You hired a marketing agency. They’re running ads, writing blog posts, posting on LinkedIn — and traffic is up. Conversions aren’t. You ask them to look at the website. They say “that’s not really our scope.”
This is the dirty secret of the marketing industry: most agencies won’t touch the thing that decides whether all their work pays off.
The marketing-vs-dev split
The agency world splits cleanly in two. Marketing agencies handle copy, ads, social, content strategy, and sometimes SEO. Dev agencies handle code, hosting, performance, and infrastructure. The two camps rarely overlap, and most marketing agencies don’t have a single developer on payroll.
That’s fine in theory. It’s a disaster in practice — because the thing that converts your traffic into leads is the site, and the site lives in the dev camp.
What marketing agencies actually do
For $5,000 to $12,000 a month, a typical marketing agency will:
- Run paid ad campaigns (Google, LinkedIn, Meta)
- Write blog posts and landing page copy
- Manage social media calendars
- Build keyword strategies and on-page SEO recommendations
- Report on traffic, impressions, and click-through rates
All real work. All measurable. None of it tied to whether the website it’s driving traffic to actually functions.
What they refuse to touch
Ask the same agency to check why your contact form isn’t submitting, why mobile loads at 11 seconds, why the checkout breaks on Safari, or why Search Console says half your pages aren’t indexed — and you’ll hear some version of “you’ll want a developer for that.”
They’re not lying. They genuinely don’t have the people. The account manager doesn’t know how to read a network tab. The copywriter doesn’t know what a 500 error is. The strategist can’t tell you whether your site is being throttled by a bloated theme. So they sell you what they can do, hand you a monthly report, and quietly hope nobody asks about the funnel underneath.
What that gap costs
A B2B agency in our network recently took over a client who’d been spending $8,000 a month on paid search for over a year. Traffic was strong. Conversions had collapsed four months earlier. Nobody at the previous agency could explain why.
It took ten minutes to find the problem: the contact form had a broken handler. Submissions were silently failing. No emails. No CRM entries. Nothing. The form had been dead for four months, and the agency driving traffic to it had no way of knowing — because checking that wasn’t their job.
That’s $32,000 in ad spend pointed at a site that couldn’t capture a single lead. Plus the agency retainer. Plus the lost pipeline. Nobody’s fault, technically. Everyone did their job. The gap between the jobs is where the money disappeared.
How to fix it
You have two real options. Option one: hire a marketing agency and a separate maintenance/dev partner, and make sure they talk to each other monthly. This works if you can manage the coordination — and if both sides actually return each other’s emails.
Option two: find an agency that does both. Fewer of these exist than you’d think, because hiring developers is expensive and most marketing shops don’t want the overhead. But the ones that do exist will catch the broken form before you spend $32K driving traffic to it.
How AJD handles this
AJD runs a 50/50 model on purpose. Half the team handles marketing — SEO, content, paid search, strategy. The other half handles the build — WordPress, performance, hosting, integrations, the maintenance work most agencies outsource or ignore. Every client touches both sides.
That means the person running your ad campaign can ping the developer who knows your site, the same week, without a project plan or a second invoice. A broken form gets caught in days, not months. A slow page gets a Lighthouse audit before it tanks your rankings. The site and the marketing get treated as one system, because they are.
If your current marketing agency keeps telling you “that’s a dev question,” it might be time to stop paying two retainers — or one retainer that only does half the work.
