After speaking with countless businesses, reviewing numerous reports and auditing far too many ad accounts, we’ve come to the realisation that a lot of New Zealand businesses are getting genuinely ripped off by their digital marketing agencies.

That’s by no means to say all agencies are guilty, we know that most are doing a good job and we simply aim to improve on their previous great work. This article is about the bottom-of-the-barrel agencies. The ones that lock you into long contracts and significantly underdeliver or under service your accounts. The ones that hold your website, landing pages and ad accounts ransom to scare you into never leaving. The ones that tell you you’re spending $10,000 on Google Ads, but quietly keep $5,000 in fees each month.

For those of us in the field of digital marketing, it’s blatantly obvious when a client comes to us in this situation - but for these clients, they had no idea until they started digging.

We’ve put together a list of signs that your digital marketing agency may not be as honest as you think they are. 

1. You don’t have access to your ad accounts.

When you pay a digital marketing agency to create an account for you on any platform, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, then you should own this work from day one.

If your agency is unwilling to give you access, including ownership or admin access, then this is a huge red flag. This is one of your business assets, just like if you buy a company car or laptop, and you likely paid for it. 

Trust me, you won’t accidentally screw something up in the account by simply having access to it. But you’ll be able to monitor performance and the amount of work being done in the account if you wish to. You’ll also be able to transfer the account to a new manager if you decide to do so in the future. These are both things that your agency may be motivated to avoid.

2. You’re paying the agency for your ad spend instead of Google or Facebook.

In most cases you should be paying Google or Meta directly with your own credit card or invoicing line. There are a few rare cases where this may not be the case (typically large businesses that work with agencies that manage various channels for them will be invoiced for media spend by the agency directly).

If you aren’t a large business and are paying your agency for all media spend, then you should immediately look into your Google Ads or Facebook Ad Manager accounts to check that your ad spend in the platform matches what you are expecting it to.

For example, some agencies charge a fixed fee for Google Ads that combines media spend and their fees. When this happens, we’ve seen the agency fees account for more than half of the client’s total budget. But they probably won’t tell you that and they probably won’t give you access to the account (see point one above).

3. Your reports & meetings don’t focus on the things that matter to your business: leads or revenue.

Your digital marketing agency should be focussing on the one thing that actually matters for you: making your business money. If they aren’t talking about things such as leads, form submissions, revenue or ROAS on every call and in every report, then they probably aren’t moving your business in the right direction.

In our industry we have a term called ‘vanity metrics’. This refers to all the different metrics that we can report on that don’t directly make your business money (but they might convince you that they are). These are things such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, time on page, traffic, etc. These are all important metrics and enable us, as the experts, to work on your account and optimise it to drive your leads or revenue forward.

However, they don’t really mean anything to you. They are relevant, but meetings and reports should always focus on leads or revenue and not impressions or clicks. 

4. They’ve guaranteed you results.

Look, guaranteed results sound good but they just aren’t a reality in the world of digital marketing. When a salesperson promises guaranteed results, it can range from an outright lie through to something vague or easy to ‘hack’.

For example, I can promise you 10,000 clicks - getting clicks is easy. Getting clicks from the right people that result in actual sales or leads, this is a lot harder. If I promise you rank 1 on Google, this doesn’t mean much if the keyword is your brand term, or something without any search volume like ‘best apple farmers in Remuera’. 

And if someone promises you rank 1 on Google for something like ‘home loans nz’ then you better add it to the contract.

5. The communication feels infrequent.

The frequency of emails and meetings usually depends on your budget - sometimes it’s just better to let the specialists do their job rather than jump on calls and send emails every day. However, your agency should be there to respond to queries, requests or ideas you have rapidly.

It’s also best to have regular meetings and email updates sent over that focus on what they’re doing as well as the results (remember, we want to hear about leads or revenue).

If you feel like they aren’t responsive enough or proactive enough in their correspondence, then it’s possible they aren’t being proactive enough in the work they’re doing for you either.

6. You don’t know the people who are actually working in your accounts.

It’s not necessary for all of your correspondence to go directly to the person who is actually doing the work you’re paying for. However, you should at least know who they are and have met with them before. 

You can easily jump into Google Ads and look at your Change History to see the email addresses, and usually names, of the people working in the account. If you don’t recognise the names, or they’re outsourcing the work overseas, then you should raise it with your agency.

7. They claim that all of your website (or even business) revenue or leads are driven by the work they’re doing.

A good digital marketing agency should be able to attribute the majority of the leads that their work drives directly back to the work they’re doing. In other words, if someone clicks an ad then buys something, we will know that ad resulted in that sale.

If your entire website revenue for a month is $100k, we can see how much of it was driven by Google Ads, Organic search, social media, etc. It would be silly to assume that your SEO work drove the $100k revenue when you would still have organic traffic whether you employed the agency or not. So it’s misleading to claim that this is the case.

We recently saw an annual report from a global digital marketing agency working with a small New Zealand business. It said in the last year this client had 4 very high value purchases worth $800k, then proceeded to claim that these 4 purchases were a direct result of the SEO work they had completed during the year and that the return on their investment was 20x.

To make it worse, only 20% of this client’s leads were coming from the Organic Search source. Plus they didn’t look at the annual organic search uplift, as though the client wouldn't have had any organic traffic if it wasn't for the work they were doing.

It’s far more likely that their work drove 0 sales for the client than all 4 of them.

8. You have a contract that locks you in for longer than 3 months.

Contracts that lock you in for a long time are not necessary for agencies that get good results and do what they promise - that’s why we don’t have them. A 12-month contract for digital marketing services is borderline scam-territory and should probably be illegal - at least if you ask us.

A lot of work can go into onboarding a new client so we understand the hesitancy of investing this time into a client that could pack up and leave a month later. We’ve decided to accept this risk and simply ask that you try to give it enough time to actually get things working.

However, I would consider anything up to 3 months to be acceptable in cases where the set up fee has been waived. If an agency is charging you a setup fee AND locking you into a long-term agreement then something is seriously wrong.

9. They’re holding your accounts, websites or IP ransom.

You should never feel afraid that if you leave your agency something bad will happen. Moving to a new digital marketing agency should simply be a seamless transition of everything your previous agency has been working on over to your new digital marketing partner.

If you paid them to complete some work, then you should own the output. This includes landing pages, content, graphic design and, most importantly, ad accounts. 

We talked with one client who was genuinely afraid that all the work he had paid for with his agency would be gone if he left them. Sadly, in some ways he was right. This agency had created his primary landing page for him and his Google Ads account, and were unwilling to hand them over to him if he were to leave them for another agency.

Thousands of dollars gone and years of hard work down the drain, all if he decides he wants a change. This is basically the story they told him, so he was scared it would hurt his business if he left. He paid for this work but he didn’t own it. 

With the landing page and ads account held ransom, and no way for the client to log in and see if any work was actually being done, there was actually no incentive for the agency to be doing anything at all.

Long story short, these are your business assets and if you don’t own them then you should start over as soon as possible. We can help to rebuild everything for you in a way that ensures you are the legal owner of all the work we complete for you.

10. Your gut tells you something is off.

The world of digital marketing agencies is a mess. Many are working hard to get you the best results possible, whilst too many others are simply lining their own pockets.

If you feel like something is off then you might be right. It never hurts to get a second opinion - we do this for free. We’re always honest in our audits, so if we feel like your current agency is doing a good job we’ll tell you. If we feel they’re not doing what you’re paying them to do, we’ll let you know as well.