Hiring agencies · KPIs and reporting
Lead counts are too shallow to judge an agency on, and closed revenue arrives too slowly to manage a monthly relationship. Hold your agency to the earliest sales stage that reliably predicts revenue, and hold yourself to getting them that signal.
Short answer
Hold a performance marketing agency to cost per qualified lead or opportunity by channel, not lead volume or reach. Use the earliest stage in your sales process that reliably predicts revenue, such as a sales-accepted lead or a qualified RFQ, as the monthly KPI, and check it each quarter against opportunities and wins.
Short answer
Lead counts reward form fills, including the cheap ones sales rejects, so an agency can hit its target while pipeline shrinks. Revenue is the right final judge, but in B2B it arrives weeks or quarters after the click and in small numbers, too late and too sparse to steer a monthly relationship. The useful KPI sits between them.
An agency optimises to whatever it is measured on. If the contract says “leads”, bidding learns from form fills, and a student counts the same as a plant manager. The junk leads from ads guide explains how that loop forms.
Revenue has the opposite problem. An industrial RFQ can take months to become an order, so in month two you can’t tell whether the agency is doing well, and a handful of large deals makes every month look brilliant or dreadful.
A deeper outcome is not automatically a better signal. For most B2B teams the contractable KPI is a sales-accepted lead, a qualified RFQ or an opportunity. Which lead stage to optimise for covers the choice in depth; this guide applies it to the agency relationship.
Original framework
Each rung is one step closer to revenue. The monthly KPI is the earliest rung with enough volume and a proven link to the next rung. Fill in the lag column from your own CRM or lead sheet; it differs by business.
| Rung | Where the data lives | Lag from click (yours) | How to use it with an agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Spend and delivery | Ad platform | Same day | Hygiene check: pacing, spend limits, delivery problems |
| 2. Leads | Form tool, platform | Same day | Diagnosis only; never the headline KPI |
| 3. Sales-accepted or qualified leads | CRM or lead sheet | Days | Usual monthly KPI; candidate bidding signal |
| 4. Opportunities, quotes or proposals | CRM | Weeks | Monthly KPI where volume allows; otherwise quarterly check |
| 5. Pipeline value | CRM | Weeks to months | Quarterly review; channel allocation |
| 6. Revenue | CRM, finance | Months | Annual review; tests whether rung 3 or 4 still predicts value |
A rung that produces three events a month can’t show a trend. Platforms have their own thresholds too: Meta’s Conversion Leads goal asks for at least 200 leads a month and a stage reached by 1–40% of leads within 28 days (Meta for Developers).
If qualification takes six weeks, the rung is a quarterly check, not a monthly KPI. Speeding up lead status updates often moves a rung from one to the other.
Compare last year’s qualified leads with what became opportunities and wins. If “qualified” converts no better than any lead, fix the definition before contracting on it.
Short answer
More than platform access. Give the agency your ideal customer and disqualifiers, written stage definitions, past campaign history, current numbers, a specific goal, who approves what and within which spend limits, and a named sales contact. Send it as a document before kickoff, so both sides can refer back to it when memory of the first call fades.
Many quietly underperforming relationships are a capable agency with too little context: under-informed, not underperforming.
Copyable onboarding brief
| Week | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1 | Access granted in your own accounts; brief shared; tracking and CRM stage flow checked |
| 2 | Goal and KPI rung agreed in writing; lead status routine agreed with sales |
| 3–4 | First changes or campaigns live; first check-in held before month end, not after |
Short answer
The agency commits to a change log with reasons, a monthly qualified-pipeline report and prompt anomaly alerts. You commit to updating lead status within an agreed number of working days, a monthly sales feedback session and quick approvals. Agencies can’t optimise to feedback they never receive, so the client side matters as much.
The most common client-side failure is silence from sales: leads sit at “new” for weeks and both sides fall back to cost per lead. Set N and X yourselves; there is no universal standard. The sales feedback loop guide shows how to make status updates routine.
| The agency commits to | You commit to |
|---|---|
| A weekly change log: what changed, why, and what was deliberately left alone | Lead status updated within N working days of each lead |
| A monthly report on the agreed KPI rung, by channel and campaign | A monthly 30-minute sales feedback session |
| Flagging tracking breaks, spend anomalies or sudden quality drops within X working days | Approval decisions within an agreed turnaround |
| Reconciling platform conversions with your CRM or lead sheet | Giving the agency access to that record, or a regular export |
How stages reach the platforms is covered in CRM lead stages for ad platforms.
Short answer
Agree up front that your CRM or lead-status sheet is the record for leads, qualification and pipeline. Platform-reported conversions are useful for bidding and diagnosis but can be modelled, delayed or duplicated. A healthy report shows both numbers side by side and explains the gap, rather than choosing whichever looks better.
Write the attribution rule into the contract: which system counts, which source field decides the channel, and how branded search is treated. Paid media pipeline attribution sets out the options.
| Weak report | Healthy report |
|---|---|
| A dashboard export with no commentary | Results against the goal and rung agreed at onboarding |
| Impressions, reach and clicks up front | Qualified leads and opportunities up front; delivery metrics as diagnosis |
| Blended cost per lead | Cost per qualified lead by channel and campaign |
| “Market conditions were challenging” | What specifically changed, and the data that shows it |
| No forward plan | Next period’s tests tied to what this period showed |
Short answer
A 15-minute check-in every week or two catches problems early: what changed, what’s working, what isn’t, and three good and three bad leads from sales. Add a monthly review against the qualified-pipeline report and a quarterly review of whether the KPI still predicts opportunities and revenue.
