Remember when agency reviews were just a handshake and a phone call?

I swear people these days overthink agency reviews so much. They look at all these metrics and case studies and forget the basics. Back in 2018 when I was working with a small digital shop in Austin, we landed a client because the owner just asked us honest questions about our process, not our portfolio stats. Now everyone is obsessed with checking off boxes like "did they use the right keywords" or "how many testimonials do they have." I see reviewers getting hung up on things that don't really matter, like a typo in an email or a delayed response, while totally ignoring if the agency actually understood their business goals. Last month I saw someone trash a solid agency just because their proposal template wasn't fancy enough. How do you decide what actually matters in a review without getting lost in all the noise?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_wells463d ago

Yeah, I was just reading about this in a marketing newsletter that said some agencies are actually starting to turn down clients who focus too much on the wrong stuff. Makes sense, because I saw this one review where someone trashed a great little agency because their website loaded slow, but they completely ignored that the agency had tripled their last client's leads in three months. People get so caught up in surface level stuff like email response times or how shiny the deck looks, they forget to ask the real question: did this agency actually move the needle for their clients? A typo doesn't cost you money, but missing your target market sure does.

stella9043d agoTop Commenter

Kevin probably charged them per typo and made bank, lol.