22 September 2026 · 5 min read · Oscar Markham
What good looks like ninety days into working with an agency
Three months is long enough to know whether something is working and short enough that changing course is still cheap. These are the things worth checking, and none of them require you to understand advertising.
You know your numbers
How many enquiries you get, what they cost, and how many turn into work. If you still cannot answer those after ninety days, that is the finding.
It is also the minimum. An agency that has not established those numbers has not started.
Tracking exists and you have seen it
Analytics installed, conversions recorded, and ideally call tracking if most of your enquiries arrive by phone.
Ask to see the account rather than a screenshot. This is the most common place where things turn out not to have been set up at all.
Something has been turned off
A campaign that has run unchanged for ninety days has not been managed. Something should have been paused, cut or rebuilt because it was not working.
If everything is still running exactly as launched, ask what has been learned.
You have been told something you did not want to hear
A channel that is wrong for you, a budget too small to judge, a website losing the traffic, a month that went badly.
Ninety days of exclusively good news means either extraordinary luck or an agency managing your mood rather than your account.
The trend, not the month
Individual months are noisy. Look at the three together: is cost per enquiry falling, is quality rising, is the proportion you can actually serve improving?
If all three are flat after ninety days, and nothing structural is blocking it, that is a real conversation to have.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.