Your retainer buys hours. Somebody should be counting them.
Almost nobody measures the effort a marketing retainer buys. Connect your analytics and your website and askotter counts the changes that 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.
The rate is the number that settles it.
ROI never resolves, because nobody can prove what your traffic would have done otherwise. So the conversation runs on faith and lasts for years.
Why effort settles itShow less
Effort is different: a change either shipped or it did not, and each one carries a date. Divide what you paid by the hours behind the changes and you get a number that needs no interpretation at all.
Not sure? Most people are not, and the audit exists to answer it. Set it to what you can name off the top of your head: pages that changed, ads that were rewritten.
At $3,000 an hour, thirty minutes of work costs you $1,500, and the same $1,500 buys fifteen months of askotter at $99/mo. $1,500 for twelve hours of good work is a fine trade, and plenty of agencies deliver exactly that. $1,500 for thirty minutes carries an opportunity cost: it is the month of work 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 on the same invoice. One of them worked.
One month, drawn out: thirty days, with every change plotted on the day it shipped. Both businesses paid the same. Watch where the marks fall.
day 30WordPress plugins updated
day 30month-end report written and sent
Both lanes show the same invoice over the same month. Retainer A costs 26× more per hour of work than Retainer B. The change log is the only place that difference shows up, because monthly reports summarise results and skip the effort behind them.
Both months are illustrative examples. The shape comes from real change logs: a coasting account is quiet for three weeks and busy in invoice week, and that pattern appears in a change log long before it reaches the traffic numbers.
How we can possibly know.
Fair question, and it deserves a specific answer. The audit does not ask anyone how long they spent.
What it readsShow less
It reads the systems the work lands in and dates every change it finds. 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, all 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: real work that never lands in a system, so the audit leaves it out.
- 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.
So the number the audit gives you is a floor. Take it to whoever runs your marketing and ask them to fill in the rest. A good agency will have specifics ready.
The audit is free, and connecting takes about ten minutes.
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.
This page argues against unmeasured work, which is a problem for the good agencies 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.
What a change log does for youShow less
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?
What if my agency is doing work the audit cannot see?
Is this just an anti-agency pitch?
What does it cost and what do you do with the data?
How long does the first audit take?
Find out what last month bought.
Free, read-only, and set up with you. Whatever it says, you will know where you stand.
Self-managed is $99/mo and scales with the compute you use. Our team runs it from $600/mo.