Insights · Due diligence

Five things to check before you book a marketing agency: all of them public, none of them a testimonial.

Romaan Sheikh, Director · September 2026 · 5 min read

Every agency website says the same three things: results, partnership, passion. None of them can be checked from your desk. The five things below can. Each one is a public record or a visible line on the agency's own site, and each one takes about two minutes. We run them on ourselves at the end of this piece, with the links, so you can see what a pass looks like and hold us to it.

1 · The company number

A limited company in the UK has a number at Companies House, and the register is free to search. The site should show it in the footer or on the contact page. Look up the number and read three things: the incorporation date, whether accounts are up to date, and whether the trading name on the website matches the registered name or is declared as a trading name. A studio that hides its number is not necessarily hiding something, but a studio that shows it has nothing to hide.

2 · The ICO registration

Any UK business that processes personal data for marketing should be registered with the Information Commissioner's Office. That includes running your ad account, handling your enquiry forms and touching your customer lists. The ICO register is public and searchable by name or registration number. If an agency wants access to your customer data and is not on the register, ask why before you hand over a login.

3 · Prices you can read without a call

Bespoke pricing is sometimes genuine and often a sales technique. Fixed-scope work, a website with a known number of pages, a set of ads with a set budget, a monthly care plan, can be priced in public. If the site publishes a price for at least the entry-level work, the agency has decided what its time is worth and is willing to be compared. If every path leads to "book a discovery call", the price will be set after they have measured you.

4 · Work you can click

A screenshot proves a design existed once. A link proves it is live and working. For websites, click through to the real domain and check it on your phone. For ads, ask for the ad library listing rather than a slide. For content, ask for the channel. The pattern to watch for is a portfolio where nothing links out, or where the links go to sites that no longer resemble the screenshot.

5 · The number agreed before the work

This is the one that separates a marketing agency from a design studio. Before anything is built, is there a written statement of what the work is meant to move, by how much, and by when? Enquiries per month, booked calls, cost per lead, sign-ups. A studio that agrees the number first has to report against it. A studio that agrees it afterwards can always find a number that went up.

Run it on us

Company number 15728873, registered as LOVE YOURS RECORDINGS LTD, trading as Love Yours Media, Manchester. ICO registration ZC059949. Prices are on the websites page and the services page, and the live sites we have built are linked from the work page. The number comes first: our enquiry form asks what you want to move before it asks anything else, and every engagement reports against it monthly in plain English.

None of these checks tell you whether an agency is good. They tell you whether it is real, whether it is accountable, and whether it is willing to be measured. That is the right order to find out in.