Should I fire my marketing agency? Six signals

The short answer

The short answer Fire them if three or more are true: you cannot name what shipped last month, they own your accounts, reporting shows impressions instead of cost per lead, no one senior has touched the account in 60 days, they guaranteed rankings, or performance has been flat for two full quarters with no test log. The six.

The short answer

Fire them if three or more are true: you cannot name what shipped last month, they own your accounts, reporting shows impressions instead of cost per lead, no one senior has touched the account in 60 days, they guaranteed rankings, or performance has been flat for two full quarters with no test log.

The six signals, in order of severity

1. They guaranteed rankings or lead volume. This one is disqualifying on its own. Google’s Search Central guidance states it directly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google,” and advises finding someone else if a firm promises first place. A guarantee is either ignorance or a plan to move the goalposts later.

2. They own your accounts. Google Ads, Meta, Analytics, Search Console, domain, CMS. If any of those sit in the agency’s name, your notice period is not 30 days, it is however long a rebuild takes. Conversion history, audience lists and quality score do not transfer. Fix this before you fire anyone, or the firing costs you a quarter.

3. You cannot name what shipped last month. Not what was discussed. What shipped. Published URLs, live campaigns, tests run, pages redesigned. Open your sitemap and sort by date. Open the change history in Google Ads. If a quarter produced nothing you can point at, the retainer bought meetings.

4. Reporting leads with impressions. A report that opens with reach, impressions or engagement and buries cost per lead on page six is telling you which number is bad. The benchmark exists and they know it: across 13,474 US search campaigns measured April 2025 to March 2026, WordStream reported a median cost per lead of $66.69 and a median conversion rate of 8.18 percent. If your numbers are far off category benchmark and the report does not mention it, that is a choice.

5. Nobody senior has touched the account in 60 days. Ask who made the last strategic change and when. Accounts drift toward whoever is cheapest to staff. Check the change history yourself: in Google Ads it is timestamped and attributed.

6. Two flat quarters with no test log. Flat performance is survivable. Flat performance with no record of what was tried is not, because it means nobody is learning. Ask for the test log including losing tests. An agency that only shows winners is not testing, it is reporting.

Signal	How to verify in 20 minutes	Weight
Guaranteed rankings	Re-read the proposal and contract	Fire on its own
Agency owns accounts	Check admin roles in Google Ads, GA4, GSC	Fix first, then decide
Nothing shipped	sitemap.xml by date; Google Ads change history	High
Impression-led reporting	Open last three reports, read page one	High
No senior involvement	Google Ads change history, attributed by user	Medium
Two flat quarters, no tests	Ask for the test log with losses included	Medium

Before you fire, check whether the problem is timeline

Some of what gets an agency fired is physics. Ahrefs analyzed 1.3 million keywords and found 72.9 percent of top-10 pages are more than three years old, the average number one result is five years old, and only 1.74 percent of newly published pages reach the top 10 within a year. If you are eight months into an SEO engagement with no top-three rankings but rising impressions and a steady publish cadence, the program is working and the expectation was wrong.

The same applies to paid media in expensive categories. If legal services runs $131.63 per lead at the median and your budget supports 12 leads a month, the agency is not underperforming, the budget is.

Separate these two failure modes before you act. Output failure is the agency’s problem. Expectation failure is a scoping conversation, and switching agencies will reproduce it exactly.

How to leave without paying twice

Take ownership of every account first, while the relationship is still cordial. Add yourself as owner in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta Business Manager and the domain registrar.
Export everything. Reports, creative files, keyword lists, landing page files, content drafts, tracking documentation.
Get the tracking documentation in writing. Which conversion actions exist, how each fires, what counts as a lead. This is the single most expensive thing to reconstruct.
Give notice in writing with a handover deadline. Fourteen days is reasonable for data.
Do not go dark on paid media during the transition. Pausing campaigns resets learning. Keep them running at reduced budget until the new team is in.

What we’d do

TACK™ has taken over enough distressed accounts since 2009 to know that the first month of a rescue is forensic, not creative. We rebuild conversion tracking, audit what was actually published, pull the link profile for anything that looks purchased, and produce a written baseline before touching a campaign. That last check matters: Google’s spam policies treat buying links for ranking purposes as a violation unless they carry rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored”, so an outgoing agency’s link building can become your liability. You cannot improve a number you have not verified.

After that it is the standard two motions: Get Leads for paid media and conversion, Get Found for organic and AI visibility. Accounts stay in the client’s name, always. See the capability set or the case studies. Engagements start at $5,000 per month.

Common mistakes

Firing before taking account ownership. The most expensive order of operations there is.

Firing for a bad month. One quarter of data in a seasonal business is noise. Two quarters is signal.

Replacing without diagnosing. If the real problem was an unqualified offer or a broken sales follow-up, the next agency fails the same way and you lose another year.

Assuming a bigger agency fixes it. Larger shops staff more junior people per account, not fewer. Ask the same four questions of the replacement.

The bottom line

Three or more signals means leave. One or two means a hard conversation with a written 60-day plan. Either way, take ownership of every account before you make the call, and check that the problem is output rather than an expectation nobody scoped correctly.

If you want an outside read on whether to fix or replace, book a call with TACK™ or call 310-620-1141.