load speed on a real connection, tap target sizing, and whether the call button works from every page a paid visitor can land on.
Message matching
Whether the headline on the page repeats the promise in the ad. This one change moves conversion rates more often than any other on this list.
Tracking gaps
Missing or duplicated tags, events that fire on the wrong action, cross-domain breakage, and consent settings that silently stop data collection.
Lead handling and CRM reconciliation
How fast enquiries are followed up, whether any are being lost between the form and the inbox, and whether the CRM record count matches the platform conversion count. This reconciliation is where most reporting problems surface.
A note on scope
What we deliberately do not do.
We do not run your campaigns
AgencyGuard does not manage advertising accounts. Reviewing work we were paid to produce would not be independent.
We do not build your website
We will tell you where the funnel leaks and what it is costing. Fixing it is your agency’s job or your developer’s — not ours to sell you.
We do not broker agencies
No referral fees, no preferred-partner list, no marketplace. Recommending replacements we profit from would corrupt the entire proposition.
Put it to work
Find out what your reporting is missing.
The free AgencyGuard Check runs a shortened version of this framework across eleven questions and gives you an Agency Oversight Score.