Good advertising can come with a BIG price tag, so it’s only natural that you’d want to be absolutely sure that your money is being put to good use. But how can you measure this? Well, the good news is, if you’re receiving weekly or monthly reports, the answer is right there. However, a good agency will admit when the numbers aren’t where they should be, and will have a discussion with you on how to move forward to improve and develop a plan that will work better. On the other hand, a shady agency might be telling you that the numbers are great when that’s not actually the case. Here’s what you should be looking at to make sure you are getting what you’re paying for:

Website

• What is driving the most traffic to your site? (SEO? Paid media? Social media? Etc)
• How much of your website traffic is coming from organic search?
• What is your conversion rate of organic traffic > leads/customers?
• Which keywords drive the most organic traffic to your site?
• Which pages are visitors clicking on most?
• How much time are visitors spending on each page?
• What is your website’s bounce rate?

Social Media

• What’s your engagement like? Are people interacting with your content? Are the number of comments increasing? 
• How many visitors do you get on each social media page? This is how you can tell which of your pages is performing best, and which platforms seem to be the most popular among your target demographic. Is your agency putting enough focus on those platforms?
• Is your agency interacting with followers and answering questions (if they have been directed to do so)?

Do your own due diligence

You don’t have to take your advertising agency’s word as gospel. In fact, we urge you to pour over the reports yourself, if anything just to get acquainted with what the numbers mean and how things work. Also, don’t be afraid to ask questions of the agency you’re working for. Call them out even, if you sense something is wrong. If they can’t explain themselves, you’ve got work to do. But if they can, you’ll learn so much about how advertising works and develop a newfound respect for what all your agency is doing behind the scenes.