The Questions to Ask Your Marketing Agency Monthly

2. Why the Monthly Call Is Where Retainers Quietly Fail

Quick Answer: A monthly call has one job: produce decisions. Most produce a summary instead. When the hour ends with “we’ll keep an eye on it”, the account has spent a month learning and bought nothing with it — and next month starts from the same place.

A report is a record of choices already made, weeks ago, without you. By the time the PDF lands, the money is spent. The only thing still in play is next month — the thing most calls barely discuss.

An agency follows whatever the room rewards. Ask only for a recap and you get a polished recap: three hours of slides telling you what you could have read in ten. Ask what was learned and what changes, and those three hours go into the account instead. The questions you ask decide that trade, not the fee. Our digital marketing agency page sets out how we structure the relationship, and getting more value from your marketing agency explains why the same fee buys wildly different amounts of work.

3. The Five Questions That Do Most of the Work

Quick Answer: Five questions carry a monthly agency call: what did you test, what is blocking you on our side, what changes next month and why, what would you do with 20% more or less budget, and which number should I stop watching. Everything else is optional.

• “What did you test last month, and what did it tell us?” The highest-value question on the list. It asks for learning, not activity. An agency that tested nothing has been maintaining your account, not managing it.
• “What is blocking you on our side?” Nine times out of ten, something is: an approval, a photo, a price confirmation, a login. Asking makes it your problem to solve — the fastest way to get the hours back. It pairs with the client-side inputs that move cost per lead.
• “What are you changing next month, and why that?” The “why” matters more than the “what”. A change without a reason is a change made to look busy.
• “What would you do with 20% more budget — and with 20% less?” The answer shows whether the agency has a real ranking of what works. Vagueness here means the account has no thesis.
• “Which number should I stop watching?” Almost nobody asks this. A good agency will tell you plainly that impressions or reach are noise for your business, and point you at the two numbers that are not.

Notice what is missing: “why are leads down?” It feels like the sharpest question in the room and produces the weakest hour. It puts the agency on the defensive, and a defensive account manager explains rather than decides. Ask what changed and what happens next instead.

4. What Malaysian Marketing Executives Actually Ask

Quick Answer: The questions asked most often change the least. Spend recaps come up on more than nine calls in ten but reshape next month’s plan one time in five. Test-and-learn questions come up on one call in four — and change the plan seven times out of ten.

The three questions almost everyone asks sit at the top of the table and near the bottom of the effect column. The three hardly anyone asks reliably move something.

That is not laziness. Recap questions are safe: clean answer, fills time, produces a slide you can forward upstairs. The other three end in “I don’t know yet” more often — which feels like a bad meeting and is usually a good one. If reporting upwards is the real pressure, solve it separately: a marketing report your boss will actually read takes that job off the agency call.

5. Which Questions Actually Move Cost Per Lead

Quick Answer: Over six months, accounts where the client asks about tests every month see cost per lead fall around 19%. Accounts that only ask for a spend recap see about 3%. Accounts that keep postponing the call see it rise.

People misread the last row. Skipping the call saves nothing — it removes the only checkpoint where a drifting campaign gets caught.

The recap is not worthless. It is the price of entry, not the agenda: ask for it in writing beforehand so the hour starts where it should. And to know what the account returns rather than what it costs, working out your digital marketing ROI reframes the conversation.

6. Where the 60 Minutes Actually Goes

Quick Answer: On an unstructured call, 47 of 60 minutes go to recapping numbers, explaining dashboards and chasing approvals. Only 13 go to learning and deciding. With an agenda sent in advance, that flips to 40 minutes on decisions.

Chasing barely moves between the columns, and that is honest: someone still has to ask you for the product photos. Everything else shifts. The 26 minutes of recap collapse to 8 for one reason — the client read the report first, so the agency does not narrate it.

Send the agenda two days out, read the report the night before, and the hour reorganises itself around decisions. If the call keeps slipping because you are buried, prioritising marketing tasks when you are buried is the place to start.

7. What a Year of Better Calls Adds Up To

Quick Answer: Structured calls do not look better in the first quarter. They pull away from month four onwards — more decisions made per quarter, and decisions implemented in about a week instead of three.

Twenty-nine decisions against thirteen, over a year, on the same retainer. The ad-hoc column is not stuck because those clients are careless. It is stuck because nothing is written down, so every quarter re-opens old debates.

