How to evaluate your marketing agency in Japan: 12 questions to ask this month

Most foreign companies that advertise in Japan hand the daily work to a Japanese agency, and most of those agencies are good at it. The difficulty sits on the client side. A country manager in Tokyo, or a marketing lead at head office, approves a monthly budget, receives a report in Japanese or a translated summary, and has no easy way to tell whether the number at the bottom is the number that matters.

This guide is for that person: twelve questions, three you can check yourself in fifteen minutes and nine to put to your agency, each with what a good answer sounds like and what should make you look closer. None of them is a trap. A capable agency answers them in one meeting, and the answers usually point at opportunities rather than failures.

Why this is hard to judge from abroad

Three things get in the way. None of them is about the agency's skill.

The first is language. Reports, meeting notes and most platform settings are in Japanese, so what reaches you has been translated, and translation compresses detail. A slide that says "CV 412 (+8%)" tells you nothing about what a CV is, or whether the same buyer was counted twice.

The second is the channel mix. Yahoo! JAPAN runs its own ad platform, operated by LY Corporation, which also runs LINE. LINE passed 100 million monthly users in Japan at the end of 2025. A head-office team that lives in Google and Meta dashboards often has no login to the channels where much of its Japan budget goes. And that budget keeps moving online: Dentsu estimates that internet advertising passed half of all Japanese ad spend for the first time in 2025, at 50.2%.

The third is reporting habit. Japanese agencies usually report once a month, as an Excel file or a slide deck walked through at a regular meeting (the teireikai). The format assumes a Japanese marketing manager in the room asking follow-up questions. When the person who decides the budget sits in London or Singapore, those questions never get asked.

First, three things you can check yourself

These need no meeting. They take about fifteen minutes, and they tell you which of the other nine questions matter most.

1. Is every ad account in your company's name, with you as an admin?

Log in to Google Ads, Yahoo! JAPAN Ads, Meta and LINE. The account history, audiences and conversion settings were paid for by your budget. In Google Ads only admin access lets you manage users and account links, and Google advises keeping a second admin so access is never lost. If accounts or tags belong to the agency, audiences and history can be lost when you change partners.

A good result is your company as owner in every platform, with at least two people from your side as admins. Look closer if you cannot log in, or the account sits under the agency. Agency-held accounts are common in Japan, often for practical reasons such as invoice billing, so treat it as a setup to fix together.

2. Does the invoice match what the platforms billed?

Put last month's invoice next to the billing page of each platform. Agency fees are usually a percentage of media spend, but an invoice can also carry platform fees, tool licences, reporting or creative charges, and minimum fees. Japanese buying guides from 2026 give the same advice: check whether the fee sits inside the media figure or on top.

A good result is a media line that matches what the platforms charged, and every other fee on its own named line. A single total, or a media figure higher than platform billing, deserves a question.

3. When did anyone last change an ad, a keyword or a bid?

Open the change history in Google Ads. Ads left unchanged for months stop working, and nobody notices until costs drift up.

A good result is changes every week or two, with new ads tested regularly. Look closer if nothing has changed in a month or more.

Ask about results

4. What did a new customer cost us on each channel this month, and how has that moved over the last three months?

A blended average hides the channel that is pulling it up or down. Ask what "customer" means, too: a purchase, a qualified lead and a form fill are three different costs, and a returning customer is not a new one.

A good answer is a small table: each channel, the same definition every month, three months of history, and a sentence on why each line moved. Look closer if you only ever see a total, if the definition shifts between reports, or if the reply moves to click-through rate.

5. When Google, Yahoo! JAPAN and Meta each report a sale, how do you make sure it isn't the same customer counted three times?

Every platform credits itself. A shopper who saw your Meta ad, clicked a Yahoo! JAPAN search ad and later bought through a Google ad can appear as a conversion in all three. Add the platform totals together and you will often have more "conversions" than orders.

A good answer names the exact conversion in each platform (a completed purchase or a submitted form, never a page view) and compares the platform totals with your own order system or CRM each month. A warning sign is "the platform reports it" as the whole explanation, or soft actions such as "add to cart" sitting inside the main count.

6. How much of our spend goes to people who were already searching for our name, and what would we lose if we cut it for two weeks?

Brand search and retargeting are cheap and convert well, so they flatter any average. They mostly catch demand that already exists: useful, but not growth, and head office usually pays for growth. Some brand spend is necessary, because in Japan resellers and competitors may bid on a foreign brand's name.

