How to Audit Your Cannabis Marketing Agency (2026)
You do not need to be a specialist to tell whether your agency is doing real work. Nine checks, most of them free, that expose the difference between activity and results.
Audit your cannabis marketing agency on evidence rather than reporting. Check that you own the accounts, that conversions being reported are real actions rather than sessions, that content published in the period is findable in search, that the site is actually indexed, that compliance risk has been identified rather than ignored, and that the agency has ever told you not to do something. Most of these checks take under an hour and require no specialist knowledge. Reporting that improves while orders do not is the signal that matters.
Key takeaways
- Account ownership is the first check, and the one most often wrong.
- A conversion that is not a call, form, order or direction request is not a conversion.
- Published content that cannot be found in search was not really published.
- An agency that has never advised against something has not been protecting you.
Why cannabis makes this harder
In most industries a bad agency is visible in the numbers within a quarter. In cannabis three things obscure that.
Attribution leaks more. Restricted channels, age gates, third-party menus and offline purchase mean the path from search to sale breaks in more places. That gives weak agencies cover: everything can be blamed on measurement.
Baselines are low. When a site starts near zero, any movement looks like a percentage triumph. A jump from three impressions to thirty is a 900% improvement and commercially meaningless.
Compliance work is invisible when done well. Nothing happening is the correct outcome, which makes it easy to charge for and easy to skip.
So the audit has to look at process evidence and absolute numbers, not at percentage changes in a slide deck.
Nine checks you can run yourself
- Do you own the accounts? Google Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile, the ad account and the domain registrar should be in your name with the agency granted access. If any is owned by the agency, fix that before anything else. This is the single most common and most damaging arrangement in the industry.
- What is being counted as a conversion? Open the analytics property and look at the conversion definitions. If they are page views, sessions, scroll depth or time on page, you are being reported activity dressed as outcome. Real conversions are calls, form submissions, orders, direction requests and reservations.
- Is the site actually indexed? In Search Console, Pages, compare indexed against not indexed. A large “crawled — currently not indexed” count means content is being produced that Google is declining to use.
- Can you find this month’s content? Take a distinctive sentence from a page published in the last 60 days and search it in quotes. Nothing returned means it is not indexed, and an unindexed article is an invoice line rather than an asset.
- Is the menu indexable? Take a product name from your menu and search it with your brand. If your own site does not appear, your most commercial pages are invisible — and if the agency has not raised this, they have not looked.
- Does the age gate block crawlers? Ask whether it has been tested. This is a five-minute check that decides whether anything else works.
- Has anyone identified compliance risk? Ask for the list of claims, pages or tactics they have flagged. An empty list on a cannabis site means nobody read it.
- Has the agency ever told you not to do something? If not in a year of work in this category, they are order-takers.
- Are absolute numbers moving? Not percentages. Calls per month, orders per month, qualified enquiries per month. Ask for twelve months of absolute figures on one chart.
Reading the report you already get
| If the report leads with | It usually means | Ask instead for |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions and reach | Nothing is converting | Calls, forms and orders in absolute numbers |
| Keyword rankings only | Rankings are not producing traffic | Clicks and conversions from those terms |
| Percentage growth without a base | The base is tiny | The absolute figures for both periods |
| Activity counts — posts, articles, hours | Output is being sold as outcome | What each item was supposed to achieve, and whether it did |
| Traffic without segmentation | Brand and non-brand are being blended | Non-brand organic separated out |
| Social engagement | The measurable channels are flat | Whether social produced any tracked action |
How to raise it without blowing up the relationship
Publisher disclosure and method
Cannabis Leaders publishes this comparison. No company paid for inclusion, none was excluded for declining to pay, and the entries are not ranked by performance.
Every statement about a third party is taken from that company’s own public website, reviewed on August 16, 2026. Self-descriptions are reported as self-descriptions, not as verified fact.
Cannabis Leaders is an agency, and this article is a guide to auditing agencies including us. If you run these checks on our work and they fail, that is a legitimate reason to leave.
Most underperforming engagements are recoverable, and replacing an agency costs three to six months of momentum. So the first conversation should be diagnostic rather than adversarial.
Send the checks above as questions, in writing, with a reasonable deadline. A capable agency will answer most of them within a day, concede one or two, and propose fixes. A weak one will reply with a meeting request and no written answers.
The response itself is the diagnostic. Written, specific and partly self-critical means keep working. Defensive, vague or escalating to a call means start planning the transition — and read the contract before you say anything else.
Sources and methodology
Company facts were read directly from each organisation’s public website on August 16, 2026. Regulatory statements follow the primary sources below. Where a company describes itself, that is reported as a self-description.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my cannabis marketing agency is doing real work?
Check evidence rather than reporting. Confirm you own the accounts, look at how conversions are defined, verify that recent content is indexed and findable, check whether your menu is indexable, and ask what compliance risk has been flagged. Most of these take under an hour and need no specialist knowledge.
Who should own the Google Ads and Search Console accounts?
You should, with the agency granted access. Agency-owned accounts mean that leaving costs you historical data, conversion configuration and sometimes the ad account itself. If any account is currently owned by the agency, transferring ownership is the first thing to fix, before any performance discussion.
What counts as a real conversion for a cannabis business?
Actions with commercial meaning: phone calls, form submissions, online orders, reservations and direction requests. Page views, sessions, scroll depth and time on page are engagement signals, not conversions. If your reported conversion number is built on those, the reported improvement does not correspond to revenue.
Should I fire an underperforming cannabis marketing agency?
Not immediately. Replacing an agency typically costs three to six months of momentum, and many engagements are recoverable. Send your questions in writing with a deadline and judge the reply: written, specific, partly self-critical answers mean it is worth continuing, while defensiveness and meeting requests instead of answers mean it is time to plan a transition.
This article provides marketing information, not legal or medical advice. Company details change; verify current services, locations and claims directly with each organisation. Verify current platform policies and applicable federal, provincial and local requirements before acting. To request a correction, see our Corrections and Updates Policy.
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