Independence
An oversight business is only worth what its independence is worth.
The moment AgencyGuard has a financial interest in what it recommends, the service is worthless. These are the commitments that keep that from happening, written plainly enough to hold us to.
We take no commissions, kickbacks or referral fees
Not from agencies, not from platforms, not from software vendors. Our only revenue is your membership fee. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it takes effect.
We do not sell the services we review
AgencyGuard does not manage advertising accounts, build websites or sell SEO retainers. We cannot recommend ourselves as the fix, because we are not for sale as the fix.
We will not tell you to sack your agency
That is your commercial decision, and an oversight service that routinely recommends replacing the incumbent is selling churn, not oversight. We tell you what we found and what to ask. What you do next is yours.
We disclose conflicts before we review
If we have any prior relationship with the agency, platform or people involved, you are told before the review begins and you can decline it at no cost.
We show our working
Every finding names what we looked at and why it matters. If a conclusion rests on an assumption because the data was incomplete, the report says so rather than quietly rounding it up.
We publish our methodology
The review framework and the scoring weights are public. You can hand them to your agency and invite them to check our work.
The uncomfortable part
What our incentives actually are.
It is worth being honest about the pressure that exists in a business like this. A service that finds problems has an obvious commercial incentive to find problems, and a sensational report is more shareable than a boring one.
We manage that in three ways. Reports are written to a fixed structure that requires us to state what is working, not only what is not. Our scoring measures visibility rather than agency competence, so a good agency with clean tracking genuinely scores well. And our revenue comes from retention rather than acquisition — a member who is alarmed for a month and then leaves is worth far less to us than one who is quietly reassured for three years.
Roughly speaking: if we told every member their agency was failing them, we would have a short and unprofitable business.
If we get it wrong
Send us your agency’s response.
We review reports and account data supplied to us. We do not sit in your agency’s planning meetings, and sometimes there is context we did not have: a test that was mid-flight, a tracking fix already scheduled, a commercial reason for a decision that looks odd from outside.
When a member forwards us an agency’s response, we assess it properly and correct the record in the following report where the response holds up. That correction is stated explicitly rather than quietly dropped.
A member who takes our report to their agency and receives a good answer has still received exactly what they paid for.
Independent by design
See what independent oversight looks like.
Two minutes, eleven questions, and a score based on your answers rather than our sales targets.