How to check whether your agency is really responsible for the leads it is claiming

An agency claiming 180 leads and a sales team saying the phone was quiet are usually both telling the truth. The agency is counting platform conversions, which fire when somebody submits a form, taps a call button or opens a chat. The business is counting people it spoke to who wanted to buy. Those two counts are never the same number, and the gap between them is not dishonesty, it is a definition problem that nobody wrote down at the start. A reconciliation closes it, and once you have run one you can run it monthly in under an hour.

The method below is for an Indian business where a good share of enquiries arrive by phone and WhatsApp, which is where almost every published attribution method breaks down.

The four counts, and why they are all different

The reconciliation, step by step

• Ask for the claimed list, not the total. One row per lead, with the date and time, the campaign, the channel and whatever identifier was captured. A total with no list cannot be reconciled and the request itself is reasonable.
• Export your own side for the same window. Form submissions from the website, the CRM records created, the call log for the tracked numbers, and the business chat account. One spreadsheet, one row per enquiry.
• Match on time first, identifier second. Phone numbers are the most reliable key in India and they are entered inconsistently, so strip spaces, strip the country code and compare the last ten digits.
• De-duplicate properly. The same person filling a form and then calling is one enquiry. Count it once and note that it took two touches.
• Mark four buckets. Matched on both sides, claimed but not received, received but not claimed, and received and unclaimable because nobody can tell where it came from.
• Compute the verified rate. Matched divided by claimed. That single percentage is the number to carry into the review meeting.

What each of the four buckets is telling you

• Claimed but not received. Usually a conversion action counted on a tap rather than a connection, a form that failed before it reached your inbox, or a modelled conversion. Check the broken form first, because that one costs real money.
• Received but not claimed. Good news that gets mistaken for bad. These are enquiries arriving through channels nobody tagged, usually direct visits, a phone call from a search result, or somebody who was told your name. The agency is under claiming and your cost per lead is better than the report says.
• Unclaimable. This is the bucket to shrink. Every enquiry that lands with no recorded source is a rupee of spend you cannot judge. One question on the enquiry form or one question on the call, asked the same way every time, fixes most of it.
• Matched. The honest denominator. Cost per lead computed on this number is a figure you can take to a budget decision.

The attribution argument, settled in two sentences

The agency will say that last click attribution hides the campaigns that started the journey, and that is a fair point. The way to hold both is to judge spend on matched enquiries and judge channel mix on a model you both agreed in writing, rather than letting the model decide the invoice. Our page on multi touch attribution tools and the four models Google stopped supporting covers what each model does and which ones no longer exist, which matters because a report built on a retired model is a report built on nothing.

The three Indian specifics that change the arithmetic

• A call is an enquiry and most systems cannot see it. Use a tracked number on the ad landing page, keep your main number everywhere else, and reconcile the call log by hand for the first month. One month of manual work tells you the ratio and you can apply it after that.
• WhatsApp is a conversation, not a form. The business account shows new chats started, which is the count to use. A chat that starts with a price question is an enquiry whatever the platform calls it.
• Missed calls and callbacks. In many Indian categories a missed call during business hours is a lost enquiry, not a non enquiry. Count them separately. If the missed call count is high, the fix is a person answering the phone and not a change to the campaign.

What a good result looks like

A verified rate above 80 per cent on the matched bucket, with a small unclaimable bucket, means the measurement is sound and you can argue about performance on real numbers. Between 50 and 80 per cent means the tracking has gaps worth a fortnight of somebody's attention. Below 50 per cent means you are not yet in a position to judge the agency at all, and that is the thing to fix before the next budget conversation. Agree the definition of a qualified lead in writing while you are at it, because the same word is currently meaning two things to two parties.

Questions about verifying agency leads in India

Can I ask the agency to run this reconciliation themselves

You can, and the better version is that they bring the claimed list and you bring your own records, because the value of the exercise is the two sides being independent. An agency that volunteers the exercise is telling you something good about itself.

What if the agency says the platform numbers are the only ones that count

Then ask for the per lead list and run the match yourself. The platform count measures the platform's view of an event, and your records measure people who contacted your business. Both are real and only one of them pays salaries.

How do I count leads that came through a marketplace or an aggregator

As their own channel, in the same table, with the platform commission counted as a cost of acquisition. That is the only way the comparison with your own site is like for like.

Is it worth paying for call tracking

It is worth it as soon as a measurable share of your enquiries arrive by phone, which in most Indian service categories is from the first month. A tracked number on the landing page and the normal number everywhere else keeps it simple and cheap.

How often should the reconciliation run

In full once, then monthly on a sample of thirty leads. The full version takes a morning and the monthly sample takes under an hour, and the sample is enough to catch a tracking break early.

What should I do if the agency refuses to give the lead list

Treat it as the finding it is and ask in writing, with the reason stated, which is that you cannot compute cost per qualified lead without it. The request is standard, the list contains nothing confidential to them, and the answer tells you what you need to know.

The enquiries no reconciliation can find yet

One group of enquiries will stay in the unclaimable bucket no matter how good your tracking gets. A buyer types the whole requirement into ChatGPT or Gemini, reads back three firm names and calls one of them. That call arrives with no referrer, no campaign and no trace, and the sentence that put the three names in front of the buyer is not in anybody's analytics. We measured the supply side of this on 22 October 2026, putting 198 India buying questions to both engines with the country named in the wording, and in 19 of the 50 blind readings a business was named in the answer text. AI Knows Us takes that reading for a specific company and its own buying questions, which is the only way to know whether the name being read out is yours.