Most marketing leads at law firms have an agency relationship that’s slightly uncomfortable.
The agency has been there for years. They know the partners. They know the brand. They’ve done good work in places. But the monthly report is starting to feel a bit thin. The numbers always tell a positive story. The questions you’d like to ask never quite make it onto the agenda. And every time you do raise something, the answer comes back so technically that you can’t tell if it’s true or just well-presented.
This is a normal stage in an agency relationship. It usually means the agency has stopped doing its best work for you, not because they’ve lost interest, but because nobody is pushing them anymore.
Here’s how to push them without breaking the relationship.
Why agencies report what they report
Agencies aren’t trying to mislead you. They’re optimising for the same thing every supplier optimises for: keeping the relationship.
The way to keep the relationship is to make the report look like progress is happening. Page count is going up. Traffic is up. Rankings are up. Conversions are up. Quarter on quarter. Year on year. Tidy numbers. Green arrows. Slide deck.
The numbers that would make the report look less tidy — declining engagement, weak conversion-to-billable rates, missing CRM tracking — get less airtime, because raising them invites questions the agency might not have a confident answer to.
Most agencies aren’t aware they’re doing this. The drift happens slowly. The reporting framework was set up three years ago by someone who’s no longer at the agency. Nobody has revisited it since.
Build a year on year tracker that sits outside the agency’s report
This is the single most useful thing you can do. It costs you a couple of hours a month and changes every conversation you have with the agency afterwards.
Open a spreadsheet. Down the rows, put the metrics you actually care about. The ones I usually include:
Total leads against your firm’s agreed definition. Leads broken down by practice area. Leads broken down by traffic source (organic, paid, direct, referral). Conversion rate from website visit to lead. Conversion rate from lead to billable matter (this one needs the CRM). Hosting costs. Average page speed score on the top ten pages.
Across the columns, put each month back two years. Fill it in. Every month, add a new column.
When the agency presents their report, you compare it against your tracker. If the numbers agree, you have a clean conversation. If they disagree, you have a conversation that’s worth having.
Five questions worth asking on your monthly call
The questions agencies don’t expect, in the order they’re worth asking.
- What changed in our analytics setup this month? Most months the answer is nothing. Occasionally something has been changed without telling you. You want to know.
- How does this month’s number compare against the same month last year, against the same month two years ago? Most reports compare month on month, which can hide structural decline.
- Which of our pages drove conversions this month, and which drove the most traffic? They should be different pages. If they’re the same pages, the rest of the site isn’t pulling its weight.
- What’s our highest-bounce, highest-traffic page? This is where you’re spending budget to acquire traffic that immediately leaves. There’s almost always a fix.
- What would you do differently if our budget was the same but you were starting from scratch? This is the question that gets the most useful answers, because it forces the agency to articulate the work they’ve been wanting to do but haven’t proposed.
The conversation script
Most marketing leads find this kind of pushback uncomfortable because it feels confrontational. It doesn’t have to be.
The framing that works is: “I’m trying to defend our digital budget at the next partner meeting. Help me understand the numbers in a way I can defend.” Most agencies hear that and respond well, because they want the budget protected too. Their margin depends on it.
The framing that doesn’t work is: “I think your numbers are wrong.” That puts the agency in defensive mode and loses the relationship.
If the agency reacts badly to a question that’s framed reasonably, that tells you something. Not necessarily that the agency is bad. But that the relationship has stopped being a partnership and become something more transactional. Worth knowing.
When to walk away
Sometimes the right answer is a different agency. Don’t rush this. The cost of switching is high, the new agency will need three to six months to get up to speed and the in-house team will absorb most of the disruption.
Three signs that the relationship has stopped working:
The agency stops responding to questions in writing. The reports stop changing format quarter on quarter, even when you’ve asked for changes. The agency starts pitching net new work before delivering on the work you’ve already paid for.
If you see any of these, run a structured RFP process. Independent help on this saves you weeks and gives you a defensible decision to take into the partner meeting. But that’s a separate post.
See the full case study – How a mid size regional UK law firm grew online enquiries by 190% without rebuilding their website
