The Marketing
Black Box.
As an executive decision maker (Founder, CEO, VP, or Marketing Director), you are pouring capital into marketing. In return, you receive confusing spreadsheets detailing "impressions" and "engagement" while your actual lead pipeline remains stagnant. It's time to stop the bleeding.
The 3 Fatal
Red Flags.
Most business owners know when something is wrong, but lack the technical vocabulary to challenge their agency. If you recognize any of these three operational behaviors, your marketing team is actively burning your budget.
The Vanity Shield
When you ask about falling revenue and empty pipelines, they immediately deflect to "brand awareness," "reach," or "cost-per-click." They use top-of-funnel vanity metrics as a shield to hide the fact that their campaigns cannot convert a single paid customer.
Strategic Silos
Your SEO guy doesn't talk to your Google Ads manager. The social media team has never spoken to your sales department about lead quality. The result is a fragmented, chaotic presence where the left hand is bidding against the right hand, wasting thousands.
The Compliance Void
For regulated industries, your marketers run rogue. They publish ad copy that technically violates FDIC, SEC, or HIPAA regulations because they prioritize "catchy slogans" over legal accountability, exposing you to massive state fines.
Stop Babysitting
Your Marketers.
As an executive or marketing leader, you should not be explaining basic business economics to your digital agency. You should not have to rewrite their confusing copy, and you certainly should not have to manually verify that their tracking pixels are actually working.
Your team's singular purpose should be removing friction from the buyer's journey. When they fail, you experience stalled growth, infuriated sales reps complaining about "junk leads," and marketing budgets that feel like black holes.
The Agency Reset Protocol
- 1Fire the Generalists
Stop paying entry-level account managers to "guess" how your complex, highly-regulated industry operates.
- 2Demand Revenue Attribution
Throw out reports based on "Reach." Mandate that every campaign is tracked down to the exact dollar of closed-won revenue.
- 3Audit the Infrastructure
Force a technical review of your analytics, server log files, and CRM routing to instantly locate where the leads are bleeding out.
The Attribution Crisis.
If your agency cannot map a specific Google Ads click to a specific closed deal in your CRM, you are not doing marketing—you are gambling. In 2024, claiming "it's hard to track" is a confession of technical incompetence.
A real marketing partner implements server-side tracking, offline conversion APIs, and strict UTM parameter protocols. They want to know exactly which keyword generated the $50,000 contract, so they can turn off the keywords that generate $0.
Tracking Maturity Model
Pixel-Only Tracking (Failing)
iOS14 and ad-blockers destroyed this years ago. The agency reports 100 conversions, but your sales team only sees 40.
CRM Integration (Average)
Leads drop into Salesforce, but the specific campaign data is lost during the handoff. Sales can't tell marketing which ads drove the best clients.
Closed-Loop Attribution (Elite)
When a deal closes in the CRM, the exact revenue figure is pushed back to the ad platform algorithm, instantly retraining the AI to find more users with identical behavior.
The Forensic
Audit.
When you hire Custody & Agency to audit a failing marketing team, we do not critique font choices or logo placements. We execute a ruthless, mathematical teardown of their operational infrastructure.
Search Term Analysis
We extract the raw search query reports from Google Ads (not the filtered dashboard the agency shows you). We identify exactly how much budget was wasted on irrelevant broad-match keywords over the trailing 12 months, calculating the total "burned cash" figure down to the penny.
Technical SEO Crawl
We run an enterprise-grade crawler to identify the hidden structural errors punishing your organic rank. If your agency is bragging about blog posts but ignoring duplicate content, toxic backlinks, and severe Core Web Vitals failures, they are decorating a sinking ship.
The "Zombie Subscriptions" Purge
Failing marketing teams love to buy SaaS tools to pretend they are doing work. We audit your entire software stack to find the $800/mo enterprise tools that haven't been logged into for 9 months, instantly recouping wasted budget.
Compliance Liability Check
For our regulated clients (Finance, Healthcare, Legal), we scan all active ad copy and landing pages for regulatory violations. A careless agency trying to write "catchy copy" can easily trigger a massive state or federal fine. We locate the risks before the auditors do.
Extrication Process
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1. Secure the Assets: Before giving notice, ensure you have absolute Admin/Owner access to your domain registrar, hosting, Facebook Business Manager, and Google Ads accounts.
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2. Export Historical Data: Download all campaign historical performance, audience lists, and negative keyword lists. Do not let them hold this data hostage.
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3. Map Dependencies: Identify any proprietary CMS platforms, custom code, or deeply integrated plugins the agency used to artificially lock you into their ecosystem.
Pulling
The Plug.
It is terrifying to fire an agency that controls your digital infrastructure. Many business owners tolerate absolute mediocrity for years simply because they are afraid the agency will "break the website" during the transition.
That fear is exactly how bad agencies retain accounts. They rely on technical intimidation.
The hard truth:
You are already losing money every month they remain on retainer. The temporary friction of transitioning to a data-driven, accountable team is vastly cheaper than another year of zero growth and vanity metrics.
Demand
Accountability.
Is your marketing team failing you? Stop wondering and get mathematical proof. We conduct ruthless, unbiased audits of existing marketing operations for executive decision makers who demand the truth.
Request an Executive Audit