Copyable 15-minute check-in agenda
Monthly: the report above, with sales in the room for part of it. Quarterly: check whether this quarter’s qualified leads from each channel became opportunities at the rate the KPI assumes, and reset the rung if they didn’t.
Beware over-editing. Frequent changes feel like effort but can stop bidding from settling. Google says a new bid strategy, a setting change or adding and removing campaigns, ad groups or keywords can start a learning period that takes “up to around 50 conversion events or 3 conversion cycles” (Google Ads Help). With B2B volumes that can be weeks. A change log that includes deliberate waits is a sign of discipline, not idleness.
Worked numbers
A US B2B SaaS company spends $40,000 a month: $25,000 on LinkedIn and $15,000 on Google. The agency reports 520 leads at about $77 each. The CRM tells a different story.
| Channel | Spend | Leads | Cost per lead | Sales-accepted | Cost per SAL | Opportunities | Cost per opportunity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25,000 | 220 | about $114 | 60 | about $417 | 22 | about $1,136 | |
| $15,000 | 300 | $50 | 30 | $500 | 8 | $1,875 | |
| Total | $40,000 | 520 | about $77 | 90 | about $444 | 30 | about $1,333 |
On cost per lead, Google looks more than twice as efficient, and the obvious move is to shift budget from LinkedIn. On cost per opportunity, LinkedIn is cheaper by $739, and that move would shrink pipeline. The company changes the contract KPI from cost per lead to cost per sales-accepted lead, with a quarterly check on cost per opportunity. Google’s search terms and conversion action go on the investigate list rather than getting more budget.
Short answer
Usually because campaigns optimise to form fills and nobody sends back which leads qualified. The platform then finds more people like the cheapest converters. Agree a written qualified-lead definition, update lead status quickly, and make qualified leads, not all leads, the KPI and, where configured, the signal the platforms optimise to.
If sales complains, check first whether the agency ever received lead status and whether the KPI rewarded volume. Lead quality sets out how to define a qualified lead both sides accept.
| If you hear | Ask |
|---|---|
| “The market was challenging this month” | Which segment or channel was affected, and what data shows it? |
| “We’re optimising continuously” | What changed this week, why, and what did you leave alone? |
| “Results should improve soon” | What are we waiting on, and by when should we see it on the KPI rung? |
| “Lead volume is up 30%” | How many of those did sales accept, and at what cost each? |
| Severity | What it looks like | Response |
|---|---|---|
| Minor | One vague answer or a late report | Raise it in writing and judge how specific the reply is |
| Pattern | The same vague phrases across two or three cycles | Reset the KPI, SLA and report format; set a review date |
| Structural | Accounts in the agency’s name, refusal to reconcile with the CRM, spend changes beyond approved limits | Check ownership and plan an exit with the contract and exit checklist |
None of these phrases proves bad faith. The signal is repetition without ever becoming specific.
Zephra supports both. It works inside your own Google, Meta and LinkedIn accounts and uses lead quality and business outcomes from CRM data or a spreadsheet; no CRM is needed to start. Where configured, it sends CRM lead stages to Google through the Data Manager API and to Meta and LinkedIn through their Conversions APIs. Low-risk changes can run automatically; everything else follows the permissions you set or waits for approval, within spend boundaries, cooldowns and learning-phase protection. Every change is recorded in an audit log. Agencies buy Zephra on Enterprise; see pricing and how it works.
If you only want a second opinion before a quarterly review, the free ad account assessment takes 10–15 minutes, needs no CRM and makes no campaign changes.
Choosing an agency comes before this: see questions to ask before hiring an agency. For fee models that reward qualified pipeline, see marketing agency pricing, and for the team decision itself, in-house vs agency. How Zephra uses lead quality is on lead quality optimisation.
Questions, answered
Reconcile the agency’s reported conversions with lead status in your CRM or spreadsheet each month. Compare cost per qualified lead and cost per opportunity by channel and campaign, and review a log of what was changed and why. Judge trends over a full qualification cycle, not a single month.
Allow for set-up plus at least one full qualification cycle on your KPI rung, which you can read from your own CRM. Judge process from the first month: change logs, reports and questions about your sales process. Judge results once qualified leads have had time to progress.
Be cautious. A cost per lead guarantee is easiest to meet by accepting lower-quality leads. If you agree any target, put it on a qualified rung with your CRM as the record.
Ask for the change log and the hypothesis behind each change. Bid strategy and campaign changes can restart learning periods, so agree which changes need a stated reason and a minimum wait before being judged.
Keep the same outcome KPI across channels so they can be compared, but expect different costs per lead. LinkedIn often costs more per lead and can still cost less per opportunity.
Before your next agency review
The free ad account assessment takes 10–15 minutes, needs no CRM and makes no campaign changes. It covers wasted spend, campaign structure, performance constraints and measurement gaps across Google, Meta and LinkedIn.
