Last updated: 26 August 2026. Written by Adrian Tan, Singapore Digital Marketing (SDM).
You have read the red-flag lists. Guaranteed first-page rankings. Reporting that leads with impressions. An agency that will not give you admin access to your own ad account. A twelve-month lock-in with a one-sided termination clause. None of it is hard to recognise once someone points at it.
The problem is that recognition is not protection. Every one of those flags is a statement about the future, and by the time it is visibly true you have paid three months of retainer. What actually protects you is a small set of checks you can run before you sign – most free, most under five minutes, all against a public record the agency does not control.
This is the verification half of the problem. For the selection framework, start with our guide to choosing a digital marketing agency in Singapore. What follows assumes you already have two or three names and a proposal you are half-inclined to believe.
Why verification matters more in Singapore than you think
There is a gap in Singapore’s consumer-protection framework that catches SME owners off guard. The Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act is the law that lets someone misled by a supplier seek redress for an unfair practice; the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore administers it, and the Consumers Association of Singapore is the usual first point of contact. It is genuinely useful consumer law – and it does not extend to business-to-business transactions.
Your company hiring a marketing agency is a business-to-business transaction. If the claims turn out to have been dressed up, you are not a consumer who was misled; you are a company that entered a contract. Your recourse is the contract itself. For smaller disputes the Small Claims Tribunals handle certain claims up to S$20,000, or S$30,000 where both parties agree; above that you are into a civil claim with legal costs that usually exceed what you are recovering.
That is the argument for front-loading the work. No regulator is waiting to unwind a bad agency appointment for you, so the forty-five minutes before you sign is, in practice, your only enforcement mechanism.
Check 1: does the company exist, and for how long?
Start with ACRA. Singapore has one of the most accessible corporate registries in the world and almost nobody uses it when hiring a vendor.
A free entity search on the Bizfile portal, by name or UEN, returns the registered name, UEN, entity type and status. For the full picture, ACRA sells a Business Profile for S$5.50 – an e-certified extract covering the UEN, entity name, date of registration and the position holders, business owners or partners. (A Corporate Compliance and Financial Profile at S$50 adds financial ratios and audit opinions.) Here is what it tells you.
- The registration date against the experience claim. If the entity was registered in 2023, “over a decade in the Singapore market” belongs to an individual, not the company you are contracting with – and individuals leave. Nothing is wrong with a young agency founded by experienced people; something is wrong with one letting you believe otherwise.
- The entity type. A sole proprietorship is not a company – it is a person trading under a business name, with no separate legal identity and unlimited personal liability. Fine for a freelance engagement, and materially different from the “team of specialists” the website implies.
- The status and any name change. Live, struck off, or being struck off – and whether the entity recently changed its name, which the profile shows. A rebrand after a run of complaints is not unheard of.
- The position holders. Compare the names against the “leadership team” page. If the people pitching you appear nowhere in the corporate record, you are being pitched by a sales layer.
- The principal activity. ACRA records an SSIC code for what the entity registered to do. An agency whose principal activity is general wholesale trade, with marketing added as a secondary line last year, is telling you where its centre of gravity sits.
None of these is automatically disqualifying. All are worth asking out loud – and asking signals that you are the kind of client who checks.
Check 2: are the credentials what they sound like?
Badges are the most-displayed and least-understood signal in this industry. Three come up constantly in Singapore, and all three are publicly verifiable.
The Google Partner badge
Google publishes its requirements, and they are more modest than the badge implies. A Google Partner’s registered Ads manager account needs:
- a minimum optimisation score of 70%;
- a 90-day ad spend of USD 10,000 across all managed accounts; and
- at least 50% of account strategists certified in Google Ads, with certification coverage in each product area that has spent more than USD 500 in 90 days.
Read the spend threshold again. USD 10,000 over ninety days is roughly USD 3,300 a month across the agency’s entire client base. Three small clients spending S$1,500 a month each clears it. The badge confirms a functioning Google advertiser; it does not mean good, experienced, or specialist in your sector.