Keep a shared decision log: one dated line per decision, with the reason. Two minutes at the end of the call, and the account stops arguing with its own history. Pair it with a short list of numbers you agree actually matter — simple KPIs and GA4 is where to draw that line.

8. One Extra Question Per Channel

Quick Answer: The five core questions work on any channel. Add one channel-specific question each month — that is enough to keep SEO, Google Ads and Meta honest without becoming a specialist yourself.

You do not need to check the answers yourself, but you should know where they live. Real results versus vanity numbers in an SEO report shows what to look past, what a monthly Google Ads report should show you lists the sections that must be there, and the seven numbers that matter in a Facebook Ads report does the same for Meta.

9. How to Run the Call in 45 Minutes

Quick Answer: Send the agenda two days out, read the report first, then run six steps in 45 minutes: confirm the numbers, cover tests, clear blockers, agree one change, ask the channel question, log the decisions.

1. Send a three-line agenda two days before. The three lines are your questions. The agency arrives prepared instead of presenting.
2. Confirm the numbers in five minutes. You read the report already. “Anything in here I have misread?” is the whole segment.
3. Spend fifteen minutes on tests and learning. What ran, what won, what died, what it means. If nothing was tested, that is the discussion.
4. Clear blockers out loud. Ask what is stuck on your side, then give each item a name and a date before the call ends.
5. Agree one change, not five. One change made properly beats five half-implemented ones that muddy the read.
6. Log the decisions in two minutes. Date, decision, reason, owner. Send it in the chat before you leave.

Step four is the one in-house marketers skip, because it feels like admitting fault. It is not. Approvals and assets sit with you; while the agency waits, the retainer idles. Creative feedback is the usual culprit — designer feedback that gets results fast makes one round do the work of three.

10. Answers That Should Worry You

Quick Answer: Four answers are red flags: “the algorithm needs more time” with no test to point to, a refusal to name what was turned off, discomfort about giving you admin access, and a different account manager on every call.

• “It needs more time to learn.” Sometimes true. But said three months running, with no tests to show, it describes an account nobody is touching.
• Vagueness about what was paused. Optimisation is mostly subtraction. An agency that cannot name one thing it switched off last month probably switched nothing off.
• Hesitation over account access. You should hold admin on the Google Ads account, Meta Business Manager, pixel and GA4, with the agency added as a user — never let the agency own your ad account, page or pixel.
• A new face every month. Turnover happens. But if nobody on the call remembers what you decided in March, nothing compounds.

One red flag is a conversation. Three is a pattern — and why businesses fire their SEO agency reads like a list of unanswered monthly-call questions. Check the questions were actually asked first: plenty of accounts labelled “bad agency” are really “call on autopilot”.

11. Conclusion

Quick Answer: The best questions for a marketing agency are the recurring ones. Ask about tests, blockers, changes, budget trade-offs and noise every month, keep a decision log, and the same retainer starts producing decisions instead of summaries.

None of this requires you to learn the platforms or out-argue a specialist. It requires you to change what the hour is for.

Pick one thing for next month’s call. If you only do one, make it the test question — it has the largest effect in our data and takes six seconds to ask. Then send an agenda two days out, and write down what you decided.

Still choosing a partner rather than managing one? The questions to ask before hiring a marketing agency covers that stage, and our digital marketing agency page shows how we run the monthly rhythm.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

What questions should I ask my marketing agency every month?

The five questions for a marketing agency that matter monthly: what did you test and what did it tell us, what is blocking you on our side, what changes next month and why, what would you do with 20% more or less budget, and which number should I stop watching. In our client data, the test question is the one most likely to change the following month’s plan.

How long should a monthly agency call be?

Forty-five minutes, if you send an agenda in advance and read the report beforehand. Without an agenda, a 60-minute call typically spends 26 minutes recapping numbers you have already seen and about 13 minutes on decisions.

Is it rude to ask an agency what is blocking them on our side?

No — it is the question most agencies wish clients would ask. Approvals, assets, logins and price confirmations sit with you, and while the agency waits, your retainer hours go on chasing instead of optimising.

What if my agency says the algorithm just needs more time?

Accept it once, with a date attached. Ask what test is running while you wait, and what result would prove the theory wrong. If the same answer comes back a third month with no test behind it, the account is not being managed.