Before firing them, diagnose why: confirm your conversion tracking actually works, check whether the problem is targeting, the website's ability to convert, or the agency's execution, and have a direct conversation with a specific metric and deadline attached. If tracking is broken you may be getting leads you can't see; if the agency can't explain or fix the gap after a fair chance, switch — but secure your accounts and data first.
- Broken or missing conversion tracking is a common cause of 'no leads' — you may be getting leads the reports can't see.
- Diagnose before deciding: separate whether the issue is targeting, the website's ability to convert, or the agency's execution.
- Have a direct conversation with a specific metric and deadline — a good agency responds with a diagnosis and a plan, not excuses.
- Give a fair but bounded chance to fix it; if there's no improvement and no credible explanation, switching is justified.
- If you do switch, secure ownership of your accounts and data first — never give notice before confirming you control your assets.
First, Make Sure You're Actually Not Getting Leads
It sounds strange, but the first step when an agency 'isn't generating leads' is to confirm that's true — because broken tracking routinely hides leads that are actually arriving.
If phone calls aren't tracked, form submissions don't fire a conversion, or sales that close offline never make it back to the ad platform, your reports will show few or no leads even when the campaigns are working. The leads are landing in your inbox, your phone, or your CRM, but the measurement is blind to them. Before concluding the agency has failed, check the plumbing: are calls, forms, and enquiries all tracked? Do the numbers in your ad platform and analytics roughly match what's actually reaching you? Has anyone verified the tracking recently?
This matters in two directions. If tracking is broken, the fix might be technical, not a new agency — and ironically, the agency may be doing fine work that's invisible. But it's also the agency's job to ensure tracking works, so persistent broken tracking is itself a mark against them. Either way, you can't fairly judge lead generation on numbers you can't trust. Establish whether the leads are genuinely absent or merely unmeasured before you do anything else.
Diagnose Where the Funnel Is Breaking
If leads are genuinely scarce, the cause sits in one of three places, and the fix differs for each — so locate it before acting.
Targeting: are the campaigns reaching the right people? Pull the search-term report (for ads) or the ranking keywords (for SEO) and check whether they match real buyer intent or drift into irrelevant, informational, or off-geo queries. If you're paying to reach the wrong audience, the leads were never going to come, and the fix is targeting — possibly within the current agency's control.
The website: is traffic arriving but not converting? If the campaigns drive visitors but the site or landing page doesn't turn them into enquiries — weak messaging, slow load, no clear call to action, a broken form — then the marketing is working and the website is the bottleneck. That's a different fix, and blaming the ad agency for a conversion problem on a site they don't control would be unfair.
Execution: if targeting is sound and the site converts but leads still don't come, the issue may genuinely be the agency's execution — poor campaign structure, neglected optimization, wasted budget. Signs include vanity-metric reporting, slow responses, no strategy adjustments over months, and an inability to explain what they're doing. Working out which of these three it is turns 'the agency is failing' into a specific, addressable problem.
Have the Direct Conversation — With a Number and a Deadline
Once you've diagnosed, raise it directly rather than stewing or quietly shopping for a replacement. Give the agency a real chance to respond — but make it concrete.
Go to them with the specific problem and a specific ask: 'Leads are flat at X; I need to see them reach Y within Z weeks, and I want to understand your plan to get there.' A good agency responds the way you'd hope — with a clear diagnosis (often the same targeting/website/execution breakdown above), an honest account of what's been happening, and a concrete plan with milestones. They may legitimately point to causes outside their control, like a website that doesn't convert or a budget too small for the category, and that's a fair conversation to have.
A weak agency responds with excuses, vague reassurance ('it takes time', 'engagement is up'), defensiveness, or vanity metrics that dodge the lead question. How they handle this conversation is itself diagnostic: confidence and competence show up as a willingness to own the problem and attach a plan to it; trouble shows up as deflection.
Set a fair but bounded window to see improvement — long enough to be reasonable for the channel (ads should move in weeks; SEO needs longer), short enough that you're not throwing good money after bad. Then hold them to the number you agreed.
If You Switch, Do It the Right Way
If you've diagnosed the problem, given a fair chance, and seen no improvement or no credible plan, switching is justified — but do it deliberately, not in frustration.
The single most important precaution: secure ownership of your accounts and data before you give notice. Confirm you own your website, domain, Google Ads, Analytics, and Business Profile, with the agency holding access rather than control. The worst time to discover your accounts were built on the agency's property is the moment you try to leave. Quietly verify ownership first; if you find assets under the agency's control, address that carefully before signalling any intent to go.
Then switch cleanly: revoke the old agency's access rather than deleting accounts (deleting can destroy years of history), export your reports and creative, and let a new agency audit the existing setup before changing anything — that audit often reveals exactly what went wrong. Choose the replacement on evidence, not just relief to be leaving, using the same criteria you'd apply to any agency: transparent reporting, account ownership, senior attention, and verifiable results.
The full mechanics of a clean handover are in our guide on switching agencies without losing your data, and our guides on choosing the right agency and telling whether an agency is producing real results help make sure the next one is better. If the diagnosis points to tracking or website conversion rather than the agency, fixing that — sometimes with a new partner who handles the whole funnel — may matter more than the switch itself.
Related questions
It depends on the channel. Paid ads should show leads within weeks and a clear trend by month three; SEO needs 6–12 months for material results. Set the expectation and metric up front, then judge against it. 'No leads' at week three of ads warrants a conversation, not a firing; 'no leads' after six months of paid search with sound tracking is a real failure.
Very possibly. If campaigns drive traffic but visitors don't convert — weak messaging, slow load, unclear call to action, a broken form — the marketing is working and the website is the bottleneck. Check whether you're getting visits but not enquiries before blaming the ad or SEO agency for a conversion problem on a site they may not control.
Confront first, in most cases. A direct conversation with a specific metric and deadline gives a competent agency the chance to diagnose and fix a real, sometimes simple problem — and gives you cleaner information either way. How they respond is itself revealing. Quietly switching without that conversation risks repeating the same problem if its real cause was tracking or your website.
Take it seriously rather than dismissing it — those are genuinely common causes. A campaign can't convert traffic a weak website loses, and a budget too small for a high-CPC category won't produce volume. The fair test is whether they can show it specifically (here's the traffic, here's where it drops) and propose a fix, versus using it as a vague excuse to avoid accountability.
Confirm you own your accounts and data — website, domain, Google Ads, Analytics, Business Profile — with the agency holding only access. Do this quietly before giving notice, because the rare but real risk is losing access or history the moment you announce you're leaving. Secure your assets first; everything else about switching is straightforward once ownership is confirmed.
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