How Do I Know If My Marketing Agency Is Actually Performing?

The Agency Accountability Problem

Since 2016, we've consulted with over 1,400 law firms at My Legal Academy. Roughly 60% of them came to us while bleeding money to a marketing agency that wasn't delivering. The pattern is always the same: impressive dashboards, lots of activity metrics, and somehow the phone still isn't ringing with quality cases.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most law firm owners don't know whether their agency is actually performing because they've been trained to look at the wrong numbers.

The 7 KPIs That Actually Matter

Forget impressions, followers, and website sessions. These are the only metrics that should drive your agency conversations:

Cost Per Signed Case (CPSC): Not cost per lead. Not cost per click. The total amount you spend on marketing divided by the number of cases you actually sign. If your agency can't calculate this number with you, that's your first red flag.

Lead-to-Consultation Rate: What percentage of leads actually show up for a consultation? If it's below 40%, either your intake process needs work or your agency is sending garbage traffic.

Consultation-to-Retained Rate: Of the people who sit down with you, how many sign? This tells you about lead quality. Good agencies send people who need your services and can afford them.

Average Case Value: Are the cases you're signing from agency leads profitable? A personal injury firm we work with had an agency generating 50 leads per month, but the average case value was $8,000. Their target was $35,000. Volume meant nothing.

Time to First Contact: How quickly does your intake team respond to leads? This is partly on you, but a good agency will track this because they know a 5-minute response converts 400% better than a 30-minute response.

Source Attribution Accuracy: Can your agency tell you exactly which campaign, keyword, or ad generated each signed case? If they're attributing everything to "organic" or "direct," they're guessing.

Revenue Per Marketing Dollar: For every dollar you spend with this agency, how many dollars in revenue do you collect? Anything below 5:1 for most practice areas means the economics don't work.

12 Red Flags That Signal a Bad Agency Relationship

We've seen these patterns hundreds of times. Any three of these together should trigger serious concern:

They talk about impressions and reach instead of leads and cases. They send reports you don't understand and seem annoyed when you ask questions. They blame your intake team for every performance issue. They won't share access to your ad accounts or analytics. They lock you into contracts longer than 6 months with no performance clauses.

They take more than 48 hours to respond to your emails. They can't tell you your cost per signed case. They resist call tracking or lead attribution. They've never asked about your ideal client profile or case criteria. They promise rankings for keywords nobody searches.

They show you competitor examples from different markets as proof of concept. They've never visited your website's contact forms to see if they actually work.

What Good Reporting Looks Like

Bad agency reports are 15 pages of graphs showing upward trends in metrics that don't matter. They'll show you that impressions are up 45% and click-through rate improved by 0.3%. Congratulations, you've paid $8,000 to learn that more people saw your ads.

Good reporting fits on one page and answers three questions: How many qualified leads came in this month? How many of those became signed cases? What did each signed case cost us to acquire?

A report worth reading includes the total leads by source with the specific campaign or channel that generated each one. It shows the disposition of every lead, meaning what happened to them and whether they qualified, scheduled, showed, or retained. It tracks your cost per signed case trend over the past 90 days. It identifies the top performing and worst performing campaigns with a recommendation to shift budget. It lists the action items the agency is taking this month based on the data.

If your monthly report requires a 45-minute call just to understand it, the report is designed to obscure rather than illuminate.

Traffic vs. Signed Cases: The Gap Nobody Explains

An agency can 10x your website traffic and still deliver zero additional cases. We worked with an immigration firm in Texas spending $12,000 monthly with an agency celebrating a traffic increase from 2,000 to 18,000 monthly visitors. The firm's signed cases stayed flat at 8-10 per month.

The traffic was coming from blog posts targeting questions like "how long does a green card take" - informational queries from people researching, not people ready to hire. The agency had optimized for a vanity metric instead of commercial intent.

Good traffic comes from people searching "immigration lawyer Houston" or "asylum attorney near me." These searches indicate intent to hire. A thousand visitors with purchase intent beats a hundred thousand visitors who just want free information.

Calculating Your True Cost Per Signed Case

Your agency will give you cost per lead. That number is meaningless without conversion data. Here's how to calculate what actually matters:

Take your total monthly agency spend including management fees, ad spend, and any creative costs. Add your internal costs for intake staff time spent on agency leads. Divide that total by the number of cases you signed that originated from agency channels.

If you spend $10,000 monthly with your agency and your intake coordinator spends roughly 20 hours on those leads at $25 per hour, your true marketing cost is $10,500. If you signed 7 cases from those leads, your cost per signed case is $1,500.

Now compare that to your average case value. If those 7 cases average $6,000 in revenue, you're getting a 4:1 return. That's marginal. If they average $15,000, you're at 10:1. That's healthy.

Most firms we work with have never done this calculation. Their agency certainly hasn't done it for them.

Contract Terms That Protect You

Never sign an agency contract without these provisions:

A 90-day initial term with month-to-month renewal after. Performance benchmarks tied to lead volume or cost per acquisition with an exit clause if missed for two consecutive months. Full ownership of all ad accounts, creative assets, and data if you terminate. A 30-day termination notice maximum, not 60 or 90 days. Transparent reporting on actual ad spend versus management fees.

If an agency won't agree to performance-based exit clauses, they're telling you they don't expect to perform.

Questions to Ask in Monthly Calls

Stop accepting the presentation they prepared. Interrupt with these questions:

What was our cost per signed case this month compared to last month? Which three campaigns should we kill based on this month's data? What's the conversion rate from lead to consultation, and how does that compare to your other law firm clients? Show me the exact path our best lead took from first click to signed retainer. What are you testing this month that you weren't testing last month? If you had to cut our budget by 30%, what would you eliminate first?

Their answers reveal whether they understand your business or just your ad account.

When to Fire Your Agency

Pull the trigger immediately if: they can't produce your cost per signed case after 90 days of working together, they've missed agreed-upon benchmarks for three consecutive months, you discover they've been inflating metrics or misrepresenting data, or they're unresponsive for more than a week during an active campaign.

Fire them after a serious conversation if: results have plateaued for 6 months with no clear plan to improve, they blame external factors for every shortcoming, or they resist implementing tracking that would prove their value.

When to Give Them More Time

Patience is warranted when: they're in the first 90 days and still learning your market and ideal client, they've identified a clear problem with your intake process that's suppressing results, seasonal factors legitimately affect your practice area, or they've proposed a specific test with a defined timeline and success metric.

An agency that says "give us more time" without specifics is stalling. An agency that says "give us 45 more days to test this new landing page against the control, and if consultation rates don't improve by 20%, we'll revisit strategy" is being accountable.

When It Goes Right vs. Wrong

A bankruptcy firm in Ohio came to us after spending $7,500 monthly for 14 months with an agency. Total signed cases from that investment: 11. Cost per signed case: $9,545 on cases averaging $1,500 in fees. They lost over $80,000.

The agency had been running brand awareness campaigns and celebrating engagement metrics. Nobody had ever calculated whether the math worked.

Contrast that with a family law practice in Arizona. Same approximate spend, but their agency tracked everything to signed cases from day one. Month six, they identified that leads from one specific ad set converted to retained clients at 3x the rate of others. They reallocated 70% of the budget to variations of that winner. By month twelve, cost per signed case dropped from $1,800 to $600.

The difference wasn't the agency's tactics. It was their willingness to be accountable to the only number that matters: cases signed.

The Bottom Line

Your marketing agency works for you. They should be proving their value with numbers you care about, not numbers that make them look good. If you've read this far and realized you don't know your cost per signed case, that's the conversation to have tomorrow morning.

And if they can't answer it, you have your answer about the relationship.