Is Your Digital Marketing Agency Showing Real Results? How to Check the Leads Behind the Report

To check whether your digital marketing agency is delivering real results, ignore impressions and reach and ask for three things: the raw list of every lead with date and phone number, viewing access to the ad accounts themselves, and the spend for the same period. Then call a sample of the leads and match the list against your sales register. If the leads cannot be reached or never buy, the report is describing activity, not results.

Why agency reports can look good while sales stay flat

Most agency reports are built from the numbers that are easiest to grow: impressions, reach, followers, clicks and cost per lead. Each one can rise while your business gets nothing. Impressions are cheap. Clicks can come from people who tapped by mistake. Leads can be duplicates, wrong numbers or people who were only curious about a free offer.

This is not always dishonesty. Agencies are usually judged on cost per lead, so they optimise for cheap leads, and the cheapest leads are often the weakest. The fix is to judge on what you actually care about: enquiries that turn into customers.

Which numbers in the report actually matter?

Step 1: ask for the raw leads, not a summary

Ask for an export of every lead for the last month: name, phone number, the date and time it came in, which campaign it came from and the answers given on the form. Any agency running lead forms or WhatsApp campaigns for you can produce this. If they cannot or will not, that is your first finding.

Step 2: check the list for obvious problems

• 1Duplicates: the same number appearing two or three times, sometimes days apart.
• 2Invalid numbers: too few digits, repeated digits like 9999999999, or numbers from other countries when you only serve your city.
• 3Copy-paste answers: dozens of leads with identical answers to every question.
• 4Odd timing: bursts of leads at 3 am from the same campaign.
• 5Wrong area: people from cities or states you do not serve.

Remove all of these and count again. The difference between the reported number and the clean number tells you a lot.

Step 3: call a sample yourself

Pick twenty leads at random and call them, or have someone on your team do it. Note who answers, who remembers filling the form, who actually needs what you sell, and who could afford it. This takes an hour and is the most honest audit there is. If most people do not remember you, the ad or the form is collecting accidental submissions.

Step 4: match leads to your sales register

Take the phone numbers from the lead list and search for them in your billing software, appointment book or accounts entries for the following weeks. How many leads became paying customers? Divide the month’s ad spend plus the agency fee by that number. That is your real cost per customer, and it is the only number that can tell you whether the arrangement pays.

Step 5: get access to the ad accounts

You should be able to open the Meta ad account and Google Ads account and see the campaigns yourself. Ideally your business owns those accounts and the agency has access to them, not the other way round. With access you can check that the spend in the report matches the spend in the account, see which campaigns are running and see the dates leads were received.

Ask too how the agency is paid. A fee calculated as a percentage of ad spend, a common arrangement, means the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not results improve. That is not wrong, but you should know it when they recommend a bigger budget.

Step 6: compare like with like

If you try anything new, run it alongside the agency’s campaigns for the same days, with the same goal, and check lead quality the same way on both sides. Comparing this month against last month mixes in festivals, salary days and season. Same days, same checks, is the fair test.

What good looks like

A healthy agency relationship has a few clear signs. You own the accounts. You get the raw leads every week, not only a monthly PDF. The report leads with customers and cost per customer, not reach. And when a campaign is not working, they tell you before you ask.

Where Adyft fits

Adyft is for owners who want campaigns built for real buyers and want to see everything. It builds complete Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google campaigns from a short description of your business. You preview and approve every ad before launch, and campaigns go into your own ad accounts, so the data and history are always yours.

There is a 14-day free trial with no card. A leads campaign uses a real lead form that always asks for name and phone, so every lead is one you can call and check exactly as described above.