Your retainer buys hours. Somebody should be counting them.
Marketing is sold on outcomes and delivered as effort, and almost nobody measures the effort. Connect your analytics and your website and askotter counts the changes that actually shipped on your account last month — then divides your invoice by the hours behind them. Whatever that number turns out to be, it is the honest start of the conversation.
ROI is not the argument. The rate is.
ROI never resolves, because nobody can prove what your traffic would have done otherwise. So the conversation runs on faith and lasts for years. Effort is different: a change either shipped or it did not, it carries a date, and it can be counted. Divide what you paid by the hours behind it and you get a number that needs no interpretation at all.
Not sure? Most people are not — that is the whole problem, and it is what the audit answers. Move it to what you can name off the top of your head: pages that changed, ads that were rewritten, things you were shown.
At $3,000 an hour, thirty minutes of work costs you $1,500 — and the same $1,500 buys five months of askotter at $300/mo. That is not a complaint about the price. $1,500 for twelve hours of good work is a fine trade, and plenty of agencies deliver exactly that. $1,500 for thirty minutes is not a pricing problem either. It is an opportunity cost: it is the month you did not get.
Arithmetic on the two numbers you set above, nothing else. askotter does not know your account until you connect it — and once you do, the hours stop being something you estimate.
Two retainers. Same invoice. One of them worked.
This is what the difference looks like when you draw it instead of arguing about it: one month, thirty days, every change plotted on the day it shipped. Both businesses paid the same. Watch where the marks are, and where they are not.
day 30WordPress plugins updated
day 30month-end report written and sent
Same invoice. Same month. Same business. Retainer A costs 26× more per hour of work than Retainer B — and no report either of them sends would tell you that, because reports are written about results, and this is a question about effort.
Both months are illustrative, not a specific client. The shape is not: a coasting account is quiet for three weeks and busy in invoice week, and that pattern is visible in a change log long before it is visible in the traffic.
How we can possibly know.
Fair question, and it deserves a specific answer rather than a promise. The audit does not ask anyone how long they spent. It reads the systems the work lands in, finds the changes, and dates them. Connect as few or as many as you like — the more sources, the fewer blind spots.
Google Analytics
When tracking last changed, which pages started or stopped receiving traffic, and whether conversion events still fire.
Search Console
New URLs submitted, pages reindexed after an edit, and query movement that follows a change rather than preceding it.
Your live site
A crawl of every page, re-run daily. Copy edits, new pages, removed pages, title and schema changes — diffed, with a timestamp.
WordPress
Post and page revisions with the author attached, plus plugin and theme updates.
GitHub
Pushes, pull requests and deploys, if any of the work is done in a repo.
Google Ads
Budget, keyword, bid and ad copy edits, and the date each one was made.
Meta Ads
Creative swaps and audience edits, with the account they were made from.
And what the audit does not count.
- Strategy calls, research and thinking time. All real work, none of it visible in a system, none of it counted here.
- Reporting and account management, unless the report itself changed something on your site.
- Anything done in a tool you have not connected.
- Effort that went into a change and then got thrown away. Only what shipped is counted.
Which is why the number the audit gives you is a floor, not a verdict. Take it to whoever runs your marketing and ask them to fill in the rest. If they can, you have a good one. If the answer is a report, you have your answer too.
The audit is free. So is finding out.
Tell us the site, then sign in and connect the sources. Access is read-only, we set it up with you, nothing in your accounts changes, and you can disconnect any source at any moment. The first audit covers the last thirty days.
A good agency should want this pointed at them.
Nothing on this page is an argument against agencies. It is an argument against unmeasured work, which is a problem for the good ones more than anyone: if effort is invisible, a team shipping thirty changes a month is priced against a team shipping two, and the client cannot tell the difference until they leave. A change log ends that. It is the receipt for the work you are already doing.
The questions people ask first.
Including the awkward ones.
How do you know how much time my agency spent?
We do not, and we do not claim to. We count what shipped, not what was worked. The audit reads your analytics, your search data and your live site and lists every change it can see, with the date it happened. Then it attaches a conservative time estimate to each one — the time that change would take a competent person to make. Hours on task is the sum of those estimates. If your agency spent three hours thinking about a change that took twenty minutes to ship, the audit will say twenty minutes. That is the floor, not the ceiling.
What if my agency is doing work the audit cannot see?
Then it is invisible to you too, and that is worth knowing. Strategy calls, research, reporting and account management are real work and the audit does not count any of it. Neither does anything done in a tool you have not connected. So treat the number as the visible floor and ask your agency to fill in the rest. A good one will have an answer ready; that conversation is the point of the audit.
Is this just an anti-agency pitch?
No. Plenty of agencies earn their retainer several times over, and this audit is the only thing that tells them apart from the one coasting down the street. If yours ships steadily, the audit says so in writing and you should keep them. askotter also works alongside an agency — the platform is $49/mo on its own and included free with any service.
What does it cost and what do you do with the data?
The audit is free and there is no card. Access is read-only, we set it up with you on a call, nothing in your accounts changes, and you can disconnect any source at any moment. We do not sell or share your data. The full detail is in our privacy policy.
How long does the first audit take?
Connecting takes about ten minutes. The first audit covers the last thirty days and arrives within two business days, because a human reads it before you do. After that it updates continuously and you can open the change log whenever you want.
Find out what last month actually bought.
Free, read-only, and set up with you. Whatever it says, you will know — which is more than a report will ever tell you.
Run the free audit