How to Tell If Your Marketing Agency Is Actually Performing
Estimated Reading Time: 11 Minutes Topic: Agency Performance & Accountability Best For: Personal Injury Attorneys, Managing Partners, Marketing Directors
I’ve sat on both sides of this conversation more times than I can count. I’ve been the agency being questioned, and I’ve been the outside consultant a firm brought in to figure out whether their current agency was actually earning its retainer. That second role has taught me more about how to evaluate agency performance than almost anything else I’ve done in this industry.
Here’s what I’ve learned. Most attorneys don’t fire a bad agency because they discovered clear proof of underperformance. They fire a bad agency because they finally got fed up with a vague, uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right, and they never had the language or the data to confirm it sooner. That delay is expensive. It can mean a year or more of paying for results that never should have been acceptable in the first place.
This article is meant to give you that language, so you’re not relying on a gut feeling the next time you sit down with your agency.
Why This Is Harder Than It Should Be
Marketing performance should be one of the easiest things in a law firm to measure. Money goes in, cases come out, and the ratio between the two tells you almost everything you need to know. In practice, agencies have gotten very good at presenting numbers that sound impressive without actually answering the question that matters.
Traffic went up. Click through rate improved. Impressions doubled. Engagement is trending in the right direction. Every one of those statements can be true at the same time your case volume is flat or declining, because none of them measure what you’re actually paying for. You’re not paying for traffic. You’re paying for signed cases.
Once you start asking questions with that filter in mind, a lot of agency reporting starts to look very different.
The Questions Every Attorney Should Be Asking
What is our actual cost per signed case, broken out by channel?
Not cost per lead. Not cost per click. Cost per signed case, separated by Google Ads, LSAs, SEO, and any other channel you’re running. If your agency can’t produce this number quickly, that’s already telling you something. It usually means the tracking connecting your marketing spend to your actual case management system either doesn’t exist or was never set up properly.
How many of our leads are being disputed, and how many should be?
This one applies directly to Local Services Ads, and I covered it in more depth in an earlier article, but it’s worth repeating here. If your agency isn’t reviewing and disputing bad leads on a regular basis, you’re paying full price for spam calls and wrong numbers. Ask for the dispute log. If one doesn’t exist, you have your answer.
Can you walk me through exactly how a lead moves from click to signed case?
A competent agency should be able to explain this in plain language, start to finish. Someone clicks an ad, lands on a specific page, fills out a form or calls, that call gets logged and tracked, and eventually you can trace that specific case back to the specific campaign that generated it. If the explanation gets vague or starts leaning heavily on jargon, that’s often a sign the tracking isn’t actually built the way it should be.
What have you changed in the last ninety days, and why?
Marketing campaigns need ongoing adjustment. Bid strategies shift, landing pages get tested, keywords get refined based on performance. If your agency’s honest answer is close to nothing, your account is likely sitting on autopilot while you keep paying a management fee for active oversight that isn’t happening.
If our budget doubled tomorrow, what would you actually do with it?
This question tends to reveal more than almost any other one. A strong agency will have a specific, thought out answer, more landing pages for underserved practice areas, expanded geographic targeting, a new LSA market. A weak agency will give you a vague answer about “scaling up what’s working,” which usually means they haven’t been thinking critically about your account at all.
The KPIs That Actually Matter
Not every number your agency reports is meaningless, but some matter far more than others.
Cost per signed case is the number that should anchor every other conversation. Everything else is a supporting metric.
Lead to consultation rate tells you how well your intake process and your lead quality are working together. A low rate here can point to either weak leads coming in, or a weak intake process on the other end, and it’s worth figuring out which one it is before assuming the marketing is the problem.
Consultation to signed case rate measures something closer to your intake and attorney close rate than your marketing performance, but it’s still worth tracking, because a marketing channel that generates plenty of consultations that never convert isn’t actually generating much value.
Return on ad spend, calculated using actual case values rather than estimated ones, gives you the clearest picture of whether a channel is worth continuing. This requires connecting your marketing data to your actual case outcomes, which takes real effort to set up, and it’s exactly the kind of effort that separates agencies who are serious about performance from ones who aren’t.
Traffic, impressions, and click through rate still have a place. They’re diagnostic numbers, useful for understanding why something is or isn’t working. They should never be presented to you as the headline result of a marketing investment.
Lesson From the Field
A firm brought me in a couple of years ago specifically to audit their agency relationship. On paper, everything looked reasonable. Steady monthly spend, decent looking traffic reports, a dashboard that updated automatically and looked professional.
When I asked for cost per signed case broken out by channel, nobody at the agency could produce it within the same call. It took them almost two weeks to get back to me, and when they finally did, the numbers were rough estimates built from guesswork rather than real tracking. Once we built proper attribution connecting their ad spend to their case management system, the real picture looked very different from the dashboard the firm had been reviewing every month. One channel the agency had been quietly scaling back for “underperforming” was actually producing their lowest cost per case by a wide margin. Another channel they’d been increasing spend on, based largely on strong traffic numbers, had one of the worst actual case conversion rates in the account.
The firm wasn’t being defrauded. The agency wasn’t lying to them. They were simply reporting the numbers that were easy to pull, rather than the numbers that actually mattered, and nobody had ever pushed back hard enough to demand the difference.
Warning Signs Worth Taking Seriously
Reports that emphasize traffic and impressions over cases. If a monthly report leads with vanity metrics and mentions actual case volume as an afterthought, or not at all, that’s usually intentional.
Reluctance to share raw account access. You should always have direct login access to your own Google Ads account, your own analytics, and your own call tracking platform. An agency that resists giving you that access, or makes it unusually difficult to obtain, is often protecting something they’d rather you not look at too closely.
The same recommendations every quarter. Marketing accounts should evolve as they gather data. If your agency’s strategy document reads almost identically to what it said a year ago, very little real analysis is happening behind the scenes.
Inability to explain a sudden drop in performance. Numbers move. That’s normal. What matters is whether your agency can explain why, with a specific answer, rather than a general shrug about “the algorithm” or “seasonality.”
Long term contracts paired with weak reporting. Agencies confident in their own performance rarely need to lock clients into lengthy commitments to keep the relationship intact. When a contract term feels disproportionate to the transparency being offered, it’s worth asking why.
What Good Agency Communication Actually Looks Like
A strong agency relationship doesn’t feel like receiving a report. It feels like an ongoing conversation with someone who understands your practice, your case values, and your growth goals well enough to make specific recommendations rather than generic ones. You should walk away from every monthly call knowing exactly what changed, why it changed, and what’s being tested next.
If your monthly meetings mostly consist of someone reading a dashboard out loud to you, that’s not a partnership. That’s a status update, and it’s not the same thing as active management of your marketing.
Steve’s Take
I’ll be honest about something most people in this industry won’t say out loud. A lot of agencies aren’t dishonest. They’re just lazy about the reporting that actually matters, because building real attribution from ad spend to signed case takes genuine effort, and reading off traffic numbers from a dashboard takes none.
The firms that get the best results from their marketing aren’t necessarily working with the most talented agency in their market. They’re working with whoever is willing to track the numbers that are harder to track, and willing to have an honest conversation when something isn’t working instead of quietly reshuffling the report to make it look better.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this. Stop accepting reports that make you feel good, and start asking for reports that tell you the truth. The two aren’t always the same thing, and the gap between them is usually where wasted marketing dollars are hiding.