How to audit the work a Singapore marketing agency did before you fire them

Run the audit while you still have access, and run it as evidence collection rather than as a judgement. The order is fixed: inventory who owns each account, export everything you will want later, read the change histories, reconcile the deliverables against the contract, settle the personal data handover, and only then serve notice. A business that serves notice first discovers that cooperation and access both decline on the same afternoon, and that the exports it needed were inside accounts it does not control.

This page gives the six steps, the handover letter to send, and the Singapore specific obligations that sit on top. It quotes a dated reading rather than a search volume, because the question belongs to a conversation with an assistant rather than to a search box.

Step one, the ownership inventory

One row per account, with three columns: what it is, whose name it is in, and who can grant access. Cover the domain registrar, DNS, hosting, the content management system, Search Console, analytics, tag management, every advertising platform, the Google Business Profile, the email sending platform, the CRM and any call tracking. The rows where the answer in column two is the agency are the rows that decide how the next fortnight goes.

Two of those rows are more urgent than the others. The domain, because a renewal inside somebody else's account is an outage waiting for a date. And primary ownership of the Business Profile, because a transfer requires the current owner to act and a departing owner has no incentive to hurry.

Step two, the exports to take now

• Search Console. Performance data for the full sixteen month window, queries and pages, exported rather than screenshotted.
• Analytics. The reports you actually quote, plus a raw export of conversions by source for the whole engagement.
• Advertising accounts. The change history, the search terms report, and the full spend by campaign by month.
• The content inventory. Every URL published or edited during the engagement, with publication dates.
• The link inventory. Every placement bought or earned in your name, with the URL it sits on.
• The commercial record. Contracts, variations, every invoice and every monthly report, because the reconciliation in step four is against these.
• The email and CRM data. Lists, suppression lists, templates and the automation logic, exported in a format that another supplier can load.

Step three, read the change histories rather than the reports

A monthly report is a description of the work. A change history is a record of it, written by the platform. The advertising account's own change log shows what was edited and on which day. Search Console shows when a sitemap was last submitted and what the coverage looked like over time. A content management system shows who published which page and when. Put the three beside twelve monthly reports and the gaps appear without anybody needing to argue about quality.

One specific check pays for the hour it takes. Count the pages published per month from the system, then compare that count with the count in the invoice or the proposal. This is the most common discrepancy in a search retainer and it is arithmetic rather than opinion.

Step four, reconcile the deliverables against what you bought

What the contract promised	Where the real number comes from	What a gap usually means
Pages published per month	The content management system, by publication date	Capacity went elsewhere, or approvals stalled and nobody flagged it
Keyphrases in scope	The named list in the proposal, checked against the pages that target them	Scope drifted toward terms that were easier to move
Links or placements	The link inventory, each one opened and read	Volume was bought on sites nobody in your category reads
Hours by named role	Timesheets, if the contract required them	Senior names sold the work and junior hands did it
Reporting cadence	Your own inbox	The relationship became a monthly slide rather than a programme

Judge the placements by whether anybody in your market would read them. Our own citation work on 16 October 2026, across 1,260 readings, found that 82 per cent of every citation recorded landed on a page belonging to a company or an agency itself and under 1 per cent on a review directory, which is a useful corrective to a link report full of unfamiliar hosts.

Step five, the personal data handover

Nothing here is legal advice, and a specific question belongs with a Singapore lawyer. The practical position is that your customer list, your enquiry records and your call recordings are personal data, and Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act places the obligations on the organisation that collected them. Three things to settle in writing before the engagement ends.

• Return. Which datasets come back, in which format, and by when.
• Deletion. What the supplier deletes afterwards, including copies inside its own tools and any spreadsheet on a laptop, with written confirmation.
• Telemarketing records. If the engagement involved calls or texts to Singapore numbers, the Do Not Call checking records matter. The registry's own site states that organisations must check with the registry before sending telemarketing messages to Singapore numbers, with effect from 2 January 2014, and that an organisation applies for a DNC Checking Account for the purpose. Read on dnc.gov.sg on 27 October 2026. Ask whose account was used and ask for the check records.

Step six, the notice and the handover letter

Serve notice in writing, to the entity named in the contract rather than to a person, and attach the handover list. Check the entity on ACRA first, because a trading name on a proposal and a registered company on an invoice are frequently not the same thing and the contract binds the company.

Ten items in the letter, each with a date against it.

1. Transfer of primary ownership on the Business Profile.
2. Administrator access on analytics and tag management, to a named email at your domain.
3. Search Console verification moved to your own domain property.
4. Advertising accounts transferred, with billing moved and the change history intact.
5. Domain, DNS and hosting credentials, with any registrar lock removed.
6. Content management system administrator credentials, with the agency's users to be removed on the final day.
7. The content and link inventories as files.
8. Email platform data, including suppression lists, and the sending domain authentication records.
9. Any design or source files for work you paid for, in editable formats.
10. Written confirmation of deletion of personal data after return.

What the assistants cited when asked this question

On 26 October 2026 we ran 64 blind pipelines across 32 batches on ChatGPT and Gemini with Singapore written into every prompt. The batch that carried this question named Semrush in one of its two readings, and our own name appeared zero times across all 32 blind batches. Of the 20 hosts cited in that batch, eight carried a Singapore domain, and six of those eight were government sites: the privacy regulator, the media and digital ministry, the media development authority, the Do Not Call Registry and Singapore Statutes Online. An engine answering an offboarding question with statute and registries is pointing a buyer at material that can be checked, which is more than most agency exit advice offers.

Questions about leaving a Singapore marketing agency

Can the agency hold my accounts hostage

Access can be slow walked, which is why the inventory and the exports come before the notice. Where an account was opened in your company's name, the platform's own verification route usually restores control without the agency's cooperation. Where it was opened in theirs, the recovery is a negotiation, which is the strongest argument for fixing ownership at the start of every engagement.

How long should the audit take

A week of part time work for a small programme. The inventory is an afternoon, the exports are an afternoon, and the reconciliation is where the time goes because it involves reading the pages and the placements rather than counting them.

Should I tell the agency I am auditing the work

Ask for the inventories as a normal part of a review and most suppliers will provide them, because a well run engagement already has them. If a request for a list of published pages produces resistance, you have learned the most useful thing available at this stage.

What if the audit shows the work was fine and the results were not

That is a real outcome and it changes the decision. Delivery against a scope that was never going to move the business is a scoping failure, and a new supplier running the same scope will produce the same result. Rewrite the scope before you shortlist, around the enquiries you want rather than the activities you bought.

Do I need a lawyer to exit a marketing retainer

For a standard monthly retainer with a stated notice period, usually not. For anything with an automatic renewal, a minimum term with a termination fee, or a dispute about ownership of the work product, take the contract to a Singapore lawyer before serving notice rather than after.

The one artefact nobody asks the departing agency for

Everything above recovers what happened. What no handover letter in this market currently asks for is a dated reading of what the five answer surfaces said about your category during the engagement, which would tell you whether twelve months of publishing changed the sentence a buyer is read when they ask who to hire. Almost nobody has that file, so take the reading yourself on the day the audit starts and keep it as the baseline for whoever comes next. AI Knows Us produces that reading across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, keeps named and cited as two separate rows, and the first one at aiknowsus.com needs no account, which makes it the cheapest line in the whole exit.