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75% of UK marketers say they've fired an agency, or seriously considered it, over poor reporting. 95% say their agency has selectively highlighted positive metrics while downplaying the negative ones. 77% found outright inaccuracies in the reports they were given (ASK BOSCO/OnePoll survey, n=100, reported September 2024). No equivalent Canadian survey exists, but there's no reason to think the dynamic is different here. Most marketing managers get a monthly traffic report and take it at face value because they don't know which questions would actually test it.
Here's a working list.
"What percentage of our pages pass Core Web Vitals?"
Roughly half of all websites still fail Google's Core Web Vitals, the load speed, responsiveness, and visual stability benchmarks Google has confirmed directly influence search ranking (Google Search Central, updated December 2025). Independent crawls of over 13 million sites put the pass rate at roughly 48% on mobile and 55-58% on desktop as of 2025 (HTTP Archive Web Almanac; corewebvitals.io). If your agency can't answer this question with a specific number, they're not tracking the metric Google itself says matters for how easily shoppers find your property.
"What's our mobile experience actually like, not just how does it look?"
A joint Google and Deloitte Digital study tracking over 30 million mobile sessions across 37 brand sites found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load speed was associated with an 8.4% increase in retail conversion rate and a 21.6% increase in lead-generation form completions (Google/Deloitte Digital, "Milliseconds Make Millions," 2019). That study is several years old now, but it remains the largest sample of its kind and nothing since has contradicted the direction of the finding. Mobile isn't a secondary consideration for a shopping centre website. It's most of your traffic and the channel where speed problems cost you the most.
"What are we actually measuring beyond pageviews?"
This is where most shopping centre website reporting falls apart, because there's no industry standard to fall back on. ICSC publishes benchmarks on leasing, occupancy, and retail sales. It does not publish website or digital marketing KPI benchmarks. There is no published, credible data on what a "good" store directory usage rate looks like, or what a strong event page engagement number is, for a shopping centre website specifically. Anyone quoting you an industry-standard benchmark for those specific metrics is likely not being straight with you, because that number doesn't exist in the published literature.
What does exist is a solid framework for what to track, borrowed from Google's own local business measurement structure: search views, direction requests, website clicks, phone calls, and messages, all trackable through your Google Business Profile (Google Business Profile Help documentation). Ask your agency to build your reporting around actions like these rather than raw traffic. And ask them to help you establish your own baseline for store directory usage, event page visits, and inquiry conversions. You won't find an external number to compare against. You need your own trend line instead.
"Is our content actually being updated, or just re-dated?"
There's a meaningful difference between the two, and it matters for search performance. Backlinko's guidance, corroborated independently across the SEO industry, is consistent: cosmetically changing a publish date without making substantive edits does not improve rankings. Genuine content updates, new information, corrected details, and expanded sections are what search engines and readers actually respond to (Backlinko, updated June 2026).
If your agency's answer to "how often is our website updated" is a number of blog posts published, that's a volume metric, not a freshness metric. Ask specifically whether existing pages, especially your tenant directory, your hours, and your amenities pages, are being reviewed and corrected, not just whether new content is being added on top of them.
"Where is our organic search traffic actually coming from?"
Mobile devices account for roughly half to two-thirds of all web traffic globally, and the share continues to rise (Statista; Forbes Advisor, 2025-2026). In Canada specifically, desktop still holds a slightly larger share than the global average, at 56% desktop versus 41% mobile over the past 12 months (StatCounter, July 2025-July 2026). That's a meaningfully different mix than what most generic web performance advice assumes, and it should shape how your agency prioritizes mobile versus desktop experience testing.
Local search intent- someone searching for a mall, an event, or a specific store near them- is one of the highest-value traffic sources a shopping centre site can capture. Ask your agency to show you, specifically, what portion of your traffic is arriving through local search terms versus branded search versus other channels, and how that's trending quarter over quarter.
"Is our website actually accessible, and do we know what law applies to us?"
This is the question most shopping centre marketing teams haven't asked at all. In Ontario, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act has required public-facing websites of businesses with 50 or more employees to conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA since January 1, 2021 (Ontario.ca; corroborated by Torkin Manes LLP legal analysis, 2020). Other provinces, including Manitoba and Nova Scotia, have their own equivalent accessibility legislation. The federal Accessible Canada Act applies to federally regulated entities like banks and telecoms, not to privately owned shopping centres, so the relevant law for most properties is provincial, not federal.
Non-compliance in Ontario carries penalties that compliance vendors report can reach $100,000 per day for corporations, though that figure should be verified against the specific regulation for your situation rather than taken as a blanket number. The more immediate risk for most properties isn't the penalty. It's that an inaccessible website is actively turning away a portion of the shoppers a property is trying to attract, particularly for a demographic that already skews toward needing accessibility accommodations at the physical property. Ask your agency directly whether your site has ever been audited against WCAG 2.0 AA, and if the answer is no, that's the first fix on the list.
What This Adds Up To
None of these questions require you to become a technical expert. They require your agency to give you specific, current, and honest answers instead of a monthly report built around metrics that make everyone look good. If the answers are vague, or if the benchmark being cited turns out to be a number nobody can actually source, that's useful information about the relationship, not just about the website.
The properties getting real value from their digital spend are the ones asking these questions regularly, not the ones assuming the agency has already asked them internally.
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