We were paying for digital PR. We were getting paid blog placements.

01

The situation

I inherited an incumbent agency arrangement on a large retainer - around £10,000 a month - for digital PR. On paper that's a serious budget behind serious campaigns.

In practice, the links it generated were almost all paid blog placements, and Superdry was paying for those separately, on top of the retainer. The budget had its own line for blogger costs sitting right next to it, which should have been the first flag on its own. Campaigns were described as data-driven, but they had no realistic propensity to earn a link on their own merit. Around £60,000 of retainer had gone into one campaign that didn't land at all.

02

What we did

I challenged the structure and asked the agency to show me what the retainer had actually produced. What came back was a list of around fifteen links, for that kind of spend, over that kind of period. That's not evidence of performance. It's evidence of a structure with no real expectation attached to it.

So I audited every campaign and every link myself, not just what was reported to me. I took the case to the marketing director and the commerce director, laid out what the retainer had cost against what it had actually produced, and made the case to move the digital PR remit to a specialist agency I knew could deliver - on a smaller budget than the one it was replacing.

Nobody wants the fight over an offsite budget nobody's auditing. That's exactly why it needs auditing.

03

The results

The replacement agency started earning links almost immediately. Where the previous approach delivered fewer than 5 links, around DA20, per campaign, the new approach delivered 10 or more DA70 links per campaign - at under a quarter of the previous cost.

A better outcome on a smaller budget tells you what the original retainer was actually buying. It wasn't digital PR. It was paid placements with a PR label on them.

04

The takeaway

Offsite budgets go unaudited more than any other line in an SEO plan, because nobody wants the argument that comes with challenging an existing agency relationship. But auditing links against spend isn't an aggressive move. It's basic governance. Any retainer should be able to show you what it produced.

The cost of doing that audit was a fraction of the money the previous arrangement had wasted. That's the actual return here - not a traffic number, a spend number that stopped being wasted.