Six months into a retainer, it's normal to have a quiet question you can't quite answer: is my marketing agency doing a good job, or have I just got used to the invoice? The monthly report won't settle it on its own, because the report is written by the people being judged.
You don't need a consultant to answer it, either. You need four checks you can run yourself in an afternoon, and a way to tell a slow quarter from a bad engagement.
Check 1: Does what shipped match what you signed?
Open the agreement, list the scope, then list what actually shipped in the last three months. Articles, pages, email flows, campaigns, experiments: put them side by side.
A mismatch isn't automatically a problem. Priorities change, and a good partner will move effort to where it matters. But the change should have been a conversation you remember having, not something you discover with a spreadsheet. If you need a reference point for what a retainer should cover in the first place, this is what a software company's retainer should include.
Check 2: Does anything compound?
Some marketing keeps paying after the work is done: a page that still earns search traffic a year later, an onboarding flow that still sends, positioning that the sales deck still uses. Other marketing only exists while you keep paying: ad spend, boosted posts, a monthly content quota nobody reads.
Both kinds are legitimate. But if everything stops the day the invoice stops, you've been renting results rather than building anything. Ask which three things from the last six months will still be working next year.
Check 3: Can you open the accounts yourself?
Try it. Log into your analytics, Search Console, ad accounts and CRM without asking anyone for help. If you can't, or you can see the dashboards but not the settings, that isn't a judgement on the work. It is a risk you're carrying, and a good partner will fix it the same week you raise it.
Check 4: Have they ever told you something you didn't want to hear?
This is the most telling check and the hardest to fake. A partner who knows your market will sometimes say your pricing page is confusing, your launch date is too early or your favourite channel isn't working. If six months have passed without a single uncomfortable conversation, either everything is perfect or nobody is looking closely.
A slow quarter or a bad engagement?
Before you decide, give each channel its own clock, because they don't move at the same speed:
Paid search. It can take a few conversion cycles, typically one or two, for a bid strategy to calibrate to a new objective, and how long depends on your conversion volume, your conversion cycle and the bid strategy (sourced from Google Ads Help). For a B2B product with a long sales cycle, that can mean weeks before the numbers mean much.
SEO and content. Slower again, and honest partners say so. Google's own guidance warns that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google (sourced from Google Search Central).
Positioning and site work. Judged by whether sales conversations get easier and the right people book demos, which is slower to read than a dashboard.
A slow quarter looks like the right work shipping on time with results that haven't caught up yet. A bad engagement looks like drifting scope, nothing you own, no access and no disagreement, whatever the numbers say.
If the honest answer is that nobody, including you, can see which channel is working, that's attribution and measurement work, and it's worth fixing before you judge anyone. A marketing audit is a sensible first step either way.
For what it's worth, the way I run a retainer is a written report every month and a call every two weeks, so there's always a document to hold the work against. Whatever your current setup looks like, the four checks above work the same.
So which of the four would your agency pass today?