How to Audit a Content Agency: The 100-Point Scorecard

Auditing a content agency means scoring its deliverables, not its sales pitch. The method has three levels: assets (who owns the rushes, the rights and the ad accounts?), production (cost per usable creative, cadence, brief-to-delivery lead time) and creative performance (hook rate, share of winning creatives, CPA attributed at creative level). Allow 30 days, seven precise data requests, and a scorecard out of 100 with thresholds set before you look at the results. A useful clarification: this article is about the agency you already have, not the one you are looking for. The sums involved justify this rigour: according to the SRI and UDECAM’s 35th e-advertising Observatory, the French digital advertising market reached €12.4 billion in 2025 (+11%), driven notably by Social and Video.

Auditing your website, your content or your agency: what are you really looking for?

Four different things hide behind the word “audit”, and three of them have nothing to do with your supplier. If you type “how to audit a content agency” into Google, the first page mostly offers website audits and SEO content audits. That is not ill will, it is a vocabulary collision. The word “content” refers both to a stock of blog articles and to an agency that produces vertical videos.

Let’s sort this out in thirty seconds.

If you are in the last row, stop here: the official service-public.fr page on auditing a business being acquired covers your case better than we can. The rest of this article is about one thing only: the company that invoices you every month to produce your vertical videos, and how to check what it is worth.

A note on the general method, though. Website audit guides, such as the one from La Fabrique du Net, follow the same logic: collect tool-based data (technical, SEO, UX), then prioritise by impact and effort. The logic is sound. We take it as is, except that we apply it to a supplier rather than a technical asset: collect objective data, compare it against thresholds, prioritise.

What signals should trigger an audit of your content agency?

The most reliable trigger is not a drop in ROAS, it is your inability to answer one simple question: how much does a usable creative cost you? If you don’t know, nobody in the chain is steering. Neither you nor them.

Here are the eight signals we find, in this order of seriousness, at brands that call us after an agency breakup:

• You can’t say how much a creative that has actually gone live costs. You know the retainer amount, and that’s all.
• Reports open with views, impressions and an “engagement rate”. Conversions arrive on page 6, aggregated at campaign level.
• Cadence has dropped, the budget hasn’t. Six videos in January, three in June, same invoice.
• The same three concepts have been running for six months with edit variations. That is creative fatigue disguised as iteration.
• You have never received a single raw rush. Only exported MP4s, ready to run, impossible to re-edit.
• The ad account sits with the agency, and you access it “as a partner”.
• The creative director from the pitch hasn’t attended a meeting for four months. Million Marketing noted in August 2026 that some agency models explicitly exclude junior profiles from strategic accounts; it has become a sales argument because substitution is so widespread.
• You have a publishing calendar. You don’t have a testing calendar.

Three signals or more on this list: launch the full audit. One or two: the light quarterly audit is enough.

How often, really?

The market orthodoxy, echoed notably by Luneos, is an audit every 6 to 12 months. For SEO content, that holds up. For vertical video, twelve months represent three full cycles of creative fatigue. We have seen Meta accounts where the same lead creative had carried 60% of spend for twenty weeks, with a CPA multiplied by 2.4 over the period, and a monthly report that didn’t show it because it aggregated everything at ad set level.

Our recommendation: a light audit every quarter (four figures, forty minutes) and an annual full audit (the 100-point scorecard below). The four figures for the quarterly audit: number of distinct concepts delivered, number actually run, median hook rate, share of spend carried by creative no. 1.

What data should you request from your agency, and within what timeframe?

Seven requests are enough, and the response time for each is worth as much as the response itself. This is the part of the audit nobody details, even though everything hinges on it. Communications audit guides describe the “data collection” stage well; e-marketing.fr was already presenting it as a central step in May 2023, but none of them says what to ask for, or how long it should take.

We know, because we’re on the side that receives these emails. A creative-level Meta export over 12 months is four clicks and three minutes of waiting. An agency that takes ten days isn’t “compiling”: it’s cleaning up.

Send all seven in a single, dated email, with the stated deadlines. Not one a week. The bundling is part of the test: it reveals the agency’s ability to organise itself far better than a meeting.

The seven requests above are things we make available to our clients without their having to ask: creative-level export accessible continuously, rushes dropped on their drive after every shoot, creator contracts shared, accounts opened in their name from day one. Writing this article commits us to answering them ourselves within 48 hours. It is the only honest way to publish an audit scorecard when you are on the audited side.

How do you score production: cost per creative, cadence and delivery lead time?

Three metrics are enough to score the production of a video content agency, and none of the three is the price of a video. Unit price is the easiest figure to negotiate and the least informative. A €350 video that never goes live costs infinity.

1. Cost per usable creative

Formula: the month’s production budget ÷ number of creatives actually put live in an ad account. Not delivered. Put live. The denominator changes everything. On the accounts we take over from other agencies, the gap between delivered and run is commonly between 20 and 40%; in other words, between one fifth and two fifths of production is invoiced and never reaches a user. We have no public statistic on this, nobody publishes this figure, but it is the most revealing gap we measure. The detailed calculation method, including the move to cost per winning creative, is covered elsewhere on this blog; here we keep only the scoring thresholds.

