The straight answer
The question
You pay an agency every month. The posts go up, the report arrives, everyone sounds busy. But if a friend asked "is it actually working", could you answer with a number?
The answer
A marketing agency is working when three things are true. Enquiries you can count are arriving, and you know which channel sent each one. The cost of getting one enquiry is a number you know, and it is one your business can afford. And you can check all of this yourself, in data you have access to, without asking the agency to interpret it for you.
Everything else, the impressions, the likes, the reach graphs, is supporting context. An agency that leads its report with reach and buries the enquiry count is answering a question you did not ask.
If the report cannot tell you what one enquiry cost, it is not a report. It is a mood board.
What working looks like
One real AETHR campaign, so you can see the shape of a working answer: enquiries, cost per enquiry, spend. Every agency report should reduce to these three numbers.
Four signs it is working
You can name last month's number
Ask yourself right now: how many enquiries did marketing send you last month? If you know it without opening an email thread, your agency is doing its job. In Singapore that number usually lives in WhatsApp, so the counting has to include your chats, not just a form on the website.
Each lead has a source
A working setup tells you where each enquiry came from: this one from the TikTok video, this one from Google, this one from the ad. Without sources you cannot decide where the next dollar goes, and neither can your agency. That is when budgets get spent on a feeling.
You can check without asking
You have your own access: the ad account, the analytics, or a dashboard with your name on it. When the agency holds all the data, you only ever see the version of events they choose to show. The good ones hand you the keys, because the numbers are their best argument.
The story survives a bad month
Every account has slow months. The sign of a working relationship is what the agency does with one: names it, explains what it is changing, and shows you the change next month. An agency that only ever reports good news is editing, not reporting.
The red flags
The report leads with reach
Impressions and reach are the easiest numbers to grow, which is exactly why a weak report leans on them. If the first slide is a reach graph and the enquiry count is nowhere, the report is measuring effort instead of results. Reach belongs in the appendix.
Questions get vocabulary, not numbers
You ask "how many leads" and get "we are building brand equity in the awareness layer of the funnel". Jargon in place of a number usually means the number is not good, or worse, not known.
You cannot see your own accounts
The ad account, the analytics, even your own page logins sit with the agency, and reports arrive as screenshots. If leaving the agency would mean losing your data, you are not a client. You are a hostage.
Every month is a good month
Marketing has variance. Ads fatigue, algorithms shift, seasons change. A report that never shows a dip is protecting the retainer, and you should read it that way.
None of these alone means fire your agency. Two or more together mean have the direct conversation, and watch whether the next report changes.
The monthly report
What it should show
Enquiries this month, split by channel. What one enquiry cost, next to last month's cost. What was spent, where, and what each platform returned. Then one honest paragraph: what worked, what did not, and what changes next month. That is the whole job. It fits on one screen.
This is how we run it at AETHR: every client gets their own login and a dashboard where leads and results from every channel land in one place, updated and managed for you. We do it because showing the numbers is the only honest way to run this, and because we would rather be judged on them than on a nice-looking deck. We built the whole studio around that idea, and named the page after it: marketing you can see.
Fair questions
How long should I give a new agency before judging results?+
Judge the setup immediately and the results by channel. Tracking, sources and reporting should exist in the first month, and there is no excuse for missing them. Paid ads should show a readable cost per enquiry within the first month or two. Content and social compound over a few months. SEO is the slow one, usually months before it moves. What you should never accept is a channel with no number attached at all.
Are likes and followers worthless then?+
Not worthless, just not the point. Engagement is how the platforms decide who to show you to, so it is real fuel for reach. The trouble starts when likes become the headline of the report instead of the footnote, because then the goal has quietly shifted from your enquiries to the agency's optics.
My leads come through WhatsApp and walk-ins. Can that even be tracked?+
Yes, and in Singapore it has to be, because that is where the enquiries actually happen. WhatsApp clicks can be counted from each channel, enquiries can be tagged by source when they arrive, and walk-ins can be asked how they heard about you. The attribution will not be flawless, but a rough honest count is worth far more than a confident guess.
What should I do if my agency will not share the data?+
Ask once, in writing, for access to your own ad accounts and analytics. It is your money and your customer data, and access is standard practice. If the answer is a maze of reasons why not, that is your answer. Any serious agency can hand over read access in an afternoon.