The mortgage broker marketing agency space has expanded enormously over the last few years, and not entirely in a good way. For every specialist who genuinely understands financial services advertising, there are several generalists who've added "mortgage brokers" to their website because the market looked attractive.
The problem is that they all look the same on the surface. Slick websites, professional proposals, confident sales calls. The difference only becomes obvious three months in, when your ad spend has evaporated and the pipeline looks exactly as empty as it did before you signed.
These nine red flags will help you spot the ones to avoid before you hand over a single dollar.
They've Never Worked With a Mortgage Broker Before
This one seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many brokers discover it after signing. Ask directly: how many mortgage broker clients are you currently working with, and how long have you been in this space? If the answer involves a lot of enthusiastic pivoting to adjacent industries, that's your answer.
Financial services advertising is genuinely different from almost every other industry. ASIC compliance, responsible lending obligations, ACL requirements, the emotional complexity of the buyer journey, the long sales cycle, the trust signals that actually matter to someone considering a $600,000 debt. None of this is intuitive. It is learned through experience, and that learning happens on someone's budget. If you're the first broker they've worked with, that someone is you.
Ask for two or three examples of mortgage broker campaigns they've run, with real metrics. Cost per lead, lead volume, campaign duration. A specialist will have this readily available. A generalist will show you a cafe's Instagram results and explain why the principles transfer.
Pro tip: Ask any agency you're considering for their average cost per lead across their mortgage broker clients. Watch how they react. Hesitation = red flag.
They Promise Specific Lead Numbers Before Running a Single Test
"We'll get you 30 leads per month, guaranteed." This sounds great. It is also, in almost every case, completely made up. No honest agency can guarantee specific lead volumes before they've run a single campaign in your market, at your price point, with your creative, to your audience. The variables are simply too numerous.
What good agencies do is give you benchmarks based on their experience with similar broker accounts. "Across our broker clients in metro markets, we typically see cost per lead in the $35 to $80 range, depending on audience and offer." That is a calibrated estimate rooted in actual data. A promise of exactly 30 leads per month is a sales technique, not a performance commitment.
Look for an agency that talks about benchmarks and testing phases rather than guarantees. The first four to six weeks of any campaign should be treated as a learning period. An agency that skips the learning phase and promises specific outcomes from day one has either never run a campaign in your market or is telling you what you want to hear.
They Can't Explain Their Targeting Strategy in Plain English
Ask them: who exactly will see your ads, and why? If the answer is dense with jargon about "lookalike audiences" and "interest stacking" but never actually answers the question of which human beings they're trying to reach and what those people are experiencing right now, that's a problem.
Good targeting strategy is not complicated to explain. "We're going after homeowners aged 35 to 50 in your area whose mortgage is more than three years old, using a mix of behavioural signals and life event targeting, because that cohort has the highest refinancing intent." That's a sentence. Anyone who can't give you a version of that sentence either hasn't thought it through or doesn't want you to scrutinise it.
A good agency should be able to describe their targeting strategy to a ten-year-old. Ask the question, then sit quietly. If the answer makes sense and connects to a real human situation, you're probably in good hands. If it sounds like a glossary of ad platform features, keep looking.
Quick one: Which of these is the biggest red flag from a marketing agency?
They Lock You Into 12-Month Contracts With No Performance Clauses
A 12-month contract with no exit clause and no performance benchmarks is not a partnership. It's a subscription to someone else's revenue. If the campaign doesn't perform in month two, you still owe ten more months of retainer fees, and there's nothing in the contract that obligates the agency to do anything differently.
Red flag: the agency charges a "setup fee" and then another "onboarding fee" and then a "creative brief fee." At some point you've paid $4,000 and they haven't run a single ad. Long upfront commitments combined with layered fees before any work is delivered should make you very nervous.
Three months is a reasonable initial engagement. It gives the agency enough time to test and optimise, and gives you enough time to evaluate whether the results justify continuing. Anything longer than three months should come with clearly defined performance expectations and an exit clause if those expectations aren't met.
Ask for a three-month initial term with defined performance benchmarks, then a rolling monthly arrangement if those benchmarks are met. A confident agency with a strong track record will not need to lock you in for a year to feel secure about the relationship.
They Don't Mention Compliance Once in the Entire Pitch
ASIC's Regulatory Guide 234 governs how financial services are promoted in Australia. Mortgage broker advertising sits firmly in scope. If an agency pitches you for thirty minutes without mentioning ASIC, RG234, comparison rate requirements, or responsible lending language, they either don't know these things apply or they're planning to deal with them later, which means after your ad account has already been flagged.
Getting this wrong has real consequences. Non-compliant ads get pulled. Ad accounts get restricted. In serious cases, the regulator takes notice. A marketing agency that doesn't understand the compliance environment they're operating in is a liability, not an asset.
Ask them directly: how do you handle ASIC compliance in mortgage broker advertising? A specialist will have a clear, specific answer covering landing page disclosures, ad copy restrictions, and testimonial requirements. A generalist will look slightly startled and then pivot to talking about their creative process.
They're "Full Service" With No Specialisation
Full-service agencies that work with plumbers, cafes, accountants, gyms, and mortgage brokers all under the same roof are not specialists. They are generalists with a large client list. The account manager assigned to your campaign may have spent last week optimising ads for a Thai restaurant.
This matters more in financial services than in almost any other industry. The compliance requirements, the buyer psychology, the sales cycle length, the trust signals, the follow-up sequences, the CRM integrations specific to broker software, all of these require specialised knowledge. A generalist will apply generic frameworks and wonder why the results don't match their other clients.
