Am I being ripped off by my marketing agency?

Probably not in the criminal sense. Far more common is a fair-ish price for work nobody has ever explained to you, which from where you sit feels identical to being robbed, and is fixable with one email.

You do not need to learn marketing to check. Six questions will do it, plus a sense of what a decent answer sounds like. Send them in one email, numbered, and ask for numbered answers back. Anyone doing the work will treat that as a normal Tuesday. The other sort takes eleven days and sends you a graph.

Where did my money go?

Not what did you do. Where did the money go.

You want the month’s fee broken into lines. Time spent on the work, money handed straight to a platform like Google or Meta, money paid to somebody else such as a photographer or a directory. The lines should add up to the invoice.

Worry when what comes back is a list of activities with no amounts against them. “Ongoing SEO, content optimisation and profile management” is not an answer. It is the shape where an answer should be. SEO, by the way, just means the work of getting your business to show up when people search. Perfectly reasonable thing to buy. Useless as a line on a bill.

How much of it reached Google or Meta, and how much was the fee?

This is the one that catches people out. Ask for the platform’s own invoice, the bill from Google Ads or Meta with the total printed on it, and put it next to the bill from your agency. The two should reconcile. Any gap needs a name.

Media, meaning the money that actually buys the adverts, should be bought at cost. Your card, your account, your receipt, and a separate fee for the work of running it. When the agency holds the budget and passes on whatever is left, they earn more when you spend more, and that stays true whether the spending works or not.

A good answer: “You spent £780 with Google in July, here is their invoice, and my fee for running it was the same as June’s. It stays the same if you double the budget.”

A bad answer is any version of “the budget is managed as part of the overall package”.

How many calls and bookings came in?

Not impressions or reach, which count the times something appeared on somebody’s screen. Not sessions, which are visits to your website. None of those is a customer. Calls, bookings, enquiries, and the people who walk in saying they found you online.

This matters more this year than last. The top of a Google results page is now often a written answer, assembled by Google itself, and plenty of people read it and stop there. The best measurement I have seen of that comes from Pew Research Center, published on 22 July 2025. They bought the March 2025 browsing records of 900 US adults who had agreed to share them, 68,879 unique Google searches, of which 12,593 came back with an AI summary. Where a summary appeared, people clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits to the results page. Where no summary appeared, 15%. Clicks on a link inside the summary itself ran at 1% of visits, so the summary is not quietly sending that traffic somewhere else. It mostly ends the trip.

Read those numbers carefully, because they get repeated badly. It is American browsing from March 2025, and what it counts is visits to a results page, not searches and not people. Pew has published no British version, and I have found nothing at all on what any of this does to a high street trade here, so treat a British percentage as invented until somebody shows you the study behind it. What survives all that is still worth knowing. On the searches where Google writes its own answer, people click out to websites about half as often. A report built on website visits is measuring a number that moves for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with the person you pay.

If nobody is counting calls, ask for a separate phone number on the ads, so anything ringing that number came from the ads and you can count it yourself. That is an afternoon’s work, not a project.

What did you change this month?

Named changes, with dates. “I rewrote your opening hours on Google and Apple Maps because the Christmas ones were still showing in February.” “I added the four services people actually ring you about.” “I switched off the ad group spending £60 a month on people looking for a job at your company.” An ad group is just a set of adverts inside a Google Ads account, and there is nearly always one of them quietly burning money.

“Continued optimisation” and “monitoring performance” are not changes. Monitoring is watching. You can watch for free.

What will you change next month?

You are looking for a plan that is smaller than last month’s. Real work runs out. Nine or ten months into a single shop the big fixes are done, and the honest answer becomes “less, and cheaper than this”. Almost nobody volunteers that sentence. I have had to make myself do it.

A good answer names one or two things and says why now. A weak one is the list you have been reading since March with a new month typed at the top.

What should I stop paying for?

Ask it in exactly those words. It is the only one of the six with no comfortable answer, which is why it tells you the most.

Anyone who has run somebody else’s budget for a year knows which line is weakest. If they name it before you do and offer to drop it, stay where you are, you are in better hands than most people get. If nothing on the list can be cut, nothing on the list was ever really examined.

What if the answers all sound reasonable and I still cannot tell?

Then it is probably fine. Some of this work is genuinely hard to see from outside. Search visibility moves slowly, and a good month often looks like nothing happening. There is also useful work that never produces a chart, such as somebody keeping your phone number and your opening hours correct across a dozen websites, so a wrong one does not sit there for a year quietly costing you Saturdays.

What matters is whether the person will answer in pounds and plain words when you ask them directly. I spent twenty years inside big businesses watching money go out of the door, first in food and drink, then technology, then financial services. The people actually doing the work could explain it in a corridor in thirty seconds. The ones who could not were, with dull reliability, not doing very much.

And what do I charge?

An article about price transparency that hides its own prices is worth nothing, so here they are. £750 a month covers search, listings, reviews and keeping the site working. £1,450 a month adds local ads, offers and email. Three months is the minimum on either, and a six-month term takes 15% off. Work outside that is £600 a day, billed in half days.

Ad budget goes on your card, straight to Google or Meta, at cost. I never hold it. Up to £2,000 a month of spend, running it sits inside the monthly fee. Above £2,000 I charge 10% of spend, agreed before anything runs, because past that point it is most of my week. That is the one place I take a percentage, and you should know about it before you have to ask.

What to do this week

Open your last three invoices and your last three reports side by side. If you cannot work out from those six documents what changed and what it earned, send the questions. Give whoever you are paying a fair chance to answer them, because plenty of good people are simply bad at reporting.

If you want to see what a customer actually finds when they search for you, or when they ask ChatGPT for somewhere near them, the free Answer Audit shows you exactly that.

Matthew