2. Cadence in distinct concepts

A distinct concept is a different advertising angle: promise, format, character, narrative structure. Three hooks cut from the same rushes are not three concepts, they are one concept and two variants. Agencies often count variants as new creatives. This is the first line to correct in your table, and it often halves the advertised cadence.

3. Brief → V1 lead time and number of rounds

Everyone tracks lead time. Almost nobody tracks rounds of revisions, yet that is where your internal hours go. A batch that goes back for corrections three times easily consumes a person-day on the brand side, invisible in the agency budget, very real in your P&L. Ask your team how many hours a month they spend on corrections. The answer often skews every price calculation you have been shown.

These thresholds apply to an e-commerce account with continuous delivery and a monthly media budget in five figures. For a brand that pushes four campaigns a year, the expected cadence makes no sense and the scoring needs recalibrating. This is the kind of nuance that ready-made scorecards overlook.

A word on vanity metrics, because this is where the market has moved. Million Marketing pointed out in April 2026 the limits of traditional KPIs and the shift of mature organisations towards more advanced measurement models. Applied to auditing a creative supplier, this gives a simple rule: only score an agency on what it controls. It controls the hook. It does not control your basket conversion rate.

Is it the creative or the delivery that is failing?

Separating creative from media means reading the video funnel in order: impressions, 3-second view, 75% view, click, conversion. Each drop-off points to a different owner. Without this reading, a content agency audit turns into a witch hunt: the brand blames the creative, the agency blames the targeting, and nobody settles it.

The point that most of the audits we review leave out: placements. On Meta as on TikTok, automatic placements crop your verticals and sometimes serve them in environments where 9:16 gets butchered. Ask for the breakdown by placement. If your agency has never looked at it, you have just found a cause of underperformance that has nothing to do with edit quality. On the platform side, vertical remains the reference format, though: the TikTok Ads Manager help centre (updated June 2026) recommends a 9:16 vertical format of at least 540 x 960 pixels for Non-Spark In-Feed ads.

Another nuance that works against us as an agency: in roughly one in three files submitted to us for a pre-audit, the problem is not the creative. It is a landing page that takes four seconds to load, an undifferentiated offer, or a badly wired pixel. Changing content agency in those cases means paying again for a full production for an identical result. If your hook rates are decent and your videos die after the click, keep your agency and fix the funnel. For the hook diagnosis itself, we have detailed the 8 hook structures that stop the scroll in 3 seconds.

Who really owns your content, your rights and your accounts?

This is the heaviest block of the scorecard (25 points out of 100) because it is the only one where mistakes are irreversible. A bad creative is redone in ten days. Lost rushes are lost. Expired image rights on a video that is running means a potential formal notice and an immediate takedown.

Three categories to check, in this order.

The files

Raw rushes, source edit projects (Premiere, After Effects, CapCut), licensed music with proof of licence, graphic assets. The test: ask for last March’s video to be reworked with a new call to action. If the agency offers to “redo it”, the sources no longer exist.

The rights

For each UGC creator: assignment duration, territory, media covered, and above all an explicit mention of paid media. A “social networks, 6 months” assignment does not cover an 18-month ad run, and many brands find this out when they take their assets back. We have detailed what an assignment really covers in our article on the cost of a UGC video and its usage rights; here, keep the checklist: duration, territory, media, paid, exclusivity, right to modify. For creators paid for commercial influence, Service Public points out that a decree of 28 November 2025 requires a written contract above a threshold of €1,000 excluding tax per year and per advertiser.

The accounts

Business Manager, ad account, pixel, product catalogue, custom audiences, TikTok Business account. The pixel is the one people forget: if it belongs to the agency’s BM, your conversion history leaves with it, and you restart algorithmic learning from zero. Sodigix reminded readers in July 2026 that non-transferable or opaque ad accounts are among the signs that should raise an alarm. That is true, and it is measurable.

The 48-hour test: send a request for owner admin access to your Business Manager. A healthy agency does it the same day; it’s three clicks. An agency that replies “we’ll check with legal” has just given you the conclusion of your audit before you have even opened a spreadsheet.

On the contract side, four clauses to reread tonight: reversibility (return of assets within X days), notice period, ownership of creations (full assignment or simple licence to use?), what happens to content in the event of a breakup. If the ownership clause talks about a “licence to use”, you do not own your videos. You are renting them. For your direct contracts with influencers, the Blog du Modérateur specified in January 2026 that the clause on the parties’ rights and obligations may include intellectual property rights, rights to exploit the content, or exclusivity clauses.

Should you audit in-house or call in a third party?

Having your agency audited by an agency that covets the budget produces a prosecution report by design, ourselves included. Better to say so before offering a scorecard: we are a video content agency. If we audited your current supplier hoping to replace them, our judgement would be biased, however good our faith.

The rule we apply, and that we advise you to impose in writing: the auditor contractually agrees not to pitch for the budget for six months after delivering the report. Otherwise they are not an auditor, they are a candidate.