The optimisation score is worth a second look too. It is Google’s own measure of how closely an account follows Google’s recommendations – and those recommendations frequently include broadening match types and raising budgets. An agency managing to a 70% score has a mild structural incentive to accept spend-increasing suggestions. Not a scandal, but a reason to read your own account’s applied recommendations rather than treat a high score as proof of good management; our guide to Google Ads match types in Singapore covers why loosened match types are the commonest way an account quietly gets more expensive.
Premier Partner is a meaningfully higher bar: all the Partner requirements plus placement in the top 3% of participating companies in a given country, assessed annually on client growth, retention, product diversification and total annual spend. That one is worth something.
The PSG “pre-approved vendor” claim
This one is misread constantly. Under the Productivity Solutions Grant, pre-approval attaches to a specific solution from a specific vendor, not to the company as a whole. An agency can be legitimately pre-approved for one packaged solution while five other services carry no grant support at all.
The check is the PSG Solution Directory on the GoBusiness portal, searchable by solution, vendor and sector. Search the exact solution named in your quotation and confirm the listing matches – not merely that the company name appears somewhere. Third-party PDF “vendor lists” go stale and are not the authority.
Two related points, because this is where grant conversations go wrong. Ad spend and open-ended retainers are generally not grant-claimable; the grant supports pre-approved solutions, not media budget. And you apply for and manage the grant yourself through the Business Grants Portal, so any vendor implying it can “get you the grant” has told you something. Our Singapore digital marketing grant guide has the full picture. SDM is itself a pre-approved PSG vendor, and the same rule applies to us.
Awards and client logos
Awards range from genuinely competitive to pay-to-enter. The test: can you find the awarding body’s own winner list for that year, on its own site, with the agency on it? If the only evidence is a badge image on the agency’s site, treat it as decoration. Logo walls are the same – a one-off landing page four years ago earns the same logo as a five-year retainer.
Check 3: do the results claims survive contact?
“We grew organic traffic 347%.” “We cut cost per lead by 62%.” These deserve the most scrutiny, because they are designed to close you and because a screenshot is not evidence of anything.
Four questions dismantle almost every inflated results claim, and none is aggressive:
- From what base? A 347% increase from 90 sessions a month to 402 is real and almost meaningless. Percentages without absolute numbers are a presentation choice, and a revealing one. Ask for both.
- Over what period, and what else changed? Traffic that triples over three years alongside a site migration, a new product line and a funding round is not attributable to one agency.
- What was the conversion action? “Leads” can mean a form submission, a newsletter signup, a phone-number click, or an auto-tagged “engaged session”. If nobody defined it carefully, the number is a measurement artefact. Our guide to conversion tracking in Singapore covers how easily this goes wrong, usually without anyone intending it.
- Can we see it in the platform? This is the one that settles it. Ask whether the client would grant read-only access to the GA4 property or Google Ads account for fifteen minutes, with the agency present. Most will say no for reasonable confidentiality reasons, and that is legitimate. What matters is how they say no. “The client would not be comfortable, but here is the same report brand-redacted, exported from the platform rather than retyped” is a good answer. Evasion is your answer.
There is a free, silent version too: look the case-study client up on ACRA to confirm they exist and are live, then check whether the campaign described is still visible. A case study about a company struck off in 2024 is a story, not a result. Our own case studies name real Singapore brands for exactly this reason – so they can be checked.
Check 4: is the work theirs, or resold?
White-labelling is normal and not, in itself, a red flag – plenty of good agencies buy in specialist capability and manage it well. The red flag is an agency that presents resold work as its own capability and cannot tell you who is doing it: you then have no way to judge quality, no direct line when something breaks, and no protection when the subcontractor is swapped mid-engagement.
The check is simple. Ask for the name and role of the person who will do the work, and whether they are an employee. Then ask a follow-up only a practitioner can answer – what would they check first in your account, what did they make of your current setup. Someone briefed to sound technical produces a fluent generality; someone who does the work produces a specific, mildly critical observation about your site within a minute, because practitioners cannot help themselves. One supporting signal: a proposal containing an “audit” that names none of your actual pages, keywords or campaigns is a template.
