How to tell whether your Singapore agency is actually responsible for the leads it claims

A claimed lead is only checkable if you own the instrument that recorded it. So the first move is not a better dashboard, it is a transfer of ownership: the advertising account, the analytics property, the Search Console property and the call tracking or form system all registered to your company, with the agency holding access rather than title. Then one test settles attribution in a way no report can, which is to pause a channel and watch your own enquiry log. Then, if any of those leads came from a call or an SMS, two Singapore registries decide what the evidence has to include.

This page sets out the ownership list, the pause test, the enquiry log fields, and the Singapore rules that make an agency's lead claim auditable. It quotes a reading rather than a search volume, because nobody types this question into a search box.

What the assistants did with this question, and why it helps

We put the agency accountability questions to ChatGPT and Gemini on 26 October 2026 with Singapore in every prompt, as part of 64 blind pipelines across 32 batches. Semrush was named in one of the two readings in that batch. Our own name appeared zero times across all 32 blind batches.

The interesting part is what the answers were built from. Of the 20 hosts cited in that batch, six were Singapore government sites, www.pdpc.gov.sg, apps.pdpc.gov.sg, www.imda.gov.sg, www.mddi.gov.sg, www.dnc.gov.sg and sso.agc.gov.sg, with asas.org.sg and laws.sg beside them, and the rest were platform documentation from Google, Adobe and Meta. The engines answered a question about agency accountability with regulators and product documentation rather than with vendors. For a buyer that is good luck, because a regulator's page is something you can read yourself and a vendor's claim is not.

The four accounts that have to be in your company's name

Account	What it proves about a claimed lead	What to ask for
Google Ads or the paid platform	What was spent, on which terms, and the change history behind any shift	Account opened under your company, agency added as a user, billing in your name
Analytics property	Which channel and which landing page preceded the enquiry	Administrator rights for a named person at your company, and the property inside your own account
Search Console property	Whether the organic claim rests on impressions or on clicks	Verification through your own domain, so the sixteen month history stays when the agency goes
Form, call tracking or CRM	The enquiry itself, with its timestamp and its source field	The system in your name, with the recordings and the raw rows exportable

If all four sit with the agency, every number you receive is a report about a report. Nothing else on this page can be run until that is fixed, and the fix is usually a morning of administration rather than a negotiation.

The one test that answers causation

Attribution models assign credit. They do not establish cause, and a monthly argument about which model to use is an argument about a reporting convention. The instrument that answers the causal question is a holdout: pause one channel, or one region, for a defined window, and count your own enquiries before and during. Our page on attribution explained honestly sets out the model choices and why the holdout is the thing that settles it.

Three rules make the test readable. Pause something big enough to notice. Keep the window long enough to cover your sales cycle. And count the enquiries in your own log rather than in the platform's conversion column, because the platform is counting the thing it was asked to optimise.

The enquiry log, which is the only first party record of a lead

One sheet, owned by you, filled in by whoever answers the phone and the inbox. Six fields are enough.

• Date and time the enquiry arrived.
• Channel, as stated by the person, from a how did you hear about us question asked out loud.
• What they asked for, in their words.
• Whether it was qualified, against a definition you wrote down before the engagement started.
• Value, quoted or actual.
• Who handled it.

That log is what makes an agency's claim checkable, because it was recorded by your staff rather than by a tag. When the two disagree, the disagreement is the finding, and it is usually a definition problem rather than dishonesty: the agency is counting form submissions and you are counting people who wanted to buy.

The dashboard full of impressions, and what to ask for instead

An impression is the engine showing your page to somebody and a click is that person choosing it. They are adjacent columns of one report and they are not versions of each other, which our page on impressions against our own two numbers demonstrates with our own export. Three questions settle any figure in under a minute. Which column is this. What is the average position behind it. What is the other column for the same window.

Then replace the dashboard with four numbers that your own systems can produce: qualified enquiries from the log, cost per qualified enquiry including the fee, the pages that preceded them, and the share of enquiries that your sales process converted. A report that cannot be rebuilt from your own accounts is a report you cannot audit.

The Singapore layer, where the law decides the evidence

This section quotes the sources rather than paraphrasing them, and nothing here is legal advice. A specific question about your own position belongs with a Singapore lawyer.

• Telephone and SMS leads sit behind the Do Not Call Registry. The registry's own site states that, with effect from 2 January 2014, organisations must check with the DNC Registry to ensure that the Singapore telephone numbers they are sending telemarketing messages to are not listed in the registry, and that an organisation applies for a DNC Checking Account to do so. Read on dnc.gov.sg on 27 October 2026. So for any lead generated by an outbound call or text, the evidence includes who held the checking account and when the check was run.
• You are deemed to have authorised your supplier's sends. The Spam Control Act 2007, whose Singapore Statutes Online page records its status as the current version as at 27 October 2026, provides at section 3(4) that, subject to subsection (5), "a person who knowingly allows the person's product or service to be advertised or promoted by a sender is deemed to have authorised the sending by the sender of any electronic message that advertises or promotes that person's product or service", and at subsection (5) that a person who takes reasonable steps to stop such sending is deemed not to have authorised it. Accountability for the method runs to the business whose product is advertised, which is a reason to hold the records rather than to trust the report.
• The personal data obligations are yours. The enquiry log, the call recordings and the CRM hold personal data, and Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act places the consent, notification, purpose and protection obligations on the organisation collecting it. Ask which named person at the agency processes it, on whose instruction, and what gets returned at the end.

The monthly review agenda that replaces the argument

1. Open with the enquiry log count for the month, read from your sheet.
2. Cost per qualified enquiry, fee included, computed in front of everybody.
3. What changed on the site or in the account, read from the change history rather than described.
4. One number the agency expects to move next month, written down.
5. Any pause test running or scheduled, and what it is testing.

Questions about holding a Singapore agency to a number

My agency says it generated 40 leads. How do I check

Compare its 40 against your own enquiry log for the same window, matched on date and name. Then ask which definition produced the 40, because form submissions, phone calls over thirty seconds and qualified opportunities are three different counts. The gap between its number and yours is almost always a definition, and once the definition is agreed in writing the argument does not recur.

Is a pause test unfair to the agency

No, and a confident supplier will usually propose one. It is the only instrument that distinguishes demand the agency created from demand that was already arriving, and it protects them as much as you when the number holds up.

Who should own the Google Ads account, us or the agency

Your company, with the agency granted access. Ownership decides what happens to the history, the audiences and the conversion data on the day the relationship ends, and that is the day on which it matters most.

What if the agency refuses to transfer the accounts

Treat the refusal as the answer to a different question, which is whether you can hold this supplier to anything. Serve the request in writing with a date, and if the accounts were opened in your name you can usually recover access through the platform's own verification route.

Does a dashboard with more metrics mean better reporting

It usually means less. Four numbers you can rebuild from your own accounts beat forty you cannot, and the test of a report is not how much is on it but whether you could reproduce any line of it without the agency's help.

The claim nobody in this market is auditing yet

Every instrument on this page measures what happened after a buyer found you. There is now a step in front of all of them, because a Singapore buyer frequently arrives with a shortlist that an assistant assembled, and no agency dashboard counts whether your name was in it. That reading is cheap to take and it is specific to your category: a fixed question list, the engines named, the sources behind each answer, and a date. AI Knows Us produces exactly that file and reports named and cited as two separate rows, and because the first reading at aiknowsus.com needs no account you can bring the answer to your next monthly review rather than commissioning it.