Look for an agency that can point to a specific focus on financial services or mortgage broking, with a client base that reflects that focus. Depth of experience in one industry beats breadth across twenty. Ask what percentage of their current clients are mortgage brokers.
The Reporting Is All About Impressions and Reach
If you receive a monthly report that leads with impressions, reach, and engagement rates, and buries cost per lead somewhere on page four, the agency is not optimising for your business outcomes. They're optimising for metrics that look impressive on a report but don't pay your mortgage.
Impressions tell you how many times your ad appeared on a screen. Reach tells you how many unique people saw it. Neither of these numbers tells you whether any of those people booked a call or became a client. An agency that leads with vanity metrics is either inexperienced at conversion-focused campaigns or is hoping you won't notice the lead numbers are bad.
The numbers that matter are cost per lead, lead volume, lead quality (as assessed by your own follow-up process), and ultimately cost per settled loan. Ask the agency upfront which metrics will appear at the top of their monthly reports. If they hesitate or redirect to engagement metrics, that tells you how they think about success.
There's No Mention of Follow-Up Systems or CRM Integration
Generating leads is half the job. What happens to those leads the moment they submit a form is equally important, and a good agency knows this. If the pitch is entirely about ad creative and targeting with no mention of what happens after someone expresses interest, you are about to pay for a leaky bucket.
Leads that don't receive an automated SMS within minutes of submitting drop off dramatically. Leads that aren't nurtured over the following two to three weeks with useful content convert at a fraction of their potential. A mortgage broker's CRM, whether that's Salestrekker, LoanApp, or something else, needs to be integrated so that nothing falls through the gap between ad click and client call.
Ask the agency what happens to a lead in the first thirty minutes after they submit a form. They should be able to walk you through an automated sequence covering SMS, email, and retargeting. If the answer is "that's up to you," they are building you half a system and charging you for a full one.
They Ask You to Pay for Ads Into Their Account, Not Yours
This is the most consequential red flag on the list, and it is far more common than it should be. Some agencies run your campaigns inside their own Meta or Google ad accounts and invoice you for the ad spend as part of a combined fee. The problem is not the billing arrangement. The problem is ownership.
Your ad account contains your pixel data, which tracks every person who has visited your website and interacted with your ads. It contains your custom audiences, your lookalike audiences built from your existing clients, and months or years of campaign learning data that the platform uses to optimise your results. If the account belongs to the agency and you part ways, all of that disappears. You start from zero. The agency keeps your data and uses it for the next client.
Insist that your campaigns run inside an ad account that belongs to your business, with the agency added as a partner with appropriate access. This is non-negotiable. Any legitimate agency will agree immediately. One that pushes back is telling you something important about how they think about your data.
How to Vet an Agency Before You Sign
Go through these nine red flags as a checklist before you commit to anything. The questions to ask are straightforward:
- How many mortgage broker clients are you currently working with?
- What is the average cost per lead across your broker accounts?
- Can you show me a landing page you've built for a broker?
- How do you handle ASIC compliance in your ad copy and landing pages?
- What does the follow-up sequence look like after a lead submits?
- Will my campaigns run in my own ad account?
- What does the initial contract term look like, and what are the performance benchmarks?
A good agency will answer every one of those questions with specifics and without hesitation. The answers should make sense and connect to outcomes that matter to your business, not to the agency's reporting dashboards.
For reference: here's how ozimedia approaches these questions.
ozimedia works exclusively with mortgage brokers. All campaigns run in your own ad account. Compliance is built into every piece of copy and every landing page. Follow-up automation is included, not optional. And the reporting leads with cost per lead and lead volume, not impressions. That's what good looks like. If you want to check the work against what we've described here, book a call and ask us the same questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I vet a marketing agency?
Ask them three things: how many mortgage broker clients have they worked with, what was the average cost per lead across those accounts, and can they show you an example of a landing page they've built for a broker. If they can't answer the first two questions with real numbers, or they show you a landing page for a gym or a cafe, you have your answer. A specialist agency will have specific data from broker campaigns. A generalist will have case studies from an industry that bears no resemblance to yours.
Should I own my own ad account?
Yes, always. Your ad account contains your pixel data, your audience lists, your conversion history, and your campaign learnings. If an agency runs your ads inside their own account and you part ways, you leave with nothing. All of that data disappears. Insist that your campaigns run inside an ad account that belongs to your business, with the agency added as a partner. This is a non-negotiable condition, and any legitimate agency will agree to it immediately.
What contract terms should I negotiate before signing?
Three things matter most. First, the contract length: three months is reasonable for an initial engagement, twelve months with no exit clause is not. Second, performance clauses: there should be an agreed benchmark for cost per lead or lead volume, with a defined process if the campaign falls short. Third, data ownership: confirm in writing that your ad accounts, pixel data, CRM data, and creative assets belong to you, not the agency. Get all three in the agreement before you sign anything.
Before you sign with any agency, arm yourself with the right questions. Read our guide on the questions every mortgage broker should ask a marketing agency before committing. It is also worth knowing exactly what a mortgage broker marketing agency should actually deliver — so you can hold them to the right standard from day one.
If you want to understand what a properly run broker campaign looks like from the inside, read Agency or In-House? The Honest Answer for Mortgage Brokers.
See what a campaign that avoids every one of these mistakes looks like in practice: read the Jordan case study →