Check 5: auditing an account you have already been given
Switching agencies, or losing confidence in the incumbent? You have something better than any reference: two years of forensic evidence in the platform.
Google Ads change history
Google Ads keeps a change history of edits to your account, campaigns and ad groups for the past two years, including account settings such as billing and notifications; data older than that is not available. It records what changed, when, and which user or tool made the change, and it filters by date, user, campaign and change type, then downloads to CSV. The incumbent cannot edit it. Neither can you. What to look for:
- The shape of the activity. Plot changes per week. Healthy management is a steady drip – negatives added, budgets nudged, ads rotated. You are looking for the sawtooth: three weeks of nothing, then a burst of edits in the two days before a reporting call. That is management theatre, visible straight from the export.
- Who made the changes. If the account was sold on a named senior strategist and every edit for eight months came from one junior email address, you have your answer about who has been running it.
- Conversion action edits. Filter for changes to conversion actions and settings. A conversion action created or redefined shortly before a big reported improvement is the most important thing to find: the improvement may be a definitional change rather than a performance one. Watch too for low-intent actions folded into “conversions” – page views, engaged sessions, phone-number clicks counted without call duration.
- Auto-applied recommendations. Check whether auto-apply is on and what it has applied. Broad match expansion and budget increases applied without a human decision are a quiet, common cause of rising cost per acquisition.
- Settings changes at odd moments. Location targeting widened beyond Singapore, “presence or interest” enabled, the display network switched on inside a search campaign, or the end date removed from a campaign meant to be a test.
Meta assets
The correct arrangement is that your business portfolio owns the Page, the ad account and the dataset or pixel, and the agency holds partner access to specific assets with specific tasks. Partner access is granted by portfolio ID and removed in one action when the relationship ends. If the agency’s portfolio owns the ad account or pixel instead, your advertising history, custom audiences and conversion data are theirs – and “we’ll set you up fresh” means losing the learning phase and the audiences you paid to build. Open Business Settings, check owner versus partner for each asset: the highest-value two minutes in this article.
GA4 and Google Tag Manager
Three checks. Are you an Administrator on the GA4 property or merely a Viewer on someone else’s? Is the property inside your own Analytics account or the agency’s? And who owns the Google Tag Manager container – whoever does controls what fires on your website, including any future agency’s tags. Our guide to reading your marketing report covers what to do with the data once you can reach it.
Check 6: the exit test
Everything above condenses into one question – the one I would ask if allowed only one:
“If we ended this contract tomorrow with no notice, what would we still have on Monday morning?”
A good agency answers immediately and specifically, because it has thought about it. A bad one goes vague, or reframes the question as a trust issue – and the reframe is itself the answer. In every case the correct arrangement is that you own the asset and the agency has access.
Check 7: the four contract clauses that matter
With no consumer-protection backstop, the contract is the whole of your protection. Four clauses do most of the work.
- Asset ownership and handover. All accounts, properties, containers, profiles and source files created for you should be stated as yours, transferring within a set number of days on termination. Vague language about “materials produced” is not enough – name the platforms.
- Notice symmetry. A twelve-month minimum with thirty days’ notice available only to the agency is one-sided. Twelve months is not automatically unreasonable – SEO takes time – but notice should run both ways, with a defined break point.
- What the fee buys. “SEO services, S$3,000 per month” is unauditable by design. You want deliverables with quantities and a named contact, checked against published market ranges: SEO cost, Google Ads cost, social media cost and website cost.
- Data protection. If the agency will touch customer data – CRM exports, lead forms, custom audience uploads – the contract must address PDPA obligations, because you remain accountable for personal data processed on your behalf. Our note on PDPA and marketing tracking covers the practical version.
What is not a red flag
Fairness matters here: a hyper-suspicious buyer gets bad outcomes too, because the best agencies decline difficult clients and the ones that accept any terms are rarely the ones you want.
