Ninety days in, most business owners cannot tell whether their agency is working, because nobody agreed in month one what "working" would look like by month three.
So the decision gets made on feel. The invoice has gone out three times and the phone has not rung more.
The monthly PDF, meanwhile, is full of charts that do not obviously connect to either fact.
This article is the list we wish every client had before they signed. It sets out what should exist at day 30, day 60 and day 90 for each service type, so you can judge the agency on things you can see. It assumes you have already done the work of choosing a digital marketing agency in the UK and now need to judge the one you picked.
It also says, plainly, where 90 days is too early to judge, and what to look at instead.
Why 90 days is a review point, not a verdict
Ninety days is long enough to see whether an agency can execute, and too short to see whether most of that execution has paid off. Those are two different questions, and conflating them is how owners either fire a good agency early or keep a bad one for a year.
Google's own advice on hiring an SEO, given by Maile Ohye in a Google video, is still the clearest statement of the timeline problem:
"In most cases, SEOs need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit." Maile Ohye, Google, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable
A Search Engine Roundtable poll of 782 SEOs run alongside that video found only 13% said they could show ranking success inside three months. So the useful 90-day question for SEO is whether the work that leads to results is visibly happening.
Paid media is the opposite. Google says a campaign's "Learning" status never lasts more than seven days, and performance settles within one to two conversion cycles after that. By day 90 you should have real numbers from paid ads, and an agency that asks for more patience on paid is asking for something the platform does not need.
Month one: access, a baseline and a written plan
By day 30 you should hold three things: control of your own accounts, a written baseline, and a plan with dates on it. None of these are results. All of them are preconditions for results, and an agency that has not produced them is already behind.
Account ownership comes first. Searchlab's April 2026 guide to agency red flags describes the client owning the Google Ads account, the GA4 property, Search Console and the Tag Manager container, with the agency given user-level access.
Google's hiring guidance makes the same point for audits: grant read access to Search Console, not write access. If the agency created accounts you cannot log into, fix that this month, before the relationship sours.
The baseline is a one-page record of where you started: organic sessions, enquiries, cost per lead from any existing ads, the keywords you currently rank for, page speed scores. Without it, every later report is unanchored.
The Whitehat SEO review of UK agency relationships cites a UK Marketing Maturity Report finding that only 27% of UK SMEs set clear objectives for their agencies. That figure is the reason so many 90-day conversations go nowhere.
The plan should name what gets done in months two and three, by whom, and what you need to supply. Mighty Roar's guide to the first 90 days puts the written strategy and a six-to-twelve-month roadmap at the end of month two.
We think that is a month late for most small UK accounts. A first plan can be revised later. A missing plan cannot be judged at all.
Month two: work you can point to
By day 60 the plan should have turned into things that exist on your website, in your ad account or on your channels, and you should be able to list them without opening a report. This is the month where "we're doing a lot behind the scenes" stops being an acceptable answer.
For SEO, that means technical fixes deployed (not recommended, deployed), rewritten title tags and meta descriptions on priority pages, and the first new or reworked content live. Clark Boyd's Search Engine Journal piece on why clients fire SEO agencies lists recommendations that go unimplemented as the top reason.
Ask for the change log. If the agency blames your developer queue, ask what it did to unblock it.
For paid ads, month two should show campaigns live with conversion tracking firing on the actions you care about, plus at least one round of changes based on what the first weeks showed. The platforms force this pace.
Portent's summary of Meta's learning phase puts the threshold at around 50 conversion events in a seven-day window. If your ad sets are still "learning" at day 60, the budget or the conversion event is wrong, and the agency should have said so.
For a website build, day 60 should mean approved designs and a staging site you can click through. For social, it means a published content calendar, posts going out on schedule, and someone replying to comments within a working day.
Month three: the first numbers that mean something
By day 90 you should see the first movement in metrics that lead to revenue, even where revenue itself has not moved. What those metrics are depends on the service, which is why a single "is it working?" question fails.
The table below is the version we use. It is deliberately specific. If your agency's month-three report contains none of the right-hand column, you have a problem with activity versus outcome reporting at minimum.
| Service | Should exist by day 30 | Should exist by day 60 | Should be visible by day 90 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Technical audit, baseline rankings, keyword map, content plan | Technical fixes deployed, priority pages rewritten, first content live | Impressions rising in Search Console, more keywords in positions 11 to 30, pages indexed, early click growth on non-brand terms |
| Paid search and social | Conversion tracking tested, campaign structure agreed, first ads live by week 3 | Learning phase exited, first optimisation round done, search terms reviewed | Stable cost per lead you can compare with your baseline, wasted spend cut, leads traceable to campaigns in your CRM |
| Website | Sitemap, wireframes, content list, who writes what | Approved designs, staging site, content loaded | Site live or a dated launch, redirects mapped, speed and tracking checked before launch |
| Social (organic) | Audit of current channels, tone and content pillars agreed | Calendar published, posts on schedule, replies within a day | Reach and follower growth from a baseline, saved and shared posts identified, at least one enquiry traced to social |
The common thread across every row is that each item is observable. You can log in and check it. You do not need the agency to interpret it for you.