Three possible modes:

• Tool-assisted self-audit. You, a spreadsheet, the seven requests and the scorecard. Free, honest, but blind to what is “normal” in the market. You will know your hook rate is 22%, without knowing whether that’s good.
• Independent creative strategy consultant. The best balance of quality and neutrality when they don’t produce video themselves. This is the mode we recommend most often.
• Competing agency. Useful for production benchmarks, provided you read the report knowing who is writing it and why.

Le Journal de l’Agence notes that large networks favour external audits coupled with satisfaction surveys. Transpose the second part internally: ask your own teams. How many hours a month spent correcting deliverables? How many chasers to get a report? How many times have you given up asking for a change because it took too long? That cost appears on no invoice and sometimes amounts to half a full-time position.

The budget for an external audit varies too much with scope for us to put forward an honest figure. What we observe: a serious audit on a mid-sized account represents between three and eight days of actual work. Do the maths from the day rate of the profile you hire, and be wary of “free” audits delivered in 48 hours: that is a sales document, not an audit.

How do you score out of 100, and what do you do with the result?

Four blocks of 25 points, thresholds set before looking at the data, and a decision rule written down before the first calculation. The order matters: if you score after seeing the results, you will unconsciously adjust the thresholds to justify the decision you had already made.

Each criterion is scored 0, 2 or 4 points depending on whether it is red, amber or green (round the block up to 25). Simple, repeatable year after year and, above all, comparable between two suppliers.

The decision rule

• 75 and above → renegotiate at the margin. The agency is good. Graine de Pub wrote in early 2026 that an audit sometimes reveals you don’t need to do more, but to do more precisely: this is exactly that case. Reallocate, tighten the test plan, change nothing else.
• 50 to 74 → restructure. New written scope, creative-level KPIs, a 90-day probationary period with three dated milestones. If the milestones are not met, the decision has already been made.
• Below 50 with recoverable assets → replace, with a 45-day transition plan. This is where evaluating the replacement comes in: we have documented our protocol for auditing a new agency in 30 days.
• Below 50 with blocked assets → sequence. Recover first, announce afterwards. Never warn of the breakup before you have the access in hand: handover times mysteriously lengthen after the announcement.

A fourth outcome exists and nobody offers it because it sells nothing: not taking on another agency. Depending on the maturity of your teams and your monthly volume, in-house editing with a pool of freelance creators can beat a retainer. The costed comparison is in our decision grid: video agency or in-house team. We lose contracts because of that article. So be it.

The three transition mistakes that cost two months of delivery

• Cutting delivery during the switchover. The algorithm goes back into a learning phase (Meta closes it after around fifty optimisation events): expect several days of unstable performance, more on small volumes. Keep the old stock running while the new one is produced.
• Retrieving MP4 exports without the source projects. You will no longer be able to adapt them, or change a price on screen.
• Forgetting the pixel and the audiences. They are not rebuilt, they are re-accumulated, and that takes months.

One last point, which is not a summary. The best time to prepare an audit is at signing. The seven requests in this guide, put them in the initial contract, with the deadlines and the reporting formats. An agency that agrees to commit to this in writing has just told you the essentials about how it works, and you will never have to run the audit in an emergency, on a Friday evening, because ROAS has collapsed and nobody knows why. Our 12 questions to ask before signing cover this upstream phase.

Frequently asked questions

How often should you audit a content agency?

The market recommends an audit every 6 to 12 months, a cycle echoed notably by Luneos. For vertical video, twelve months represent three cycles of creative fatigue. Our practice: a light audit each quarter on four figures (concepts delivered, concepts run, median hook rate, share of spend on creative no. 1) and the full 100-point scorecard once a year.

How long does a content agency audit take?

Thirty days, of which about ten are spent waiting for data. Allow 48 hours for the ad exports, five days for creator contracts and the cost breakdown, ten days for rushes and source projects. The rest is processing: scoring, internal interviews, decision. An audit delivered in 48 hours is a sales document, not an audit.

Can you audit an agency without access to its ad account?

No. Without a creative-level export, you can calculate neither hook rate, nor share of winning creatives, nor CPA attributed to the creative. You are left scoring only what is declared. A refusal of owner admin access to the Business Manager is a conclusion in itself: Sodigix ranked non-transferable accounts among the major warning signals in July 2026.

Can a tool automate the audit of a content agency?

Partially. Exports, cost-per-creative calculations and ratios can be scripted very well. No tool judges a hook, tells you whether a concept is distinct from an edit variation, or whether a creator embodies the brand. Manual review by someone who has produced vertical video remains the part of the exercise that cannot be automated.

My agency refuses to hand over the raw rushes. What can I do?

Three steps, in this order. One: reread the clause on ownership of creations and send a dated written request relying on it. Two: if the silence lasts beyond ten days, freeze the media budget before sending a formal notice. Three: organise the transition without announcing the breakup until the access and files are in your possession.

What is a free audit offered by an agency worth?

It is an acquisition tool, built to find problems the agency knows how to solve. There are two cases where it remains useful: getting an external production benchmark, and having someone say out loud figures your current supplier has never produced. At the very least, require the auditor to agree in writing not to pitch for the budget for six months.