A twelve-month term is not a red flag on its own – some work genuinely does not show results inside three months, and an agency honest about that is more useful than one promising a quarter. Refusing to guarantee rankings is the only honest position. Declining to name a client is often a contractual obligation. Being young is not disqualifying. And charging more than the cheapest quote usually signals a different scope, not a worse one – our in-house versus agency cost comparison shows why the cheapest external option often loses to no option at all.
What is disqualifying is any answer whose function is to prevent you from checking: a guarantee of specific rankings, a refusal to give you admin access to your own ad account, reporting that cannot be traced back to a platform export, and a case study that evaporates the moment you ask which client it was.
The forty-five-minute due-diligence run
Put together, the sequence costs S$5.50 and fits in one sitting. Minutes 0-10: ACRA entity search, then the S$5.50 profile if anything looks off. 10-15: verify every badge at source. 15-25: two case studies through the four results questions. 25-35: name the person doing the work and put one specific question about your own site to them. 35-45: the exit test out loud, then the four contract clauses – plus the change history export if you are switching.
For a broader shortlist to run this against, our roundup of digital marketing agencies in Singapore and our list of SEO companies are a starting point – and every name on them should survive the same forty-five minutes.
The point of all this
None of this assumes Singapore’s marketing industry is unusually dishonest. It is not. The problem is structural: results are slow, attribution is hard, and the buyer usually knows less about the work than the seller. That asymmetry produces bad outcomes even between well-intentioned parties, and no amount of good faith substitutes for a public record you can both point at.
The agencies worth hiring will not mind. In my experience they are visibly relieved – a client who checks the ACRA profile is a client who will also read the report, ask about the conversion action, and stay three years because they can see what is happening. Verification is not suspicion; it is the start of a relationship where both sides look at the same numbers.
Evaluating an agency, or wondering what your current one is actually doing? We are happy to be on the receiving end of every check above. Read how we work, look through our case studies – all named Singapore brands – or talk to us about a second opinion on an inherited account.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get my money back if a Singapore marketing agency misled me?
Usually not easily. The Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act, which protects people misled by suppliers, does not extend to business-to-business transactions, so a company hiring an agency is not covered. Your recourse is the contract: certain claims up to S$20,000 – or S$30,000 if both parties agree – can go to the Small Claims Tribunals, and above that you are into a civil claim with costs that often exceed the amount in dispute.
Does a Google Partner badge mean an agency is good at Google Ads?
It means they meet Google’s published thresholds: a 70% optimisation score on their manager account, USD 10,000 of ad spend over 90 days across all managed accounts, and at least half their account strategists certified. That spend bar is roughly USD 3,300 a month across the agency’s entire client base, so the badge confirms an active advertiser rather than an expert one. Premier Partner is a much higher bar – the top 3% of participating companies in the country, assessed annually.
How do I check whether a marketing agency is really PSG pre-approved?
Search the PSG Solution Directory on the GoBusiness portal for the exact solution named in your quotation. Pre-approval attaches to a specific solution from a specific vendor, not to the company as a whole, so a vendor can be genuinely pre-approved for one package while other services carry no support. Do not rely on third-party vendor lists, which go stale. Also remember that you apply for and manage the grant yourself through the Business Grants Portal, and that ad spend and open-ended retainers are generally not claimable.
How far back can I see what my agency changed in my Google Ads account?
Two years. Google Ads change history lists changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups over the past 2 years, including account settings, and shows the date, the change type and the user or tool responsible. Data older than two years is not available. You can filter by user, campaign, date and change type and download the result, which makes it the best single piece of evidence you have when auditing an incumbent.
What should I check first if I have just inherited an ad account from a previous agency?
Ownership before performance. Confirm you are an admin on the Google Ads account, an Administrator on a GA4 property inside your own Analytics account, the owner of the Google Tag Manager container, and that your Meta business portfolio – not the agency’s – owns the Page, ad account and pixel. Then export the Google Ads change history and look specifically at conversion action edits, auto-applied recommendations, and whether editing activity clusters just before reporting dates.