SEO at day 90 is leading indicators, not revenue
The honest position on SEO is that 90 days shows direction, and an agency that promises revenue by then is selling you something. Boyd's piece notes that some SEO work only really kicks into action in month four or later and argues for a six-month minimum before judging. Our own month-by-month view of how long SEO takes lands in the same place.
Searchlab gives six to nine months for SEO and content programmes to compound.
What you can see at 90 days, in order of how much weight we give each:
- Search Console impressions for non-brand queries trending up week on week, even if clicks are flat. Impressions move before clicks.
- Keywords moving from nowhere into positions 11 to 30. These are the pages Google is testing. Page-two rankings at day 90 are a good sign, not a failure.
- The count of indexed pages and the number of pages with errors in Search Console moving in the right direction.
- New content ranking for anything at all within two to three weeks of publication, which tells you the site is being crawled normally.
- Crawl stats and page speed figures improving where the audit said they would.
What you should not expect at 90 days is a change in enquiry volume you can attribute to SEO. A Redditor in r/smallbusiness, quoted in Fivenson Studios' round-up of Reddit threads on hiring SEO companies, put it as "you will not see return on investment from SEO efforts for 6-18 months".
That is blunter than Google's wording, and closer to what most UK small business accounts experience.
If you are three months into an SEO retainer and the agency cannot show you the five items above, SEO being slow is no longer the explanation. Nothing is happening.
What owners actually complain about
Reading owner threads on Reddit, the complaints are less about speed and more about not being able to tell what was done. In a widely upvoted r/marketing thread, an ecommerce owner fired an agency after about a month, five sales from ads and nothing from email, then got a large final bill.
The top replies did not side with the owner. One pointed out that the budget was probably too small for the results promised. Another, from u/k_rocker, said "Good marketing is refined over time."
That thread is a fair summary of the two failure modes. The owner judged a paid campaign after one month on a budget that could not have exited the learning phase. The agency, by the owner's account, overpromised at the sales stage.
Both would have been caught by a written month-one plan with a cost-per-lead target and a budget check against it, the kind of thing the right questions to ask a marketing agency surface before you sign.
Agencies feel the pressure from the other side. AgencyAnalytics surveyed 494 agency professionals between February and April 2026 and recorded one leader saying "I keep getting asked to prove ROI in ways our reporting wasn't built for".
If your agency's reporting cannot answer "what did I get for the money?", that is a defect in the agency. The question itself is a fair one.
Two more UK figures from the Whitehat review belong in the 90-day meeting. Client approval cycles average 15 to 19 days according to a 2025 Jam7 study, so if you sat on content for three weeks, that is three weeks the agency could not deliver.
And the IPA's 2024 Agency Census put agency staff turnover at 24.1%. If you have met a new account manager already, ask what was handed over.
When to end it at 90 days, and when to give it until month six
End it at 90 days if the month-one items still do not exist, whatever the agency says about results being on the way. An agency that has given you neither account access nor a baseline nor a change log by day 90 is unlikely to become organised in month six.
Searchlab recommends contracts with a 30-day rolling notice period after an initial 90-day kickoff and a review trigger if targets are missed two months running. If your contract does not have that, raise it now. Knowing what it takes to leave a marketing agency without losing your accounts is worth checking before you reach that point.
End paid media at 90 days if cost per lead is worse than your baseline and the agency cannot explain which change it will make next. Paid campaigns give you data fast enough that "it needs more time" is rarely true after three months at a workable budget.
Give SEO until month six if, and only if, the leading indicators in the list above are moving and the change log shows steady work. Impressions up and content shipping on schedule is an agency doing its job inside the timeline Google itself describes. Firing it at day 90 restarts the clock with someone else.
The decision rule is simple to state and uncomfortable to apply. At 90 days, judge the agency on what exists. If what exists is thin, no amount of patience will fix it. If what exists is solid, revenue is usually a timing question.
If you want a second opinion on an agency's first 90 days, or want to set up a retainer with these checkpoints written in from day one, talk to us about SEO or paid media.