A good answer reports brand on its own, with its share of spend and of new customers, and suggests a clean test: lower brand bids in one period or one region and watch total orders, not ad-reported orders. Be careful if brand is mixed into every campaign, or if the test is turned down without a reason.

7. Which search terms did we pay for last month that have nothing to do with what we sell?

Search ads match more loosely than most people expect. A budget can end up paying for searches for a competitor's name, for jobs at your company, or for a word that means something else in katakana. The search terms report shows exactly what people typed before they clicked.

A good answer opens that report in the meeting, names a few wasted terms, and shows they are already excluded, with new exclusions added every month. Look closer if nobody has opened it lately, or if the answer is "Google handles that".

8. When did someone last send a test order or form and see it arrive in every platform?

Tracking breaks quietly. A site redesign, a new form tool, a moved thank-you page or a new consent banner can stop conversions being recorded, and the platforms then optimise on bad data.

A good answer has a date, a name and a method: someone sent a test form or order and saw it appear in each platform and in analytics. "It's set up", with no date, is the answer to watch for.

Ask about decisions

9. Why is the budget split this way between Google, Yahoo! JAPAN, Meta and LINE, and what result would make you change it?

The split is the biggest decision in the account, and it often goes unexamined for months. A good answer ties each channel to your customers and your results (Yahoo! JAPAN carrying weight because your buyers skew older, for example, or LINE used for repeat purchase rather than first contact) and gives a clear rule for moving money. Be wary of "this is the standard split", or last year's split rolled forward.

10. If our budget dropped 20% next month, what would you cut first, and why?

This shows whether the agency ranks campaigns by what the next yen returns. A good answer is an ordered list, produced in minutes, with a reason for each cut. Cutting every campaign evenly is the weak answer.

11. What is coming in our category in the next three months, and what is the plan for it?

Buying in Japan follows a calendar: marketplace events such as Rakuten Super Sale, year-end gifts, and the March–April new-life season when people move and start new jobs. Budget and ads prepared in the week of the event miss most of it.

A good answer gives dates for the moments that matter in your category, with budget and new ads ready weeks before. Look closer if the plan is "same as last month".

12. If this were your money, what would you change first?

Keep this one for last. It gives the agency permission to say what it has been holding back, and the team often already knows: the landing page is slow on mobile, the budget is spread too thin across four channels, the product page still reads like a translation.

A good answer is specific and may be uncomfortable to hear. "Everything is fine" is the only real warning sign here.

A worked example

The numbers below are invented to show the mechanics.

A consumer brand spends ¥4 million a month in Japan. The agency reports 400 conversions at ¥10,000 each, and head office approved the budget on that figure. Questions 5 and 6 change the picture. The shop's own order system shows 320 orders from paid channels, not 400: the gap is buyers counted by more than one platform. Of those 320, 140 came from brand search, which cost ¥480,000. The remaining ¥3.52 million produced 180 orders: about ¥19,500 for each customer who was not already searching for the brand.

Nobody did anything wrong. Each platform followed its default settings. But a new customer really costs about twice the reported figure, and that changes which channels deserve the next yen. The fix is a shared definition and a monthly check against the order system, agreed with the agency.

What to do with the answers

Do the three checks first. Then send the nine questions in writing ahead of time, in English and Japanese, and give the team two weeks. Frame them as what you need to report to head office, which is usually true.

Sort the answers into three piles. Some will be good. Some will be out of scope because nobody asked or paid for that work: that is a conversation about the brief. A few will have no owner; tracking and landing pages are the usual orphans.

Then agree three changes for next month, each with a date, and one written definition of a customer that everyone reports against. Ask the questions again in a quarter.

Two things to avoid: forwarding the list as an audit, and running it at the same moment as a pitch from another agency. Both turn a working conversation into a defence.

When an outside review helps

Sometimes you cannot judge the answers yourself: they arrive in Japanese, or they are correct and still don't say whether the money is well spent. Sometimes head office wants an independent read before budget season.

Meridian plans and supervises marketing in Japan for international brands, and never starts from blame.

Our free outside review starts from your agency's latest report: send it as it is, Japanese is fine, and we tell you in plain English what it proves, what it doesn't, and the three opportunities we would act on first. To answer these questions with your own data, our agency diagnostic works inside the accounts, with your permission, and gives you and your agency the same document. If you'd rather keep your agency and have its results checked every month, that is our independent monthly review.