Bath businesses are spoilt for choice on agencies and starved for ways to tell them apart. Every pitch deck promises transparency, every case study glows, and every proposal has a dashboard in it. The only reliable way I know to separate a measurement culture from a presentation culture is to ask questions the deck was not built to answer. These are the five I would ask, having sat on both sides of the table.

One: where does this revenue figure actually come from?

Ask them to trace one number in their sample report back to its source. Platform reported revenue, analytics revenue and what lands in the bank are three different figures, and they rarely agree. An agency with a measurement culture will tell you which one they report, why, and what its known gaps are. An agency selling theatre will say the word integrated and move on.

Two: tell me about something you advised a client not to spend

Any agency can spend money. The valuable ones stop you spending it badly. Ask for a real example of budget they handed back, a channel they recommended pausing, or a campaign they killed on the evidence. If every story ends with spend going up, you are hearing a sales history, not a management history.

Three: will your numbers agree with my accountant’s?

This is the quiet test most reporting fails. Marketing figures gross of VAT, on platform attribution, against bank reconciled reality will drift apart within a quarter, and the meeting where the owner notices is always uncomfortable. Agree the definition of revenue and profit before you sign, and expect reporting built to match it. We call this having one source of truth, and we consider it the foundation of everything else.

Four: who reads what my money actually bought?

In paid search, ask who reads the search terms. In SEO, ask who looks at the queries you were actually found for. Automation and AI now decide much of where budgets flow, and the platforms’ defaults favour the platforms. The protection is a named human whose job is to audit what was bought, on a schedule, with the findings shown to you. Ask for the name.

Five: what happens when AI answers instead of Google ranking?

Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI features for recommendations and receive a single written answer rather than a list of links. Ask a prospective agency what they are doing about it. You are not listening for buzzwords, you are listening for measurement. Can they tell you whether AI systems can read your site today, and can they prove a change moved the needle? We publish monthly research measuring exactly this across thousands of UK company websites, because we think the honest answer starts with a number, not an opinion.

The pattern behind all five

Each question has the same shape: it asks the agency to show its working. Good agencies in Bath and Bristol will enjoy these conversations, because rigour is what they sell. The ones who bristle have told you something useful too. Marketing spend is one of the few costs in your business that can be measured to the pound. Choose a partner who behaves as if that is true.

Nic Crane is the founder of The Crane Consultancy and works with businesses across Bath, Bristol and the South West on paid media, AI search and marketing measurement.

About The Crane Consultancy

Senior-led paid media, technical SEO, and web analytics. Removing agency fluff and junior hand-offs by having senior practitioners handle strategy, code, and platform execution directly.